I'm sorry but everyone who is having problems (me included) must be delusional as Shaw has tested this code and deemed it 'ready for release'. How could it possibly have any problems after being so thoroughly tested by the 'Shaw Tester' group?:o:rolleyes:

I find it weird that some people are having so many problems! What are the differences between the systems that would cause these things. Mine has been rock solid since the update. No reboots, communication errors, nothing.

Ditto me too. I haven't had one issue since the update. Everything is going good. Much better then before with the skip forward and back. No communication issues either. I've had 1 random reboot of 1 portal since the update, but nothing since then. So I am glad for the update, it seems to have sped up the system. The only thing they need to improve IMO is the delay in the guide, and the blocks of channels that go missing in the guide.

since the update I have noticed long freezes of the picture on live tv and then it goes to black, sometime for 5 mins or more.. I can change the channel to help revive it or try to wait patiently for 5 ish mins for it come back to life on its own.... It wasnt doing this prior to the new update.

Also something wierd I have noticed twice now is when I make a new series recording it seems to lose communication with the gateway and I have had to reboot it. loses communication right after the final click of accepting the new series recording.

Oh and HDMI to my tv loses connection sometimes when I turn the tv on, like in the mornings.. Tv just says no signal, so I have to unplug portal to get it going again, never did that prior to the update.....

Another problem for me is sometimes when I try to watch a recording, the screen just turns black and nothing happens. I have to press 'Stop' and then I get the 'Keep/Delete' options and have to select 'Keep'. Then when I press 'Play' again, it will play normally. This seems to happen with about 1 out of 4 recordings I am watching.

It is odd that so many people are getting issues that they did not get before. They must have touched more code than we would have thought for the visible changes. Perhaps to prepare for future features that they hope to enable in the future. Or maybe the code is how do I politely say this... "fragile".

In our case since the update our experience is:
better - skip fwd/back much more responsive and no lost communication message when skipping fwd fast.
no change - freezing/pausing during live/recorded playback still occurs intermitently.
worse - missing rows in grid guide more frequent than before.
new issue - same issue JetRanger just described where a recording will not start, black screen. Also noticed that the progress bar (or whatever they call it) is empty as if the show has no content. We've seen this twice since the update.
unknown - haven't seen a portal reboot since the update but that only happened 3 times over 3 months before the update so too soon to tell.

Jetranger, since the update I get the same black screen issue. Have had it on several occasions, the solution seems to vary with the most dramatic I had to unplug both the gateway and portal several times until everything returned to 'normal'. I got the black screen on both recorded pvr shows and live tv. It shows either the name and time of the recorded show or the name and details of live tv but just shows the black screen.

I'm a little surprised at the state of the gateway this far into it's release and think maybe shaw should rethink it's relationship with Arris but that just might be the rum n coke talking.

The girlfriend absolutely hates the gateway. For once in my life I made the right decision in running both the gateway and motorola parallel. To be honest we really keep it on the motorola for the most part. I use the gateway when I need to record more shows than the 2 the motorola offers but with all the issues that's about it.

The potential seems unlimited but the many bugs are annoying. The two reasons I got the gateway was for the 6 recordings at once and the remote pvr recording set up through my iPhone. Well one out of two isn't bad in the shaw world. Hoping for the remote recording option sometime soon.

The few that have jumped to the Gateway deserve something from shaw for living through the many hiccups!

Cheers,

tttinbc

I hate to agree, but I'm getting the above symptoms too now. :(
Certainly not the fixes I was hoping for.

I'm wondering why I continually miss recordings of CSI and CSI Miami? Every once in awhile I will get a portion of CSI Miami before it cuts to The Good Wife. This has happened since I installed the Gateway. Never had an issue before. I have had other issues with missing shows but none as consistent as this one. Any ideas why?

Could there be some correlation between the number of problems that people are (now) experiencing and the number of portals that people have and/or the number of simultaneous recordings and/or playbacks going on or even the presence of an external drive?

One could suspect that the system might be less reliable the more that there is going on, but, at this point, that would be just a guess.

I, for one, have only the gateway and one portal. I don't use it heavily (still preferring to use my DCX3400s whenever possible), have no external drive and have disk utilization no higher than about 60%. I have noticed no difference in its operation since acquiring these units several weeks before the most recent update. I get the occasional inability of the portal to communicate with the gateway but no more frequently than before. I have made only one attempt to record 6 programs all at once but haven't yet checked whether it worked. And perhaps I am not noticing some of these problems because I use these units so infrequently.

Of course, I am no happier with the units since the update than I was before. Many, many things still need to be improved.

So since my first problem free week since buying this system 6 months ago 3 problems cropped up this week. Why did I have to say how well things were going? Kiss of death.

One is a recurring problem from before the update. I tried to skip through commercials about 10 minutes into a 30 minute show, but when the timer bar appeared at the bottom of the screen it read 1:12 and the time slider was at 0:00. After a couple of seconds playback froze and I got the "do you want to erase this program" prompt. I chose 'no' and picked the episode again from the PVR list and the show started over with the proper 30:00 on the timer bar. No problems on the second viewing. I have had this occur 2 or 3 other times since October.

Another problem that came up this week was not being able to skip backwards while watching live TV despite having an adequate buffer built up. Changing channels and turning right back usually fixes this bug and allows access to the built up buffer. This is also one that I've seen a handful of times before the update.

The third problem was a new one for me. One portal was giving "to subscribe to this channel..." message on all channels. I accessed the dashboard and saw the portal had lost connection to the LAN and the Gateway couldn't find the modem. Reboots of both solved the problem. This sort of thing keeps me from reccomending this system to people who might not feel comfortable finding the dashboard and rebooting.

Cheers!

Yes I too have strongly recommended to numerous friends and family that they not go to the Shaw Gateway system since it is still so buggy. Bell and Telus are getting a lot of new subscribers as a result. Too bad.

Kritiker, you raise an interesting question but stanl and I have very similar setups and have had quite different experiences so far. Still, there may be something to your question. I might think it could likely be that you are not experiencing as many issues since you aren't using the system all the time but that's just my guess.

Jetranger, you are undoubtedly right about my lack of issues due to my lack of use. ;)

However, some of what people are describing certainly could be due to an overloaded processor dropping near-simultaneously-scheduled events from a queue, otherwise losing track of some tasks or just a system crash. It's a thought.

So, Jetranger, both you and stanl both have fairly complicated systems and he has fewer problems than you. So we can conclude that a complicated system is, by itself, no guarantee of problems.

Are there any folks out there reporting problems who have only a simple setup? In other words, is a simple setup a guarantee of no problems?

Excellent question, Kritiker. It would be very interesting to take a poll of how many 'one Portal' system are 'trouble free' or 'experiencing problems' along with whether or not an expander or other external drive is used.

Let's hope we can get some members with 'simple' systems that will post here.

My system is only 1 portal, no expander. Runs perfect.

Gateway and 5 portals with one Shaw expander, no problems of note... I do a lot of recording and again, no problems...

I apologize if this glitch has been reported before. I go to watch recorded show and when hit play, not there, but rather another show in its place with the time bar on the bottom indicating we are 30 minutes into the recording, but cannot rewind.
I looked in my diagnostics and have the following version listed:
7.0.1b.17x5r-P.348041 Is this the latest. Thanks

I'm only running a single portal with no expander, and I haven't had *any* problems with the Gateway system at all. I'm loving it ;)

I have a gateway with 2 portals and no expander. Most of the time, I am using only one portal. No major issue with the new firmware. I have the skip back on live tv problem as other had reported.