FWIW, I had a glitch during the Paul McCartney performance right at the end, it froze/pixelated and skipped a bit. No expander.

@Jetranger - At what time into the show (from the time line osd) did you notice your glitch?

It seems to be consistently around the 23 minute mark, IIRC. It doesn't happen 'every day' so I have sort of become accustomed to ignoring it. Still, it can happen at very noticeable moments in different programs and that's when it is most annoying.

I guess I will have to pay closer attention to these and start noting them on a sheet of paper to see if there is really a common time to them or not.

The tech's came yesterday with the MoCA tester guys along (guy from Arris didn't show).

They tested my network and found a lot of drop outs. Apparently this was caused by a three way splitter they installed to split the docsis modem and the gateway. It was causing bounce back of the signal. They suspect any drop out in the system cause these errors when there is high demand inside the MoCA network and the system is getting overloaded.

They replaced the "unbalanced" 3way with 2 - 2 way splitters.

I have seen noticeable improvements with my system but its still not perfect. I am still seeing pausing and "no connection to gateway messages" but not as frequently.

I have let them know and hopefully they will come back to do some more adjustments.

Great to hear they made some progress for you. I thought they had the tester on the previous visit and didn't see anything wrong. Was that a different tester or perhaps they have learned more about how the tester works?

After they switched to the 2 2-way splitters, did they check again with the tester? Hopefully they did but it would be good to know if you still have some drop outs (although reduced) that might explain the remaining symptoms.

I wasn't home when they did the first test so I don't know for sure if they used the tester or not. They said they did so I'll have to take their word for it.

When they came yesterday they did a final test after they swapped out the splitters and the guys from the tester company said things looked alot better.

The Shaw tech was still learning the device it seemed.

It is better but like I said not perfect.

The tech's who made the tester (sorry I can't remember the company name) said MoCA networks are very finicky and if your cabling and setup isn't 100% you're gonna have issues. Just like I am having. (actually having right now.. History channel is pausing and got the ol' black screen).

I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to that 'rule' since I have seen a rather convoluted installation that has little to no issues. It has many different splitters, cable combinations and types so clearly there are other possibilities than just the 'ideal' setup.

Was looking up some shows at vod.shaw.ca and it asked if I wanted to sign up for Exo VoD, I said no, but started to wonder what I'd get with Exo, that ended me up here:

http://www.shaw.ca/Support/Exo/Exo-FAQ/Shaw-Exo-On-Demand/

so I popped onto a portal to see if I really have the enhanced/enlarged VoD library as a Gateway owner and I do.

I notice the most recent episode of Fringe was recorded in 2 parts, first 21 minutes long and the second 31 or 32 minutes long. This is akin to the complaints about 1 minute recording and which I don't seem to experience...

Watching the 2 parts it becomes obvious that I am missing a few minutes of the episode.

I know from further reading that lots of current run shows will have the last few episodes available on VoD. So I think lets see if latest episode is available on VoD and it was so I started watching it and notice I can't ffwd in the show and choosing next jumps to the end of the show with the VoD music and VoD banner.

I call gateway support and tech says, that's a known problem and we can fix it. He indicates that I was just on the December update and my gateway and portals hadn't updated to the January release. He updates the portals. then the gateway (takes about 10-15 minutes), then has me power everything off, power on the gatway, wait about 5 minutes, then power on the portals. I then check ffwd again, but no joy. Works fine for other recorded programs and other VoD movie titles. Testing with other VoD TV show titles gives same issue as does the other available Fringe episode. Try Family Guy and another, same problem. However the Family Guy episode starts with a message from Global saying that skipping is disabled for this title. No such notice for Fringe though. At this point the tech basically says, it must be a "feature" i.e. that's just how it is.

I thank him and hang up and notice some other issues.

choosing next or back basically skip to the end/beginning of the episode with nothing in between. ffwd and rew do nothing at all. This is a problem as if you can't hear a section of dialogue, there's no way to play it back, you have to watch the entire 1 hour show in realtime, at best you can pause, that's it, which leads to problem #2, the recordings have ads and you are forced to watch them, there is NO skipping over them....

All I can say is major fail on this one Shaw. Though I do get it may be mandated by upstream providers, I still highly detest this.

There was no 'January update' and the inability to navigate through the TV show VOD selections has been discussed here somewhere already. I totally agree it is virtually useless to have the program available but not navigable for the very reasons you state.

The other big 'fail' for me is the lack of HD versions of the programs.

