Several months ago, I ponied up the cash for a Shaw HD-PVR device (otherwise known as a “TiVo”, in the same sense that facial tissues are known as “Kleenex”). While I’ve been mostly happy with the device since then, a few issues have come up that I want to address here, and hopefully I’ll be able to find out if anyone else has experienced these difficulties.
For those who are new to the Personal Video Recorder concept, the device is essentially a computer with a 120GB hard drive and two high-definition TV input components. The on-board interface allows you to schedule TV shows to record, and it also allows you to set “series” recordings, so it will always attempt to record new (or, if you tell it to, repeated) episodes of the show in question. The “series” feature would be equivalent to TiVo’s “season pass” functionality. Other features of the device include the ability to pause and rewind live television, and to fast-forward through previously recorded programs (thus allowing you to skip commercials, or to skip artificial suspense in the case of reality TV shows).
My issues with the device boil down to three simple problems: interface lag, occasionally buggy scheduling logic, and one very annoying issue with how the device handles power outages.
Usually, the interface is quite responsive. The included remote seems to work fine, although the IR beam strength is somewhat lackluster compared to previous Shaw digital tuner remotes I’ve used. In some instances, however, the interface slows to a crawl. This has occasionally resulted in lag time (the time between pressing a button and seeing the resulting response on the screen) as long as 30 seconds. That, frankly, is entirely unacceptable. Since the unit has no built-in CPU usage meter or any sort of debugging tools like that, I can’t find a way to see what causes the lag in these situations. Presumably, the CPU is having a hard time handling the encoding of data to the hard drive. This could be understandable if both tuners were recording in HD quality at the same time, because I’m sure that would be very processor-intensive, but since I don’t have an actual HDTV yet, it’s all just a waste of resources if that’s the actual cause.
As for the scheduling logic, it usually works fine. The on-screen interface allows you to order shows by how important they are, and shows nearest the top will receive top priority in a scheduling conflict situation. Just last week, however, Survivor Micronesia failed to record properly – and it’s very near the top of my list. I couldn’t see any obvious reason for it to have failed, because no other shows on at that time appeared to have a higher ranking, and, in fact, nothing at all was recording at the time. I got lucky, though, in that I was watching another show at the time (a previously-recorded show) and it happened to end during Survivor’s first 15 minutes. As luck would have it, one of the two tuners on the device was tuned in to, although not recording, Survivor. To fix the problem, it was a simple matter of pressing the “Record” button. Because the device constantly spools what is being viewed on the tuners, it not only started recording immediately, but it also allowed me to rewind to the beginning of the episode and watch from there.
The most egregious and annoying issue with the device, I’ve found, is how it deals with occasional power outages. Normally I don’t have many issues with power fluctuations, but occasionally a car accident or a BC Hydro maintenance issue will cause an outage of around 2 to 30 minutes. Once the power comes back on, the unit has to spend 30 minutes re-downloading all of the TV listing caches. That, however, is not the most annoying power outage side-effect – that dubious honour is reserved for the fact that after a power outage, all of the PVR functionality is disabled until I call Shaw and have them perform a “reset” on the device. Not only do I have to do this to gain access to my already-recorded shows after a power outage, but I have to do this to allow it to start recording my Future Recordings! This means that if I lose power for 2 minutes at 9am, while I’m at work, none of my shows will record until after I’ve gotten home and spent 20 minutes on the phone with Shaw, explaining to them that they have to perform the reset. They seem to think that unplugging the power and waiting half an hour will cause the device to unlock the PVR functionality on its own; this has worked exactly zero times, out of seven power outages, and it exacerbates my frustration every time they ask me to do it.
Overall, I am satisfied with the HD-PVR device, but my fervent wish is for the lag and power-outage issues to be taken care of very soon. I don’t know if it can be solved with an automated firmware update, but I hope the solution is as simple as that.
