I've yet to receive anything even remotely helpful from Star Choice in terms of 530 upgrades, timeline, or anything else. Maybe I'm asking the wrong people!

to raise false pretense of precicely what the next unseen code can or cannot do for some people raises a false expectation


I do not believe Zeuses was telling us what it 'Will' do, but what it is 'intended' to do. I believe that this is a positive either away as it demonstrates that *C is completely aware of what is going on and is not ignoring it!

Almost all televisions on the market have the ability to be set up so the channel change button skips unavailable channels so you can not patent this idea.

I believe the lack of a channel-scan was intentional by StarChoice. When you're looking through the guide, they want you to become interested in stations you don't subscribe to so that you'll increase your subscription. I don't think there's anything devious about, it's just good marketing. If you don't see those stations in the guide, how do you know what you're missing?

As for the bug with the favourites affecting the guide, but not the channel scan, I think that's a bug in the software. Hopefully, it will be fixed

You can delete the unsubcribed channels from the guide but you just can't delete them so they don't show up when your scanning up and down the channels without getting the PIN request screen and Not Subcribed screen.

You can delete the unsubcribed channels from the guide but you just can't delete them so they don't show up when your scanning up and down.

Yeah I realize that GaryE, but one of the feature requests was to have an auto-scan feature so that the unsubbed channels would be removed automatically instead of doing it manually with the favourites. And if the 530 is like my receivers, when it's powered down, the guide reverts back to the full guide.

I guess my post was a little confusing, as there were two very similar topics being discussed on the thread.

I will leave with this, the DVR 530 is new equipment, and if you do not give it a chance to be corrected then that becomes your own liability. As with any electronic device, there is months of fine tunning before it will work as planned.


Zeusus

Welcome to the Lions Den and the Lions are pissed and hungry.

The customer is alway right and you have to deliver what they want, when they want it and it must work right. If you don't you are out of business. You can't give them lame excuses. Motorola and *C simply pushed this out to market before it was ready. They gambled, loss and now have to pay.

As a consumer I am not satisfied at all with this product. However I am probably more tolerant to waiting since I work for Motorola and I know it is a company that will put in the extra effort needed to fix this product. They know the damage this does to their reputation and have a damage control plan. (I apologize for this lame excuse but company loyalty you know.)

Motorola and *C simply pushed this out to market before it was ready. They gambled, loss and now have to pay.

Not that this is in any way an excuse, but to be fair, it should be mentioned the customers were demanding it be released ASAP - they were sick of waiting and threatening to jump ship if it wasn't released.

it seems really strange that customers wanting something really has that much pull that they would release a product before it is properly fine tuned.

i completely disagree with the statement made by Zuesus in regards to any electronic product having months of fine tuning. my canon digital camera is more complex than any other product i have ever purchased. it worked right out of the box and is still working fine. my canon printer also prints picture-quality photos. they know they have to get it right because if it is not working i am going to take it right back to the store. with starchoice and motorola they realize that you cannot return the motorola for a pioneer dvr because of the proprietary relationship going on between motorola and starchoice. it is great that they introduced this machine in may. from what i have observed some of the bugs in this machine are very minor bugs and should not be left so long before getting them fixed up.

it would be interesting to know what sort of electronic equipment or devices you are purchasing that need to be tweeked to this extent?

Ummmm, How about Windows XP for one????????

my canon digital camera is more complex than any other product i have ever purchased.

I disagree. A digital camera has many moving parts and optics, etc. but the software in them is fairly simple. In additon, even in the most complex of cameras, most of the complex functions such as auto focus, zoom and adjusting the exposure are technologies that have essentially remained unchanged for the last 20-25 years.

I've worked on DVD firmware, and that's complicated enough. A DVR has to have all of a DVD player's functionality (except, maybe eject), include all of the functionality of a satellite receiver and then some. Just the code to handle the HD alone would be a nightmare given that you have to be able to read and write in real-time and often at the same time.

Customer demand may not have been the driving force, but market pressures caused by being behind the competition would certainly have played a factor in what may be a premature release.

My 1.5 cents.

windows XP is not an electronic device, but i will admit that i have had little to no trouble with windows xp considering it can handle being a pvr, a video recorder, an mp3 player, enables email, web browsers, and a host of other things. never a problem for me. even the starchoice demo on their website works better than the actual dvr itself. comparing the dvr to windows xp is like comparing apples and oranges. windows xp is an operating system.

windows xp is like comparing apples and oranges. windows xp is an operating system.

At the root of the PVR is an operating system. I'd say the PVR has more in common with XP than it does with a digital camera. That is, unless your digital camera is capable of both reading and writing to media simultaneously.

my camera does have that capability. you can continuously take photos while the camera is writing to the disk in the background. it also has many automated features. the point is, the camera was released working 100%. this is also the case with every other electronic product in my house. my vcr, my computer, my coffee maker, my microwave and i don't buy the argument that the dvr is a masterpiece and the ultimate in electronic gadgetry. i have a vacuum cleaner that cleans my floors automatically too. the irobot roomba discovery. that thing amazes me and has no flaws that i have uncovered. good thing that motorola didn't design the vacuum. it has 4 sensors that tells it when it is approaching a staircase, it knows when its battery is running low and automatically docks itself in its charger, it knows how to untangle itself from an area rug, it is a piece of electronics mixed with hardware that is truly functional and much newer than a pvr or a vcr for that matter. yet the makers designed it to work the way it should. i have faith in humans and humanity. i think that they can do much more than design and put together a dvr. 1969 when the rocket took off from earth and landed on the moon. now there is something much more complicated than a dvr and it happened 40 years ago. good thing they didn't have as many errors. if you want to go patting motorola on the back go right ahead. myself, i think they need a good slap on the butt for what they've done, regardless of what their situation was.

