Yes, your issues have been reported on this forum many times. Here are some hints.

1a. I see 1.75 hours (almost 2), not 1 hour.

3. Change to CP24 before going into the guide. You'll always have the time at the top right. The time is also on the front of the PVR, if so configured.

4. If you press the record button instead of select, you can reduce the procedure by one button press. This is there for "safety" reasons to confirm your intentions.

6. You may have had a signal issue. Check your signal strength and read the other tips:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=17719

8. Some people like the fact that you can go back a bit. If you don't like it, simply press guide twice and it'll take you to the current time. No need to "go back" to the current time.


Please read the following useful post regarding other issues:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=17213


And the following post, useful for those new to the forum - search tips & FAQs:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=57741

The 8300HD is really something of a hybrid design - an SD cable box with an HD video section stuck onto it. The guide is from the SD side and gets overlaid on top of the HD video. Because of this design, it can't really have an HD resolution guide. That's not to say it can't have a much better looking one though!

I feel so, so sorry for you. I never had a PVR before I got the 8300 so, while I was not happy with someof these issues, I had nothing concrete as far as expectations go. I also thought "Hey, it's software, so it's just a simple fix and firmware upgrade." There's been one upgrade in, what, five years? And that high-resoultion display you wanted, well they tested it in their labs (someone even posted screencaps) but never deployed it.

On the other hand, the 8300 hardware is pretty solid (or at least has been for me) and you will find plenty of instructions to add an E-SATA hard drive to increase your recroding capacity.

The 8300HD is really something of a hybrid design - an SD cable box with an HD video section stuck onto it. The guide is from the SD side and gets overlaid on top of the HD video. Because of this design, it can't really have an HD resolution guide. That's not to say it can't have a much better looking one though!But that hybrid design was the choice of SA. Presumably they decided to take the software that they had designed for their earlier SD boxes and use the same design for new boxes rather than writing a new design for their box or even outsourcing the UI of their box to a company like TiVo.

I have now had an HD cable box for 3 weeks shy of seven years and an SD box for a few years before that (I can't remember when Rogers introduced digital but Shaw introduced digital in 1997 and I believe Rogers was around that time as well). There is no excuse for not having improved the UI in that period of time.

"8) Why does the guide allow you to go back in time 2 hours? Annoying when I scroll forward into the future and then have to scroll backwards carefully far to get back to the current time "

For this, if you just press the red C, it will jump to the current time and channel that you are on. This is a bit quicker than 57's suggestion of pressing Guide twice, and the results are the same.

There is something that Rogers Digital has had for years now that has always bugged me, and has yet to be fixed (I'm in Toronto) yet the feature is available for other digital stations in smaller cities (like Kingston's Shaw cable)... and basically, it's the 'browse by title' function.

On Rogers Digital, if you 'browse by title', you get to choose between A-Z. Then after you've picked your letter, you have to scroll through a freakin billion things to find what you want. God forbid you are looking for a show starting with N because you'll have to scroll through pages and pages of 'NEWS' listings. In Kingston, if you hit 'browse by title' you are given the option to input up to 5 characters... so if you wanted to find a show called 'Nine' for example, you could type in "N", "I", "N" at which point it would narrow your search down to only shows starting with NIN.... making it easy to find 'Nine' without having to scroll, and scroll, and scroll.

This feature seems pretty freakin easy to implement, so why the hell isn't it available here yet? We have HBO Canada now.. tons of radio stations... HD programming and On Demand features.. and this damn search function is still ancient.

Rogers... get off your ass and do this already. Geez.

Relax, im working on it. Sorry its taking me so long, everyone else got laid off so im all by my self and the mgmt keeps piling on work and more work and even more work :( :( :(

LOL.... one guy named Paulo is 'working on it?'

First, if that's the case, your upper management people suck... but this we already knew.

But are you telling me you've been working on it .... for YEARS?

This isn't new.... it's been this way for years...

But that hybrid design was the choice of SA. Presumably they decided to take the software that they had designed for their earlier SD boxes and use the same design for new boxes rather than writing a new design for their box or even outsourcing the UI of their box to a company like TiVo.

Certainly. If you remember back to 2000, Motorola offered the HDD-200 hi-def add-on box (aka "sidecar") that worked with many of their cable and satellite receivers (Star Choice, for example). If the channel was SD, the HDD-200 would do a cheap-&-dirty upconvert to HD. If it was HD, the signal would be passed to the HDD and processed and output as true HD.

The SA HD cable boxes have always worked on an almost identical type of design - a regular digital cable receiver with a hi-def frame buffer added. It's much better integrated today than it was back then, but it's still the same basic design.

Since CISCO bought SA, anything new they might have had in development would have been put on hold.

The rate of change in these boxes is shockingly slow given the pace of change of everything else in computers and electronics. The SA/Cisco web site shows some additional boxes like the 8450HDC and 8550HDC but it isn't clear what functionality these have as well.

Given the purchase of SA by Cisco I would have thought that Cisco would see STBs as their entry into consumers' living rooms and that they would start adding functionality to STBs. For example, why not build media extender functionality into a cable STB? It already has almost all of the hardware you would need with the exception of a LAN connection or wifi. Or give a cable STB functionality similar to Apple TV where you can stream content over the web to your STB.

Of course the cable companies probably wouldn't be too happy about the latter use.

I personally agree that some channels are duplicated and that does pose a problem . I'm from NL as well and think its much better than the previous tan guide we used to have . I think that it can be improved ,but it is a step up from what we used to have here. As for Bell , I'd take Rogers guide and service over them any day. Every time with Bell ,if it rains or snows you will either lose your signal or it will be degraded. So I will put up with Rogers guide and at least I can depend on them when the weather is not so good.:rolleyes:

i only ever had the snow issue maybe 2-3 times in 8 years....

The program guide that bell has is more then enough reason for me to go back to bell this July when my new home closes... Rogers should take notice of this, The rogers hd-pvr box lacks greatly compared to the Bell box....

Just comparing the experience of watching tv and forgetting all the other issues(customer support,snow,price ect ect) to me the Bell HD PVR experience is 10fold better then rogers. Rogers has till july to change things and them im gone. :)

nfldanchor shouldn't really be posting comments regarding his UI in this thread since he's in Atlantic Canada with Motorola STBs and a different UI. We probably have something similar to the Tan guide he referenced.

I'm glad to see a group of people as irritated with IPG as I am. My anger has built up continuously.

Any word on a change?

Keep lodging complaints. I don't think there is anything else we can do without dropping Rogers as a provider.

Does anyone know why Rogers plans on update the firmware on our PVRs? The ROD final received a make over but we are stuck with our old guides and PVR controls.

Keep lodging complaints. I don't think there is anything else we can do without dropping Rogers as a provider.You can use something like a TiVo or HTPC which has its own guide, but that is much more expensive and more complex as well. But it is a much better solution.

Can you record HD on a TiVo in Canada?

No, but you can with the HTPC solution.

Unfortunately, we do not support cablecard in Canada...so recording of HD is limited outside of an all-in-one box like the SciAtl boxes.

A TiVo can record OTA HD but not cable HD. You will need an HTPC with a Hauppauge HD-PVR ($250) unit to record cable HD. IMHO it is the best solution but also more expensive and complex since it still requires cable boxes.