Bell ExpressVu 9200: Daylight Savings Time change screws up one-off timers

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Bell Satellite
October 30th, 2005 • 10:44 am

This is a bad one, and if you have a BellExpressVu PVR receiver you’d better run and check whatever one-off timers you created in the past couple of days for events that are taking place after the time change (which came in effect last night).

The problem affects one-off timers, i.e. timers that you create to record an event just once. And it only effects timers created before the time change concerning events taking place after the time change.

Yesterday (Saturday, before the time change), I browsed my on-screen guide for the next couple of days and defined a number of manual, one-off timers for things that I wanted to record today (Sunday) and tomorrow (Sunday).

Then this morning I turned the system on and went to check these timers. They were all, with no exception, set to record the wrong event! I had created a timer to record channel X—and no, I am not referring to the Playboy Channel here— from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm today (Sunday). But when I checked this morning, the timer, while still bearing the correct event title (i.e. the title of the event scheduled for 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm), was actually set to record for 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm!

It looks to me like this is a huge bug. Instead of “falling back” one hour, the timer actually springs forward one hour!

Fortunately, this bug does not seem to affect daily or weekly timers, i.e. timers that are set to repeat every day or every week. These ones appear to have been adjusted correctly. But still… It’s bad. Very bad.

I phoned Bell ExpressVu this morning, and was of course put on hold for 10 minutes before I got to speak to someone. To the operator’s credit, he understood immediately what the problem was and said that he would report it immediately. I also mentioned that there should be a “Bug Report” facility on the web site to report such bugs, in order to make it as easy as possible for the user encountering such problems. I was, after all, doing them a favour by reporting the bug in the first place, so I shouldn’t have to wait for 10 minutes to speak to a live operator for this. Again, he readily agreed with my analysis and said he would report this as well.

Whether this ever leads to any changes, of course, remains to be seen. At least they have about 6 months to fix the problem with the Daylight Savings Time change.


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