Red exclamation mark, unable to delete, unable to series link, shadow recordings and unable to play!

[TaruqH]

I have had an absolute nightmare with virgin media over the past month. I hope this post helps.

It all began with me "upgrading" to Virgin 360. Initially it seemed to work okay but then I had issues with episodes from series links not recording, and there being a red exclamation mark in a red circle showing next to recordings. I think this happened because there was some kind of outage in the TV service in my particular post code area.

I rang Virgin and they took me through their phone procedure, rebooting the box, resetting to factory settings, switching off my router and my Tivo box, etc. NONE OF THIS WORKED. The operator said that they will need to send an engineer out to me.

An engineer was booked for Monday 18th Nov between 4PM & 7PM. I received 2 text messages stating "Someone 18 or over must be in or you'll be charged £25. To cancel or reschedule, go to virginmedia.com/engineerappt"

I booked the 3 hours off work at a personal cost of £90! I waited and waited for the engineer. I looked outside my house onto the road and saw a Virgin van parked opposite my house at about 5.15pm, but no one had knocked on my door and assumed that that engineer was for someone else.

I rang Virgin at about 6.15pm, telling them that no engineer had come up till now. Imagine my shock when the said to me that had been and gone, that he had noticed some twisted wires outside my house and replaced them.

The problem now was that BOTH MY INTERNET AND TV WEREN'T WORKING, whereas before my only issue was TV related. I asked how was it that the engineer had come to my house, done some work outside the house, BUT then did not come into my house to check that everything was working.

So now, both my TV and Internet was not working. I rang Virgin and put in an official complaint. Why did I need to book 3 hours off work if the engineer was not going to come into my house. I was then assigned a new engineer to come to my house 2 days later on Wednesday 20th of November.

This new engineer noticed that the TV box I had in my house did not have the serial number which was assigned to my account, along with my modem. He concluded that the engineer who had come on Monday probably went to the wrong house and assigned a new tv box and new router to my account, but in someone else's house.

This engineer installed a new TV box and assigned the box's serial number to my account. He also reassigned my modem to my account and both the TV and broadband seemed to be working fine.

After he left I tried to set up a series link for match of the day. It did not work. I then noticed that there was a list under my recordings of all the old series links from my first TV box. This was clearly not right because when you change to a new box, all previous recordings are lost.

My hard drive was showing 0% recordings but there was a list box about 15 items listed under "My Recordings". None of these recordings played, all had a red circle with an exclamation mark next to them and none of these items could be deleted from the list being displayed. Any new series links that I tried to create did not work if it was a series link already listed on this "shadow list" of recordings.

I spoke to Virgin again, they said they need to send out n engineer again. He was booked for Wednesday 4th December between 4pm and 7pm. I booked another 3 hours off work again at a cost of £90.

This engineer came, saw the issue, told me it was a problem with the box and swapped in a new box. Nothing changed. The shadow list was still there, I could not play anything from this shadow list, I could not delete anything from this shadow list and I could not set up any series links for any time on this shadow list. Recorded programmes like Match of the Day said subscribe instead of play. The engineer said this is something that needs to be sorted out over the phone with virgin and he had done all that he can do, which was fair enough.

On the Thursday 5th December I rang Virgin, told them I had a new box installed and still had my issues. They took me through the same procedure of rebooting everything, resetting the box to factory settings, etc.... but still the shadow recordings were there and my issues still existed.

They wanted to book another engineer for Monday 9th November to swap in another new tv box. I complained that the last engineer said he could not do anything, so what was the point of booking another one! I stated to that the definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome. They stated that this engineer was one of their best.

Anyway, he came today. He actually listened to me. I told him I had already had 2 new boxes after the original one that I had and was having the same issues as before. He said he won't bother swapping the box over as this didn't work last time. What he did do was take photos of what my TV screen was showing, how it was failing to set up series links, how it would not delete any items from my shadow list. He would then contact one of their top technical experts who hopefully would be able to resolve the issue as it was something which he had not come across before.

The engineer's name was Nigel and the top technician that he tried to call was also named Nigel (Seinfield I believe). He tried calling him, but the expert did not pick up his phone. He therefore decided to email him.

Nigel the engineer then rang me later in the day and told me that everything should be working fine now after he got a reply from Nigel the technical expert. What did they do?

This is the message I received from the virgin engineer... 

Hi. 

Only way to sort this was for me to speak with one of the top employees at Virgin whose job it is to build these accounts. He just messaged back straight away saying resolved. Can’t really advise as to what was done. 

So, I don't know what was done in the end. What I do know is that any engineer who comes to your house will not be able to solve it as a box change had no effect. It can only be solved by an account manager/developer 

[Matthew_ML]

Hey Taruqh, thank you for reaching out and a warm welcome to the community I am so sorry to hear your TV problems.

I can see you've spoke to the team since this post, did the team manage to help at all?

[nodrogd]

360 is a server driven system. The master recording list is held on the server, not the box, hence you seeing old data. The server has to be updated as well when there is a box change so that the correct disk location can be read.