A power cycle didn't help in my case. Perhaps you'll have better luck.

VOD on my Gateway was glitchy too last time I looked at it. The Wish List was just plain broken, with various error messages, only one showing even though multiple added, etc. It's been a while though.

A power cycle did not help. I am chatting with support now.

Okay, a CSR fixed it for me, very quickly might I add.

Get on the online chat, and keep in mind it might be a different problem that I had, but ask them to try an interactive test in the Sod tool.

anyone have any idea when gateway will get a firmware update? it's been a very long time since they've released fixes...and some of them are pretty annoying. especially the music channels only showing the title...

I see Arris is abandoning their retail customers. Leaving them with worthless boxes.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/11/arris-brings-moxi-hd-dvr-sales-to-an-end-plans-to-cut-off-guide/

I hope their commitment to Shaw is better.

^ nothing to worry about here, there is a big difference between a few hundred retail and thousands of Gateways out there. We had Arris guys up from the US this week in my work branch actually sitting and listening to Gateway tech calls. There is a massive commitment and relantionship between our two companies even before Gateway deployment. :)

Okay, so today I was unable to order Superchannel/Movie Central VOD again. I was on chat with a CSR for an hour, she got it working on the portal, but the EXO.shaw.ca website and the iOS app still weren't showing that I was subscribed to those services. She removed then readded the channels, and said to wait at least 24 hours to see if that fixed it.

At the risk of jinxing myself, I have to say that our Gateway system has been behaving fairly well in the last few days. We had a short power outage on Wednesday so there was a system reset and since then we have not noticed any freezing/pixelation issues. The other quirks and bugs are still around but without the freezing/pixelation issues, it has been quite enjoyable to watch TV again. I really hope it lasts.

We have never had this long between freezing issues so it would be great to know what is different. Nothing in our setup in home has changed so either Shaw has fixed something around our area of maybe something like JasonB's speculation is indeed correct.

I wonder if power-cycling the device is causing it to hunt to a different MoCA channel with less interference / stronger signal.

I'm having the opposite experience. I have had more 'minor' issues of late: freezing while watching, Portal resetting while watching, recording in list showing as 'in progress' days after it finished(and it did only record the 1 hour it was supposed to). As I said, these are 'minor' but annoying none the less.

The last I heard, the next update release should be around the end of this month but that has already been pushed back from the end of last month so don't be upset if it takes a little longer.

I had to talk to a CSR again today about my VOD problem, they are sending a tech out on Wednesday, they think it may be a signal issue on the frequency that the VOD comes in on. I will post again after they take a look!

About 9 this morning I was watching a recorded episode of King, when everything went black and I got a message "Gateway not found". I looked at the settings and everything was mapped and looked good, I tried a reconnect to no avail. I did a power cycle of the Gateway and Portals but that didn't help. The channel list was all but gone, I only showed 4 SD channels that I have selected for my grandchildren, those I could watch, all the HD channels had disappeared.

I tried the Concierge service for the 1st time, connected with a CSR in less than a minute, he had me power everything down and he did a remote reset, on power up everything returned to normal.

I'm still having considerable pixelation issues during high motion or pan/zoom/fade scenes in HD. Despite the installers revisiting my house to check signal levels, talking with various support people on the telephone and chatting with concierge tech support, I am no closer to figuring this out.

I have uploaded some various image samples I took of my Shaw HD cable feed from Food Network HD, NBC HD and TSN HD. I was hoping other Shaw subscribers could have a look at these and comment as to whether this level of pixelation is normal or acceptable. I realize pausing live TV is going to yield some artifacts even on the best HD signal, but I think there is much more going wrong here.

The portal is set to 1080i (720p has the same level of pixelation). The portal is hooked to a 46" Samsung LCD via HDMI.

(please be sure to expand the thumbnails to full size to get a better view):

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/585/dsc01681u.jpg/

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/831/dsc01684xh.jpg/

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/192/dsc01689qk.jpg/

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/dsc01691pk.jpg/

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/204/dsc01692g.jpg/

Anybody have any ideas?

I dont know if there is any relation to the internet connection speed with the gateway picture quality, however i noticed that when i was on Shaw extreme, the gateway seemed to be more problematic and occasionally had picture quality problems similar to what your pictures are showing, however I recently upgraded to Broadband 100 and it seems most of all my problems (picture quality in particular) have gone away. I would doubt there is any connection between the technologies used for the internet and the tv signals (unlike the telus optik system), but who knows maybe there is.

It might just be coincidence, as I have no idea if the internet speed is related or not, but I do like broadband 100 now! :)

welfaredog, looks like standard digital compression artifacts to me. I have been complaining about this since the implementation of 'digital' that was supposed to provide 'superior picture quality' when compared to 'analog'. I'll take analog broadcast over digital any day. There have never been 'colour rings' on an analog signal, as just one example. Shade banding is one of the biggest issues I have with digital. It's not quite as bad with Mpeg 4 but it is still a far cry from the smooth transitions that analog provided.

I realize the days of analog are 'history' so we now just have to accept the lesser quality pictures that comes with the highly compressed digital processes that now share more crowded space in the broadcast spectrum. I just hope the Gateway can reproduce a reasonable picture once DLNA is enabled.

welfaredog, check the shaw gateway's aspect ratio, if you haven't already. Make sure it's set to 16:9, and "maintain" as opposed to "stretch".

Also, check your television's aspect ratio to ensure it's not doing any extraneous stretching or overscanning.

Also -- part 2 -- check your tv's "sharpness" setting. Digitial sources typically don't require any extra "sharpening" so make sure your sharpness isn't too high (minimum is often the recommended setting). The various noise reductors can also accentuate any picture quality issues you may have, so make sure those are set to "off".

Are those pictures representative of what you see while watching at normal playback speed? As JetRanger mentioned, I also see some amount of that pixelization when I pause certain scenes on those channels but probably not quite as much as the sample pictures you posted.

You have probably considered this already but just to check a couple of points to consider:
- Some source material even on HD channels is still scaled up SD video so try to judge the image based on good source from HD broadcasts.
- The compression rate of some channels may be higher than others (possibly higher compression for Food but should be lower compression for TSN).
- The jpeg format is a compressed format so your sample images may exaggerate the pixelization somewhat depending on the encoding settings used to store the picture.

Your images seem to be heavily compressed but it is hard to say if that is more than normal for a paused show in a high motion scene. If Shaw has a retail store or mall kiosk anywhere that you can see their source in your area, I would check that out to see what those channels should look like and go from there.

Shaw is coming out again tomorrow (as I am still having issues) they are bringing the a Tech from Shaw and Arris and well as a rep from the company that makes the MoCA tester.

This was self initiated from Shaw who called me up this morning. Glad they are being proactive and serious about getting the issues cleared up on my end.

Sixpac, awesome that they are taking advantage of the opportunity to troubleshoot reproducible problems...

I have to say I've been really impressed with the LACK of pixelization. Watching the openin to The Big Bang Theory, with the Gateway it's the first time I've seen that extremely fast motion intro have almost no pixelization at all. Downloads and Sasktel were both horrible for the artifacting.