I have the Gateway and had two 3400's before. It has performed so well for me that I have given the 3400's to my kids.

In the time that I have had it I have never had to reboot the Gateway itself and have only had to reboot 2 of 5 portals once after the last update.

I have had an expander of it since Day 1 and have never had to reboot it.

As far as overlapping recording I do it all the time. My defaults are to start 1 minute early and end 1 minute late and the only time I have had a problem is with CSI. It consistently gives me 2 recordings, 1 of 1 minute and then the rest of the program. This is the only program and the only time I have the problem so I can only surmise that it is probably a unique combinations of tuners at play that causes this.

I know there are a number of people that have had and are continuing to have problems but I have no way of knowing what percentage of the total they actually represent. But overall, I am happy with the way it has performed.

My major complaints relate to UI issues - a clunky and glitch ridden program guide and a remote designed by a committee of primates during their coffee breaks trying to write that Shakespeare novel.

These are annoyances rather than show stoppers for me. However, they are definitely not significant other approved and could end up causing Shaw to be named as a co-respondent in a number of divorce actions. In short, it can be a rewarding experience but it is not without it's dangers.

I read the earlier posts that the gateway system freezes sometime. Is there any more freezes with the new firmware?

I am planning to get the Gateway system. What I want to know whether the current hardware is under power or not.

Can you explain what you mean by 'under power'?

Running Windows Vista on a Pentium 4 PC is under power. Pentium 4 will not run Vista smoothly.

I want to know whether the Gateway hardware has enough hardware power to do 6 recordings and playing 3 recorded shows concurrently or any combination of 9 streams of recording/playback/realtime TV. Sometime, it is hard to know whether the lag/freeze is due to hardware or due to poorly designed software.

'Under powered'; got it now. (I do understand English is not everyone's first language)

You can 'max out' the system by doing 9 things at one time but considering that they are planning on adding the capability of doing 12 (6 record and 6 playback), I'm guessing the system can handle it and has the power needed.

Now, that being said, the system does lag quite a bit when maxed out now so I am guessing there will be some major software updates in order to provide 'smooth operation' while performing an amazing 12 simultaneous actions in the future.

Thanks for the extra feedback on your experiences everyone. It is good to hear some more of the positive sides of things too. You guys might be swaying me to take the plunge and hope I'm not one the the ones that gets the more serious issues. Of course, I now have someone to blame for the decision if I decide to go with gateway and I have problems. :) Even though (or perhaps because) I'm in the tech field, I tend to wait a few versions before jumping onto to newer technology and have avoided many headaches that way. I would probably wait a bit longer on gateway but the price point is tempting me and I've wanted the features for a while. Decisions, decisions...

@JasonB Never underestimate the importance of marital harmony :)

After switching from Bell to the Shaw gateway all the women in my house find the gateway system to be "clunky" and the remote sucks. Yes the remote sucks.

Also the amount of HD on Shaw is horrible and so is the way they list the channels on the gateway.

Shaw dropped the ball on this system and their hardware is way overpriced, no software upgrade is going to fix all the issues the system has.

Period.

and BTW its been almost 3 months and my system stills freezes up on all my portals from time to time (at least 10x per day) and with at least 10 calls to Shaw they have nothing to offer to fix my system.

I have had the Gateway and 3 portals from the very beginning. Any problems have been minor annoyances at best. My wife has not complained once about the new technology and I would hear about it if she were unhappy...

The advantages of moving from room to room, centralized recording, eventually larger storage (still have only one TB) and all the bells and whistles down the road made this a no-brainer for me.

I love the system, prefer the smaller footprint for the equipment, and have not had to reboot once. I did it once just to see what happens, and it just reconnected and refreshed the guide.

Full disclosure, there are petty annoyances; some don't like the remote. (I use Harmony remotes on some units but the new Shaw one is fine with me). The guide can be a little glitchy sometimes, but patience normally allows it to catch up.

IMHO, this is the best thing out there for major systems.... I am planning on adding another portal and have already booked an appointment...

NO regrets here...

is the remote exterder working on the portals yet ? , have to dig mine up and search for it if so !

thaks

The IR port on the first generation Portal is a 'Blaster' or 'output' port. An IR input takes a completely different chipset so that means the current version of Portal will never have an 'IR Extender' option. (or an 'exterder';))

Is anyone else having problems with the system ignoring episode limit settings? my daughter has a number of kids show series recordings and to limit the space they take up I have the episode limit set to 3 but it is keeping more than 3.

Does this not work the same way as the old pvr's or does it wait till it needs the space to clean them up?

That would be my experience also.

In one case I had about 70 episodes, I set the retention limit to 20 and 10 minutes later it had 23 episodes listed. It never got down to 20 exactly. I haven't looked at the folder since, so it could now be 20 for all I know....