There was no 'January update'

<Shrug> I know that and you know that, but hey, that's what the tech said. I don't think he was refering to a firmware update though.

as to the VoD navigation problem, I never watched TV shows via VoD before so I must have overlooked the threads on that problem since it works just fine with VoD movies, albeit a bit slower than normal when compared to navigation with recorded programs.

As to lack of HD versions, doesn't bother me personally. While I do appreciate the higher quality, unlike lots of the folks here, watching in SD is no big deal for me. Though I suspect once I replace the 30" HD CRT with a larger LCD or Plasma, I might think differently.

The tech came yesterday, he figures my VOD problem is on Shaw's end, not at my house, so he's looking into it and will call me at the end of the day.

I'm really hoping that he can get it figured out for me so that I can just finally use it properly! Other than this problem, everything is working great.

I've had my gateway and 3 portals for 2 months now. No problems recording until Tuesday night.

I have all my series start 2 minutes early and end 2 minutes late. On Tuesdays, I record Glee at 6 and Body of Proof at 8. No problem until I added The River at 7, which is on the same HD channel 205 as Body of Proof. That makes a 2 minute overlap due to my extensions.

Last night I found that I had only the _last_ 5 minutes recorded for the overlapping shows on 205 at 7 and 8pm.

I'm quite sure I deleted both of the 5 minute recordings last night.

Believe it or not, just now as I looked at my series recordings to get my facts straight about the channels and times to make this post, I found that both shows are there in full. The River at 7 has 1hr2min (instead of 1hr4min) and Body of Proof at 8 is split into two pieces, one of 2 minutes and one of 1 hr.

Call me crazy?

I have a 1TB Shaw Extender. My system is 14% full. It's never been higher than that.

It's Thursday today, which means my system rebooted itself about 6 hours ago. The diagnostics also show "resources" (whatever they are) were updated about 8 hours ago.

I've had Shaw gateway + 2 portals since inception in Calgary (Aug or Sept 2011). I connect via HDMI on both, 1080p, have no extenders, and am able to slow-forward by pushing PAUSE-FFWD (so I should have iS2 or iS2+). I read a few dozen pages here but not all of it. My prevalent issues as of now are:


- (Daily), when skipping forward in a recorded show, it will take 5 or more seconds before actually jumping ahead, and sometimes will black the screen out and say something to the effect of "Can not communicate with Shaw Gateway, please call ...", which will then fix itself after a few more seconds, and resume the recording playback

- (Persistent) Channel guide has blank rows where I ignored channels we don't get

- (2x/month) when watching a channel, it will suddenly black out and say "You are not subscribed to this channel, if you wish to order...", which is then fixed by changing the channel, and going back to the original one.

- (only happened once) Trying to delete a previous recorded show resulted in it just dinging and not deleting, but it mysteriously disappeared the next day

It looks like the Shaw tech came through. Everything seems be working now!

my VOD issue was resolved as well. No tech came to my place. It just started working again on its own.

Jetranger, I must be using the wrong search terms as I can't find any threads discussing the tv vod navigation issue :-( Suggested terms?

heck "vod navigation" sorted by post gives most recent date of May 2011...

Out of curiosity, I also tried this on my DCX3400 and same behaviour, you can't ffwd or rwd when watching a vod tv selection. Given that some of the shows explicitly state at the beginning that ffwd and rwd are disabled for the show, I thinking this is probably a "feature" so that advertisers can get their eyeballs for the commercials :-(

<sigh>

sibble-comp:

Can you pause a VOD TV selection?

Do VOD movies pause/rwd/ffwd?

sailorickm

That all works fine, it's specific to TV shows via VOD, Prime Time VoD and such. I've since been informed that this is by design at the request of the broadcasters so that people watch the ads as I surmised. Basically if we explicitly paid for this VoD feature we'd be able to skip this ads, but since this is a freebie "bonus" we get stuck with the ads :-(

Back to your question, you can pause, but not rew of ffwd.

So for any Shaw folks, I'd gladly pay another $5/month to have the ability to skip the ads.

Hmmm, $5/mo to watch VoD TV that I'm watching only because the gateway screwed up recording it in the first place...

I still have a DCX3400M free rental for another 18 months. I'm setting all my series recordings on it as a backup until the gateway recording is fixed.

I guess that's one way of looking at it.

I'll watch the VoD TV shows for stuff that I don't yet record to see if I want to start recording it, to catch broken/missed recordings and just to catch something that might be watercooler talk then next day but not a show I actually want to start recording regularly.