Starting the morning of Wednesday February 16, HDDSR 605 and HDPVR 630 receivers will begin to be updated from Current Version 00.13 to 04.06.
The overall usage and look/feel of the system is unchanged with this download. 04.06 includes a few new and updated features along with providing a more consistent and reliable experience.
We’ve prepared some FAQ and detailed information on this update.
When will I receive the update?
The upgrade will be deployed gradually starting the afternoon of February 15. When you see a “Target Version” on line I of System Status (OPTIONS 4-7), your receiver will be upgraded automatically around 2:10AM local time. The upgrade will occur regardless of whether the receiver is left on or off and should take less than an hour to complete.
If your receiver has not been targeted, it is not possible to force the update. All units will be targeted and upgraded over the coming days.
Will all my recordings and settings migrate to the new version?
Yes, with one exception:
- If upgrading from version 00.10, Channel Locks and Favourites lists will not migrate. Refrain from setting these until after the download.
After the download has occurred and the Guide has fully loaded, Check your PVR/Options menu to ensure all Recording Events have the expected “Next Recording” time. If they don’t, simply make a change in this menu and press EXIT to save. The receiver will replan and everything should be scheduled as expected. This will also happen automatically overnight.
What has changed with this download for the HDPVR 630?
Nearly all parts of the software have been refined for a smoother and more consistent experience. Highlights include:
Tuning Rebuild – Audio/video are now presented much faster when turning on the receiver, changing channels, or stopping PVR playback. Tuner lockup/phantom recordings have been eliminated.
HDD Space Remaining – In response to your feedback, we’ve added the disk remaining bar to the PVR List and PVR/Upcoming menus. The bar has been made more compact and is now colour coded depending on how full your hard drive is.
Parental Controls – The experience with Parental Controls enabled should be more stable, with occurrences of the “false PIN” screen reduced and no more “No Data” blocks for programs that cross the GMT boundary.
Guide changes – Channel lineup changes (like new channels being launched) will now appear within 60 minutes, or immediately by turning the receiver off and back on. A Front Panel Reset should no longer be required to fix missing or duplicated channels in your Guide.
LIVE and 3D programs now have an icon in the Guide. “Live” programs will now be included when selecting “Record new episodes”. Note that these icons do not appear in the full-screen INFO pages.
Search Enhancements – Interests Search genres are now sorted in correct alphabetical order when the language is set to French; Programs beginning with accented characters are no longer grouped at the bottom of the results list; and programs with accented characters can now be properly searched.
Tune in Satellite Signal – The OPTIONS 4-3-1 menu now provides signal level from both tuners, an indication of signal strength, satellite, modulation, and transponder ID for both tuners. If no background recording is taking place, some values will not be available. This menu is primarily for self installation/dish alignment and advanced troubleshooting. Audio will be lost when exiting the menu, change channels to resolve.
With all the negative comments to do with this PVR I just thought I would put in my .02 and say that in general I have been happy with the unit.
I switched from Rogers (had an 8300HD) back when the unit first came out and although I did suffer from the occasional reboot and locked up tuner it really hasn't been enough for me to be too put out.
I find the new firmware update to be pretty good so far. The unit seems a LOT more responsive and snappy.
There are still some annoyances with the unit that I wish would get corrected but they are so minor I'm not going to get my feathers in a knot over them. The skip back a little bit when I hit forward happens all the time and I find it hard to believe that they can't track down that bug and squash it. The jumping to the start when I hit fast forward does happen once in a blue moon but it's certainly not the end of the world when it does happen and I just fast forward back to where I was.
With the latest firmware update I would say I'm just as happy with it as I ever was with the Rogers unit and hope that things only get better with future updates.
I am also waiting for the update on my 2nd receiver. But I can say that my
1st receiver (with the update), does appear to be much faster. I notice they gave us the percentage of harddisk used, but I wish they wouldn't have taken away the hours for SD/HD. I see no reason for them to have taken this away, there was still room in the window to leave it there.
Other than that its been very stable.
Here is an easy couple to test in the new firmware, if someone with it wouldn't mind checking:
Start playing back a recording. Pause it. Press "menu", look at the menu screen for a second then press "exit". Press "play". Does it start playing or open the menu again?
View recordings by "Program Name" and "Episodes". Navigate to a series where you need to delete something. So you have for example "NCIS" and "5 Episodes". Press OK to open the list and select one to delete and delete it. Press "Go Back" - How many episodes does it now say you have? 5 or 4? Also, of secondary interest, did you have to wait more than 10 seconds for it to actually delete your episode before you could do anything else?
I have read that the skip forward still rewinds on the first push, but what about when you are near the end of a recording and you just want to skip to the end to bring up the menu? Does it not let you skip forward when you have less than 30 seconds left like the 0.13 firmware?
I'm not targeted yet...but if these simple and obvious bugs are not fixed I will be less than happy.
I'm hoping that the new firmware gives me some reason to change my mind about this hardware. As it stands now I am convinced that it is "substantially different than described at the time of purchase", is "unfit for the purpose for which it was intended", and "is of substantially poorer quality than comparable goods commonly sold in the marketplace". The TOS tries to scare anyone away from attempting to enforce any implied warranty with regards to merchantability but you can not waive this right in many provinces, including mine. I figure 2 years is enough time to give the merchant a chance to repair his products that I have paid over $1,500 for?
OK, Update. Sort of. I was targeted somewhere in the past few hours.
I forced the download and about 22mins to 24mins into the process I heard the sound come back on (I had stepped out to another room). After checking all three items in my previous post and finding them to be the same, plus having the delayed-buffered-remote response in the PVR list (press multiple buttons trying to get a response then after about 10 seconds it does them all at once, plus waiting 10 seconds for an episode to delete, I was less than impressed.
