I received the 1.89 firmware last night and when I first turned on the STB, I found that I couldn't access recordings on the external HD. Previously, the external HD worked perfectly.

I repowered the STB and got the message that it found a compatable external hard drive. Everything worked properly so I thought that was the end of it. Roughly 10 minutes later, I got a message that the external device was disconnected. I powered down again and this time I reseated the esata cable before powering back up. After restarting, the same thing happened except that it only went for about 2 minutes this time. After a third restart, it didn't find the external drive at all.

Has anyone else had this problem since 1.89? Is a reformat of the drive the next thing to try? (Hope not - I have about 40 hrs of recordings there.)

Thanks.

I've read through this entire thread tonight and a number of people are talking about the new screensaver or shutdown features of the 8300HD. Are you guys actually leaving your TV and PVR on all the time and relying on the box powering itself down? Why wouldn't you just turn everything off when you're not watching something? Post 134 made it sound like power was being wasted by the screen save option not working well, so why not just shut everything down? The recordings will still function with the 8300HD in it's "off" or "standby" mode as long as there's still power going to the box from the wall. Am I missing something?

Hi,
I've noticed today on my PVR (Ottawa) that if I power down with the Harmony 880 remote and come back a bit later and turn it on again it seems to keep coming up with the external drive attached screen. As well, I noticed that the default volume it now at 17 when before if it rebooted it was 24 and if it was just a simple power off it seems to remember the last volume. Anyone else notice or is it just me.

I shut mine off every night when we go to bed. This will be the 1st night with the new firmware at my house.

I also noticed tonight on the HD PVR box that instead of only being able to fast forward 3 arrows you can now fast forward 4 arrows....

Got the update here in Waterloo. Looks good but I have only noticed the 4x FF so far. The menu changes are pretty small.

Now, Rogers, just enable MR.

You need a new box for MR.

I noticed my update (here in Ottawa) on the morning of the 23rd. I first noticed the four FF modes.

The only downside I've found is that my mute button no longer works. It used to mute the audio going from the PVR to my stereo. This no happens. Mute is invoked, but the audio continues to stream to the stereo. The closed captions appear, so I know the PVR is in mute mode.

I can't see why we would need a new box. It is just firmware support. Plus, our firmware has MRDVR server pages, unlike my other boxes which just have client pages.

I was reading that you can now see the classification of a show with 1.89. How do you see that?

I don't think the existing boxes can stream video to other boxes, that would take different hardware.

It's been confirmed in other threads that the MR is a separate box with some specialized hardware (by people who work with the box on a development level). As well, it's lack of HD client support, or it's ability to stream to another PVR makes it less than ideal.

Well, i gotta say, this feels like a new box. 'bout time, better late than never.

Few other things i noticed:

- erasing a program seems to execute alot faster ie. about 1 second, compared to up to 7 or 8 seconds sometimes previously
- paging/scrolling through recorded list (> 200 items for me) seems to be slightly quicker too, i'm not able to visually keep up through paging as i thought i previously could
- firewire transfers look promising, sporadic quality issues for me too though as per rogers firewire thread, at least its active to some degree which is a huge start

I received the 1.89 firmware last night and when I first turned on the STB, I found that I couldn't access recordings on the external HD. Previously, the external HD worked perfectly.

I repowered the STB and got the message that it found a compatable external hard drive. Everything worked properly so I thought that was the end of it. Roughly 10 minutes later, I got a message that the external device was disconnected. I powered down again and this time I reseated the esata cable before powering back up. After restarting, the same thing happened except that it only went for about 2 minutes this time. After a third restart, it didn't find the external drive at all.

Has anyone else had this problem since 1.89? Is a reformat of the drive the next thing to try? (Hope not - I have about 40 hrs of recordings there.)

Thanks.
Update:

I repowered the 8300HD yesterday evening and it seemed to be working for a considerable time so I thought that the problem was gone. Well, no such luck. After an hour and a half, a message popped up that the external device was disconnected and check connections etc. I repowered but this time it didn't help.

I disconnected the external drive and hooked it up to my second 8300HD (FS $299 special). On reboot, it asked to format the external drive which I accepted and everything seemed to work fine.

I then moved the drive back to the original STB and got the same error messages again following reboot. Next, I went through the list of recorded programs and erased all entries that were originally recorded on the external drive. After repowering, it asked to format the drive and I accepted. After that, there were no more error messages but I did notice that the % used didn't go down. I checked the partition info which showed the second device present but indicated that the AVFS partion was 0 GB. I then repowered once more and this time, everything came up looking good.

