Sitting here counting blessings and knocking wood... this place would make me develop a nervous tick if I visited any more often :)

I have the Gateway, 1 Portal and also run the Moto parallel on the same tv. All equipment is located beneath the tv. I have a 2 tb expander on the Gateway and 1 tb on the Moto.

We mainly use the Moto and the biggest reason is the Guide. Surfing is sooooo much faster in the Moto. The Gateway guide is painfully slow to the point that the girlfriend refuses to use it. The other main issue since the update is the black screen. It mainly occurs when I try and play something from the hard drive when the Gateway is in sleep mode. When it occurs I have to go back to guide, select a channel and once I get a signal then I can go back to the hard drive and watch a recorded show. Twice I have had to reboot both the Gateway and Portal to get rid of the black screen.

On the positive, the ability to record 6 shows is kick a$$ and the main reason I am hoping they manage to work all the bugs out in the near future so the Gateway can be my main source of tv. Also getting the ability to set up a recording remotely from an iPhone would be huge and I hope this comes soon. Also one positive to the Gateway guide is that when the power goes out and then comes back on it doesn't take forever for the channels to repopulate.

Overall not impressed that this far into the roll out that some of these issues persist. The ability to surf smoothly and quickly seems elementary to me and the fact that it still sucks after so several updates disturbs me.

Hoping for major improvements real soon!

Cheers

t3

In addition to experiencing my first spontaneous portal reboot the other day, I think I experienced a brand new bug yesterday.

I recorded a 3 hour UFC broadcast which came with absolutely zero description. No event details, no genre, no nothing. The recording was fine except that I could not skip forward or back with the 30 second or 15 minute buttons. Additionally, I could fast forward and rewind but play just froze the screen and no amount of waiting got the recording to play again. I found that pressing stop to return to the PVR menu and then play to resume worked to continue from where I had fast forwarded to. A portal reboot and switching to a TV using a different portal did nothing to solve the problem. I did not try a gateway reboot. This seems to have been the only recording that has exhibited these problems.

Sigh. It was a glorious week when this system worked as advertised.

I hope that Shaw knows that when these problems are rampant I want money back, I look into switching to Telus, I tell people to avoid this system. One week of perfect service made me forgive all. I hate paying a premium for new hardware, getting the runaround, and feeling like someone who has been mistreated as a longtime customer.

Cheers, all!

Ya, with each day that passes, my system seem to be developing more and more issues. There are glitches in the recordings and sound, there are skips forward with and without freezing. There are odd skips and jumps when pressing the skip buttons and the time bar is showing incorrect info more often than not now. Strange thing with that last one is that it will sometimes return to normal if I stop the playback and then restart. These issues didn't happen nearly as often before this code release so clearly they are instabilities that have either been exaggerated or introduced by this code.

I am eagerly awaiting the next release, 7.0.3, as it is supposed to have the most fixes yet. This has just completed the 'survey' portion of the testing phase with Shaw employees and hopefully should be ready for release within the next 4 weeks or so. One interesting thing is it seems they are either incorporating an assumed '7.0.2' code with it or they just gave up on it altogether. My bet would be an amalgamation and that's why there are so many 'fixes' supposedly in 7.0.3 .

I sincerely hope the next code clears up these issues and provides us with some of the features that were promised when this system was first introduced a year ago. They have been a long time coming.

OK, so now even though we have series set up for recording, the latest non-repeat episodes are not showing up in the Channel Guide as being set for recording (i.e. the grey dot is not present in the guide. We can set tonight's episode up for a one time recording, but if we try to tell it to record the series, it claims that it is already set up even though there is no indication that tonight's episode will be recorded.

What is more, last week's episode deleted itself. We did not delete it, the gateway did. The recording settings require the shows be kept until I choose to delete.

I just got an update now notice 09:14 May 17th, wonder if they are attempting the bug fixes for the latest bugs introduced with 17B?

That could be the weekly Thursday restart of the gateway Reboot. Can you check your firmware version?

I did, no version change, they usually don't (in my experience) do a daytime update. Not sure what the purpose of a weekly Gateway reboot would accomplish, except maybe clear cache :confused:. The same code but all portals and the Gateway show updated today.

Any Shaw employee out there who can give me an idea of what is accomplished with these updates?

It's more of a 'soft boot' than anything else and I am pretty sure you won't get anyone from Shaw even admitting this happens. They are really tight lipped with this stuff and I'm not helping matters by posting the info I do, apparently. My sources prefer to 'share' rather than not and that is why I am able to post the info I do.