Turns out I'm still at 0.13. Must have crashed during the update process. Don't know why this would surprise me at this point. Forcing it again. Hopefully better results the 2nd time around.
I'm also in the 'targeted today' camp. I forced the d/l between the hockey games and it went off without a hitch - just took a while. I gave it a while to get lined out (populate guide data, etc) before I played with it, and it seemed solid. Nothing that always caused a crash before did so now; and the unit is much more responsive in general.
We'll see how she does with some use - but looks promising so far.
By the by, anyone else's signal strengths look different than before? I don't mean the screen; I mean the numbers themselves.
Well, I am on 0.13 and all I know is something is wrong on Channel 233 with the NHL Game in 3D. Its not sending all the info needed to engage the 3D circuitry and I am getting 2 Side By Side pictures on the screen and cannot get the circuit to engage.
It works fine if I switch to the Directv 3D Channels - and has worked in the past.
So perhaps they broke the 3D circuit for anyone not on the new firmware, which pisses me off that the first 3D broadcast in what, 2 months, I am not able to view properly.
EDIT: Forced the upgrade and missed the first hour of the game.
Its still not working - still only getting 2 SBS pictures without the proper information to allow the 3D to even be manually operated.
OPTIONS 4-7 Lines H and it will tell you if you are targeted...
Finally got it. Took 5 tries, last one after a hard reboot. Was about to try a factory reset if that didn't work.
Regarding the issues in my above post: 0 for 3 - every one of them still exists. I'm wondering if the caller ID still shows up 3 hours later if you happen to have had a show paused when the call came in..(shows up when you sit down to finish your show). I guess that is better than not letting you pause if the phone is ringing like the 530 does.
It does delete shows faster, and the HDD remaining on the PVR menu is nice, but as has already been mentioned, it would be nice to have the "hours remaining"; they also removed "hours remaining" from the other menus.
The huge lag time and "remote control buffering" issue has gotten worse I think.
A new issue: I was deleting a few shows, and other than the number of episodes still being reported wrong, after trying to delete an episode, it now appears with a duration of 0:00 minutes and I can neither delete nor watch it. Selecting it boots me out of the menu.
Is it possible they artificially inflated the signal strenghst to fool the 630 into thinking it's getting a much better signal in order to avoid the tuner locks that were so sensitive to signal strength?
No. 04.06 brings with it a new method of calculating the signal level, designed to "normalize" the reading across 8PSK, QPSK, and the different coding/symbol rates. The most easily visible result is a higher reading for Standard Definition QPSK channels.
I think that a thanks and kudo's are in order to the SD team for this timely firmware release. While it does not apparently fix everything, it does appear to make the experience faster and more reliably which means more to me then fixing the 'cosmetic' things.
I do have one quibble, the indicator of the space available does not estimate the remaining time available. This is a one step forward and ten steps backward as far as I am concerned. My use case is that I am going to be going away for some petiod of time and need to ensure that there is enough space. The way it is now, I have no way to guestimate if there enough space is available. While it was not good UI design before ... it's just bad functional design now
One of the big challenges with providing the "hours" remaining is exactly what you stated - it's simply an estimate. Under 00.13, the true amount of space remaining varied greatly depending on the channel/content you were recording, along with the reserved part for LOD.
As we look to future broadcast methods, it becomes impossible to provide an accurate estimate of the true number of hours that could be recorded. SD, HD, MPEG4, 3D, etc. all vary dramatically in terms of how much space they take up.
Additionally, in order to fit the bar in the PVR List (which was a very popular feature request last Fall), it needs to be more compact.
The PVR is still self-managing, and will still automatically delete the oldest unprotected recording when space is needed. As you spend time with the software, you'll start to get an idea of approximately how much space gets freed up when you delete a recording. It's nice to now have that instant gratification, too
Yes....I completely agree with you....as you don't have anyway to know how many hours of SD or HD space you have left. This needs to be addressed a.s.a.p., preferrably before the holiday season hits. As I had stated in a previous post, there was no reason for them to take this away.
Just got the update and it does speed up the response times. The receiver responds much quicker now. As far as the comments about how the amount of recording space available is presented I don't mind the change to percentage of HD space remaining. HD and SD hours are different and had to be tracked separately, as well with the old software the hours remaining wasn't listed directly in the save screen. Moving it out front is a nice improvement. In my case I have 24 hours of HD saved with a disk usage of 39%. Pretty easy to see when it's time to delete some shows when it approaches 85% to 90%.
No sign up my update yet... however I did notice that my trip count went from zero... to one... then up to two over the past couple of days. I thought it might be SD pinging my receiver to see if it was an opportune time to download the update. However this morning it's back to zero.
Shaw Direct cannot "ping" your receiver like a cable company. It is a one way street. Updates are done by messages received stating which serial numbers are to receive and unpack the update that is sent.
The one thing I did notice now is that The Score (403 classic) is now in my guide instead of thinking it was unsubscribed to.
I have noticed slight improvement in response
Signal levels are way up almost 20 points. I do agree with zbroke in that they have artificially increased this number OR the old scale/reading was incorrect. Previously, my other units always had high levels and the 630 was the odd man out showing lower levels.
If this pixelates now at least the CSR cannot use the signal level as a potential cause.
My 2 605s also got the upgrade, but they were problem free before.
Still need to test out if after you watch a recorded show to make sure land on that show in the list of recordings. Another show needs to start recording during your viewing for this bug to be tested.
Hey GaryE- Im targeted- but how do you prompt/force the download- would rather do it now than overnight and screw up my recordings! Cheers
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