I've recorded a few hours of programs to the external drive since last night as well tested all of the PVR functions and so far so good. I'm guessing that what may have happened is that the firmware upgrade was downloaded while I was recording a program to the external hard drive. I'm guessing that perhaps the file system on the external drive somehow got messed up. It's also clear that a discrepancy between the recorded list and what's actually on the drive causes some major problems. In retrospect, I should have made sure that there were no early morning scheduled recordings this week.

Hope this helps anyone with similar problems.

Got it in Ottawa finally. Tuesday morning at 2:01am, because it cut off my recording of Colbert report into 2 parts. Took about 5 minutes judging by the missing recording.

The image is definitely brighter and washed out (component to Samsung DLP) for me, I had to recalibrate my screen. After wards, it looks good again.

External HD works as before, and menu seems snappier.

One happy camper here.

When viewing a channel, or recorded show, I see the classification after pressing the info button.

Anyone know the reason why Rogers decided to not roll out the hi-res version to the 8300HD boxes? The lo-res one we got really does look quite bad (which is what we are used to) compared to the hi-res version. The whole user experience is much better with the other version. Just curious why they decided to go that route. I am glad with some of the fixes though, they were much needed.

16. If you set up a recording for "On this channel any day in this time slot" or "On this channel any time" and adjust the start and/or end times, the adjustment will be applied to all recordings for that title. ie 8:05, Done "intelligently".

Is this working? I do not have this fix. I had Heroes scheduled for "any time", with 5 minutes extra, yesterday it recorded the first episode. When I check the scheduled recordings ii is again showing it for 1 hour, not 1:05.
Can somebody confirm that it is working like described in bullet 16?

Has anybody tried the firewire ports after the firmware upgrade? What exactly is needed to record HD content to a PC (other than the card and a cable)? I remember seeing instructions on how to do this some time ago somewhere, but the firewire ports were disabled then, so I didn't bother.

Any help on posting instructions is very much appreciated.

DonR, please read post 63.

LesE
I'm guessing that perhaps the file system on the external drive somehow got messed up The file system is all on the internal drive.

Castaban:
I had Heroes scheduled for "any time", with 5 minutes extra, yesterday it recorded the first episode. When I check the scheduled recordings ii is again showing it for 1 hour, not 1:05.it works for the "All Episodes This Timeslot option", however, it doesn't work for the All Episodes This Day option (once a week - I tried it for the Monday Jay Leno). I haven't tried it for the All Episodes any time, but would think it doesn't work there either, since these options rely on the IPG for the "start/end" time, while the timeslot one doesn't, it can rely on you having set the time correctly, almost like a VCR.

Does anybody know the best avenue for complaining to Rogers over the "improvements" with the new firmware? I contacted technical support, and of course got one of the clueless idiots who wasn't even aware of the update.

The biggest issue (apart from the picture definitely appearing less sharp) is the new restrictions vis-a-vis disk space remaining for scheduled recordings. It was bad enough how in the past you couldn't schedule a future recording if the PVR calculated (usually incorrectly) that you didn't have the space. If you tried to start a scheduled recording of a program which had already started, you used to still get the warning, but it would record anyway. (Often when it would finish, there would still be at least 2-3% left, proving my point earlier about miscalculations). After the update, you'll get the warning as it starts recording (like before), but as soon as you exit out of the warning screen it would stop recording (not like before)....but here's the kicker: If you try to schedule a program that's already well underway (and was not previously tuned to), the PVR will still calculate the space required based on when the program STARTED, not form when it would actually start recording! In other words, anything (say a long sporting event) which started hours ago but that you just tuned will often be unrecordable to its conclusion (especially if you try to stretch the end time) because the PVR is basing its judgment on the whole schedule. So you have no choice but to create tons of Manual Recordings (whose title can't be edited of course) to work around this.

Why couldn't the software allow a recording (whether current or future) AFTER giving you the space warning (along the lines of "at your own risk"?) This is ridiculous...I'm at only 87%, and I have to create Manual Recordings...

As far as the aesthetics that they added (including ability to get program info more easily on ch. 950 or to watch a currently recording show on 950) it's all lipstick on a pig compared to the bigger issues. They still have a horrific search "engine", the interactive guide (and the search list) still forces you to wade through every single channel (whether you subscribe to it or not or wish to see it), and from what I see posted the PVRs still crash on the VOD channels.

Whether Rogers or Scientific Atlanta is responsible for this mess of an update (after years of virtually no progress) I'd like to know to whom I can send official feedback!...*rant mode deactivated*