Now, I'm not sure if it is an equipment issue or a datastream from to origin issue but the recording of Private Practice the other night was riddled with errors that essentially cause the program to be shortened by almost 5 minutes. It kept 'glitching' with both video and audio like it was playing back an old VHS tape that the machine had eaten and the tape had then been cut up and spliced back together. The first time through, there was some very noticeable macroblocking but subsequent playbacks did not show this again. I can only assume the problem lies in the hard drive, presumably the Expander, so I'm hoping the new Expander they gave me the other day won't have these same issues.

Fortunately, I discovered the season finale episode is available, in HD to boot, on VOD. One thing of note: the image on the TV is noticeably dimmer when playing VOD than when playing the same program from a recording in the Gateway.

I just turned on my TV after having turned it off not 20 minutes before and was greeted with a "No signal detected..." message from my TV. Rebooting (read: yanking the cord) the Portal got it back.

Well my main portal rebooted today for no discernable reason. I was watching the hockey game live and it froze for 20 seconds and then rebooted.

Nixxo, similar thngs have been happening to me. Dont you hate it when it happens during live tv?

Now I have quick question. Does anybody know if its possible to partition the internal harddrive of the gateway? What I mean, is it possible to have "Portal A" only record shows to one half of the harddrive, and have "Portal B" record to the other half? If not internal, is it possible with an external drive?

Thanks.

No, that is not possible as we have no Shaw utilities available to us for the expander.

I had issues with my old moto box where the expander after being written to and deleted over time became so fragmented it would not play a program without numerous playback issues. I got so fed up I removed the harddrive, did a Windows defrag and the expander worked flawlessly after that. Unfortunately I also lost all the shows as the drive had to be formatted by Shaw for use.

I am hoping Shaw will have utilities provided for the health of customer expanders by doing a monthly defragmentation.

I checked my recording of Private Practice the other night that is on my 3400 and there were no issues like I saw on the Gateway system so I have to assume the issue is in the Gateway hardware. The recording was from the same time and channel so it wasn't an incoming signal issue. Not at all impressed with this system right now and neither is my girlfriend. I'm really getting an earful these days. Thanks Shaw.

We just looked at our recordings of NCIS and NCIS LA from Tuesday night. There are both riddled with errors too. We watched the NCIS episode on VOD instead (in SD - yuk!) and may have to do the same for NCIS LA. JetRanger, if those other shows you had trouble with were also from Tuesday night, perhaps it was a more widespread issue that day.

It was Tuesday so you may be on to something, GWNorth. It would seem it is related to just the Gateway though.

On another note: I was sent this link today; http://betanews.com/newswire/2012/05/17/arris-introduces-new-moxi-software-and-support-for-advanced-web-services-and-application-development/ about a new software release from ARRIS. Let's hope it means there will be a speedier timeline for future code releases from Shaw.

I just want to say that I haven't had any of the "new" problems people are seeing after the update. All my recordings have been fine. Watching live TV is fine. I'm really happy to have the transport modes finally usable.

That Arris link is interesting news and shows that future features that many people desire are in the works in some way.

My optimistic thought would be that Shaw may have been waiting for this new SDK and perhaps working with a beta version and the delay in Arris releasing the SDK has contributed to the long delays between updates so now that the new SDK is getting released, Shaw could be ready to pump out a steady stream of new updates.

My less optimistic thought is that a new SDK often means existing functioning code has to be changed (hopefully not completely re-written) to reflect the new APIs and this could cause delays in releases and potentially new bugs in previously working features. I hope that is not the case but it depends on how much the Shaw version of the Arris code uses those APIs and how much they need to change should Shaw/Arris choose to migrate to the new SDK.

I've also had 2 of my portals lock up and reboot a couple of times in the past 2 weeks. One time I was watching a recording, the other time I was watching live TV.

Last evening I was watching a recording and when it was over I went to start another. It asked if I wanted to delete the current one when I hit stop like normal. I selected 'delete' and confirmed. It was "deleting" for a long time. It then came back with a time out error leaving the recording there.

I then tried to play the next program, but it was nothing but a black screen. There was no time in the time bar. It was completely clear. I tried several different programs all with the same result.

I rebooted both the Gateway and Portal. The program that didn't delete earlier was now gone and the other recordings have worked without a hitch since.