Actually just looked and it's at 24 episodes at the moment....

From memory, the deletion is done when it starts to run out of space... but do a search on the forums as this has been discussed a bunch of times over the past few months.

I tried searching both this thread and the forum but didn't get any results related to the gateway, I was searching 'episode limit'

One of my portals doesn't display sound sometimes when I turn on the TV. Turning the TV off and on again doesnt do anything either (no receiver, just portal and LG LK5400 TV).

A fix I noticed is if you go into Menu>Settings>Audio Ouput and reselect the already selected audio (digital dolby or whatever your default is) the sound automatically comes right back.

Just thought i would share if anyone else has this problem.

---

1. How do you select a PVR recording to watch if there are multiple episodes in a folder? I can't seem to play an episode once selected.. no option given and if I hit "play" on the remote nothing happens.

2. when browsing around in the guide, if you skip a few hours or a day or so ahead in time how do you automatically return to the current time in the guide? with the old PVRs you just close the guide an re-open it. .. not so with the portal. also if I hit LIVE the guide still saves the cursor at the last selected show (which could be 1 day or so in the future). So I have to manually bring the cursor back to the current time in the guide. There must be a quicker solution


thanks

1) Select the folder and wait a few seconds. After a few seconds, the episodes will show in a list to your right, scroll over and then select your episode to play.

2) Just keep hitting menu until you get back to current time/channel.

Posted by hedge: Is anyone else having problems with the system ignoring episode limit settings?...

I have one series recording set to save only 5 episodes and it has been doing just that since I reduced it for 'save all', about 4 months ago now. Interesting to hear there is some inconsistency with this setting. I guess it's better to have it save more than less but still not ideal if the unit inadvertently deletes something else to make room.

Also interesting to hear about the audio issue, Bobafart. Have you tried connecting using component cables to see if it's an HDMI issue? I realize you may not want to have it connected that way but if you can at least try it, your findings may be helpful to the engineers at both manufacturers.

As an addendum to JohnnyCanuck's item #1: Once in the folder list of recordings, you can move through it a page at a time using the Ch +/- keys like you might in other menus.

Hi all...

Just finished reading ALL of the posts on this thread. Very helpful, and very eye-opening.

We've had our Gateway box and two portals installed since Nov 4th.

We had a few problems early on ("cannot communicate with Gateway" message when using the skip button a bit too liberally, UI problems, etc.). But we've never had truly "deal-breaker" problems. We had more with our two Motorola PVRs that we had before! We've never had to power-cycle the Gateway manually, but have had to power-cycle one of our portals two times to correct a "no sound" problem. By reading this forum, I'm going to try the solution of just re-selecting the audio option next time. We have seen some of the out-of-sync audio a few times, but really very infrequent, and it was out-of-sync by just a smidgen (technical term), so very easy to handle. I don't believe we've actually had a failed recording other than by one of our own mistakes. My wife is a "power user", and I hear about everything she doesn't like about "her TV" - unexplained failed recordings has not been mentioned. I'm glad, because ...well ... I'd be sleeping on the couch. Because I'm the one who wanted the Gateway!

Yes, we've experienced some of the annoyances, but as others have stated, they are just that. Nothing more, nothing less. By the way, after the 2nd day we had the Gateway, I learned that by pausing approx 1 second between presses of the skip button, the function works perfectly, every time! Seems pretty workable to me. I've discovered that a lot of the "annoyances" are related to us having to change from the way we were used to doing/seeing things with our old PVRs. It's the "old dogs" story I guess.

I'm a big believer in reading the manual. Through this forum, I found out that you can download a "complete manual". I'm wondering if it's more than the booklet I received when they installed the equipment. But I can't seem to download it from Shaw's website. I get an error message saying that the file can't be found. Is there any other way to get this download?

All in all, we're pretty happy with the Gateway. Looking forward to seeing some of the future improvements/features that have been hinted at for the 1st quarter of 2012.

Sorry for the length of this post.

Thnx...Dan

Here is the page with both downloads

http://www.shaw.ca/Gateway/Support/

Hi Bucky...

Thanks for the link.
I had tried this several times, but consistently got an error message (couldn't find file). And I still get it now.

Then, I tried starting Internet Explorer and accessing the link. It worked fine. Hmmm... wonder why my Mozilla browser didn't work?

Anyway, the Table of Contents is very similar (maybe exactly the same?) as the hardcopy booklet I have. But the downloaded file has more pages. I'll review it in more detail to see what differences there are. Maybe I'll learn a few more tricks.

Thnx...Dano

Update to my previous post:

The downloaded manual has quite a bit more than the booklet that came with my equipment. It includes all of the booklet material - verbatim - plus more.

I'd love to see a *real* manual, that gives you all the technical info and all of the details.

Thnx...Dano