Well, yesterday marked 3 weeks since my Gateway and 5 portals installation. So far I have encountered zero, that’s right “zero” issues. No portal disconnects, no freezing, none of the typical issues many here are often facing. What prompted me to jump in with my comments is the general underlying tone of this thread that the Gateway system is somehow fundamentally flawed. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Last night’s experience pretty much nailed why I decided to take the plunge and go with the Gateway system...at one point we had 4 simultaneous recordings going on, one of which was the Detroit CBS feed of the Grammy’s. Now, I’m not an awards show fan by any stretch of the imagination but last night’s broadcast of the Grammy’s was absolutely spectacular. The picture quality was without out a doubt some of the best HD I have seen anywhere. In fact, everyone in the family commented on how great the picture and sound were.

OK, back to last night’s Gateway experience...everyone arrives home around dinner time, 2 or 3 tv’s tuned to different channels, at one point 4 simultaneous recordings plust 2 or 3 tv’s on, then we started watching the “in progress” Grammy’s recording a little over an hour into the east coast feed so we were also skipping through the commercials while the recordings were happening. Everything worked perfectly, not only did we benefit from the whole home multi-PVR experience, but the HD quality was a huge difference from what I was used to seeing with my old Motorola boxes. I was concerned during the first week of Gateway ownership that the picture quality may have been a little more grainy and washed out than the Motorola boxes but the picture steadily improved after the first week to the point last night where I was honestly blown away by the picture quality. Without a doubt some of the best HD I’ve seen since my first Motorola HD box 5 years ago.

I hope this post doesn’t jinx me, but I’m absolutely thrilled with everything that the Gateway system brings to the table for all of us in my household. Based on my own experience only, I would wholeheartedly recommend the Gateway system to anyone looking for anything beyond basic HD.

So you didn't have a 'glitch' in the middle of Adele's song? I believe that was the only fault I noticed with the recording I made last night and since it was the sole reason for the recording, I'm more than a little disappointed that the one performance I wanted to see was corrupted by a video and audio problem right in the middle of it.

@jetranger, no glitch here, I agree with Cobra, fantastic picture, sound and program!

I'm left wondering if it could be bad sectors on the Expander or something similar.

Ok, just checked to make sure I didn't miss it last night...no glitch for me either.

A friend here in Calgary messaged me and says he didn't have a glitch either so I guess there is a good chance it's a problem coming from my hardware. It's a Shaw Expander so I could get it replaced but I have a lot of content to watch before I can do that. I might have to try one of my other ones to see if it continues to happen.

@Jetranger

Re Grammy Adele performance - No glitch hear on Gateway (with home brew expander) or on my Moto DCX3400.

Any chance it could have just been a signal glitch in your area? How close was your friend? (i.e. in the same neighborhood or across town)

He's across town. I'm thinking it's a hardware issue in my system. I wish I had set the same show on my 3400 then I would know for certain.

@Jetranger, I wonder if it could be fragmentation? My 1GB expander I used on my 3416 used to get so fragmented it would become unusable (I would swap in a new formatted drive and I would be good to go for another 6mos to a year). I hope this is not the case, Shaw had no de-frag utility so I was hooped.

I have my set weekly recordings for mondays for mostly CBS shows like How I met your mother, followed by two broke girls, and then Two and Half Men, and these shows are shown one after the other...

However every week, I get around 5 minutes of recording for Two Broke Girls, and just yesterday Two and Half Men was more than an hour long (it's a 30 minute sitcom)... Two and Half men play the first 30 minutes ok, and then played a few minutes of the start of Mike and Molly (the next TV series, which I don't record), after the first minute of Mike and Molly, it replayed the same two and half men episode (hence the 1 hour size of the recording)... Is anyone here having the same problem? Is it a CBS schedule error or is my Gateway screwy during mondays?

Hey Guys,

I got an issue I was hoping someone might have a fix for? I got the Shaw Getway system a few months back with two portals. I've set up automatic recordings for a number of shows, but what i'm finding is that sometimes the shows don't record properly. For all series recording, my default is to record 1 min before the show and 1 min after the show.

