Have you seen the episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray tries to convince his parents to try their CD player? Ray shows them how simple it is: press "open," put in the CD, press "play." His mother replies: "We're not astronauts, Raymond!"
After more than a week with the Sharp HR-DV 350s hard drive recorder, I felt like Raymonds mother. I just couldn't get the damn thing to record shows from the beginning. It started everything a minute or two into the program. Setting the clock two minutes early did not help at all.
Only after lots of experiments and reading the fine print in manual did I get to the solution. The clock on the recorder is automatically adjusted to a "VPS/PCD" signal in the broadcast. I don't know if the stations we have send such a signal, or if our cable provider transmits it, but anyway, it keeps the clock two minutes behind. My attempts to manually set the clock did not have any effect, as the clock automatically set itself back. Turning off automatic clock setting fixed that part of the problem.
Then I needed to specify that the timer should rely on the internal clock, and not the erratic VPS/PCD signal. That is a manual setting that must be done every time I set the timer. Then the timer performs perfectly.
I repeat my cry for metadata. If the broadcasters and cable provider had supplied this signal (correctly), my timer would work hassle-free and the recorder would even know when a program was delayed! (It would know this because the VPS/PCD signal also flags the beginning of a program together with the start time that was listed for said program.)
While reading and experimenting, I found how many possible states the recorder can be in. They're not listed anywhere in the manual, but here they are:
The last one is a beauty. After a program is recorded with the timer, the recorder stays on for about three hours, just in case. It only turns off the LCD display on the front. The disk is spinning, the fan is humming, and it displays a blue screen on the TV, but it's not showing any signs of life on the front panel. Amazing, really. It's a noisy mode, so I'm going to check if I can force it from this state to one of the two standby modes without ruining anything.
Now there's only a small thing left. Why does it, when the timer starts to record display two messages? The messages are:
"Cannot operate due to timer preparation."
"There is important information."
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life with the pvr: day twelve