At the root of the PVR is an operating system. I'd say the PVR has more in common with XP than it does with a digital camera. That is, unless your digital camera is capable of both reading and writing to media simultaneously.Agreed that at the root of a PVR is an operating system. Windows XP is an operating system. if you run a buggy piece of software that some dummy wrote are you going to blame windows xp for it? i could develop a program right now and send it off to you that runs under windows xp. if that program deletes your hard drive contents is it windows xp's fault, or is it my fault for putting that code in the program instructing windows xp to do the delete? operating systems are not new. hard drives are not new. in fact there are not too many components inside the dvr that are new. the programming is new and they can have it.

my camera does have that capability. you can continuously take photos while the camera is writing to the disk in the background.

That's buffering and writing. All the camera is doing is storing the photos in voliatile memory while it transfers the previous photos to the media. That's not simultaneous.

I agree that the PVR has problems, and that Motorola and Starchoice did a lousy job troubleshooting the software before releasing the product, but your comparison wasn't fair. It's like comparing a go-cart to an SUV.

We've been through the whole analogy thing already, trying to compare the DVR530 to just about every other piece of electronics under the sun.

Windows 1.0 came out just over 20 years ago. How well do you think that worked out of the box? How about Windows 3.1? Windows 95? That one crashed while being demo'd for the first time in front of the press. Windows 98? Not much better. Windows ME? A joke. Windows 2000? 15 years after the first Windows, a stable operating system!

Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of users all demanding better, more stable software and it still took them 15 years to do it.

According to Zeusus's numbers, we can guess around 33,000 of Star Choice's customers own a 530 receiver. That seems really high to me, but regardless, it still means the numbers just aren't there to be devoting huge amounts of money to get the problem fixed immediately - just like anything else, I'm sure Star Choice/Motorola has a budget (does Star Choice have to pay Motorola for software updates?) they have to follow based upon cost/benefit and such.

An update is comming - am I surprised its taking this long? Not really.

One fundamental difference is that like XP, a DVR530 CAN be easily upgraded.
In the 530's case, with NO customer intervention, so maybe it doesn't have to be 100% perfect, becuase you can roll it forward.

In your camera's case, would you have to replace the camera or could you take it somewhere to be flash upgraded, like many cells phones that have buggy firmware on initial release.

How about the XBOX 360 from a large and well known company that have the resources, but released a much antictipated product that crashes and melts CD's?

In PC software, we always look for the latest drivers and patches to fix our problems, because it's easy to do so.

the original comment was something like the 530 is a lousy piece of electronic equipment that was not properly thought out. from there we went to operating systems, the inner workings of cameras and all sorts of things. the bottom line is no company would introduce a piece of electronics costing so much to the general public with the amount of bugs. all we can do now is hope that motorola really will put effort into resolving the issues. this is a machine dedicated to doing one thing really. it's not like windows which is a true multitasker. most of the problems with windows over the years has been with software developed by 3rd parties that did not properly release memory that was allocated. or they would sabotage a piece of memory critical to the system. i cannot say that any piece of electronics i have ever bought had bugs in it and i am talking about cassette recorders, vcrs, televisions, cameras, telephones, modems, record players, cd players, dvd players, dvd recorder, coffee maker, electric mixers, vacuum cleaners, automobiles. none of these items that i have purchased contained so many flaws. i cannot speak for people who were unfortunate enough to buy items that failed miserably as i can only go by my own experiences with electronics and mechanical items. my co-worker is with rogers and has one of their pvr's. he does not have 1 problem with it. i asked him if it was made by motorola and he said no. i can't remember the name of the company who made it, but it was not motorola. i never heard of them before. i have on the other hand heard of motorola as they have been around for many decades. it surprises me that this company is responsible for the 530.

I couldn't agree more - I've had my 530 since May and have experienced most of the glitches reported in the past 6 months. I think *C was remiss in not ensuring that the software in this thing was as close to perfect as possible before releasing it to the market. But, to be fair, the engineers likely didn't expect that users would be able to mess things up by pressing buttons that would not normally be included in a normal test. That's not to say there were no serious shortcomings, and I've screwed the machine up simply by not looking closely at the buttons I pushed - resulting in freezes and restarts and frantic calls to *C. Bottom line - I'm a bit more careful with my remote buttons, but if the next update isn't up to snuff, I hope there's room up *C's butt when dissatisfied owners start stuffing 530's in there...

Interesting commets all.
I also happen to sit on a private email list dealing with Motorola CABLE DCT 6412 Dual Tuner HD PVR box that uses software coded by Prevue (aka TVGuide-Gemstar). A company that has written set top code for some time now and has just broken some standard fetaures that have worked for years, so even they are not imune to Murphy.

Now if you thought the DSR530 bugs were bad or some of the operations were not to your particular liking, then you've got it good.

Some of the operations of that unit are just plain assinine.
But again, Motorola only codes some of the very low level things in boxes now a days. Higher level stuff is often done by various 3rd parties depending upon the end customers requirements.

The DCT6412 has been out longer than the DSR530 and suffers badly from failed timers, lost recordings. After a recording, shuts itself off, evn if you were watching something, so the recomeded work a round is 'don't turn it off'. It mutes the audio when it has to fully wake up to record in the background. And then it's a goofy sequence to get things going again.
Some feature!

I don't have my list in front of me, and I'm not trying to makes excuses for any party associated with the DSR530, but some need to look over the fence and realize, that it's neither the best, nor the worst that anybody makes it out to be, rather somewhere in the middle, above centre, I'd say and gaining strength, all things considered.

I suspect the other name being looked for is Scientific Atlanta, BTW, they were just bought out by Cisco.