Issues I've been having:

- Randomly, some shows will only record for 1min.
- Some recordings are split, so i get the full recoridng (32 min for a sitcom), but it's sometime split into two with a 1min recording and 31 min recording

The spit isn't a huge deal, but it sucks when my 1 hour or 30 min show only has a 1 min recording.

Anyone else getting this? Any fixes?

I have 24 series set to record and have had none of the issues you have mentioned. None on CBS, but I do have back to back recordings Thursday nights on NBC with no problems. I think I've seen on the forums somewhere where some people are having the same problem as you though. You might wan't to do a search.

If you read through this and other Gateway threads you will find it does happen from time to time. A 'double' recording is not as bad as a missed or short recording but it is never-the-less a known issue.

@JetRanger For the Grammy recording error, is there some reason to suspect a specific hardware failure rather than random freezes/pixelation glitches that many of us seem to be getting? I get these once in a while and if they were all physical disk errors or equivalent, my drive would be riddled with bad sectors rather than an odd one or two and I don't have an expander.

BTW, I did jinx myself with the comment about having a few days with no freezes/pixelization drop outs. Less than 24 hours after that post, the same issues came back, occasionally worse than usual. That'll teach me to open my mouth.

New bugs (for me anyway) I've seen in the last little while:
- One 30 min recording of a show started the first 8 minutes fine then recorded a different channel for the remaining 22 mins. Different channel logo in the corner and everything.
- One recorded show would not delete correctly after 5 attempts. Show content cleared out but it would not delete from the pvr listing. About 15 mins. later it finally disappeared.
- A couple of times when watching a recorded show, the first attempt to skip ahead gives an error beep and the time bar shows the time at the end of the show even though the playback is very early in the show. I have to stop the playback and restart the show to be able to use the skip function.

It's repeatable with every playback and can happen at about the same 'time' in different recordings. Since I am deleting shows after watching them, the same 'space' is available for subsequent recordings. If a 'glitch happens at about 20 minutes into any given recording and a day or two later I see another similar 'glitch' at almost exactly the same time in a different recording, made since the previous one was deleted, it gives me suspicion to think there could be a bad spot on the hard drive. As these DVR drives are set to just 'play through' bad data on the disks, I'm thinking that's possibly what's happening.

I see. I didn't realize it had a pattern with multiple recordings at potential similar spots on the drive. Sounds like a reasonable suspicion in your case then.

Once you watch all the shows you want from that expander, doing a fresh format should mark that sector (or sectors) as bad if there are read errors found. At least that is what a computer format of a hard drive would do. Hopefully, the PVR would format like that too.

If you switch expanders and notice a similar glitch with similar timing, another answer could be a time related bug in your gateway config. If it was that and fairly reproducable, it would be good to get Shaw/Arris testing on your system to hunt that down.

Your first suggestion is pretty much what I am thinking. I just need to watch everything on the Expander and that's no small task.

Interesting thought about the recurring time issue. I have pretty much ruled that out as it doesn't 'always' happen at the same time of day but rather a time in any given recording.

It's just a 'theory' so anything is possible. Thanks for the ideas and questions to make me think about it a little more.

By a time related bug I meant time from the beginning of recording rather than time of day. I probably should have said duration rather than time to be clearer. So if the glitch is consistent at approximately X minutes into a recording it could be a gateway issue that takes that much time (or duration) to manifest itself.

I'm just speculating as you are in hopes of uncovering information that helps get rid of these glitches. I know hunting intermittent bugs can be very tricky so if a reproducible scenario for the glitch(es) can be found, Shaw/Arris will have a much better chance of fixing it(them). Hopefully, this is all irrelevant and they already have a fix for us if they ever get those elusive releases out.

Jetranger, I think you would learn more if you attached a clean expander to the unit and checked its performance for awhile; it it performs well, then try hooking up the 'glitchy' unit and see if the problem re-occurs.

Sure thing. You have one you would like to loan me to try that?;) I have three of them and can use one that has had the least use. It will need to be formatted to the Gateway anyway so that's as good as it's going to get, if and when I do get to trying it.