Axxlog

While evaluating the Explorer 8000, I kept notes of most of its little flaws. Here is a cleaned-up version of my notes that still may be slightly impenetrable.

2004.02.06 22:33

Spontaneously rebooted. Previously, could not figure out how to get out of playback mode. You have to hit channel arrow keys, leaving you on the security channel (980).

2004.02.06 22:37

Re-rebooted!

2004.02.06 23:00

“ATTENTION: A scheduled recording will take place in 2 min.” Room to Go. Already recorded before.

“You are now recording ZeD. Press SEL to change to the other recording.”

960 is “DVR Playback Channel.” Not “PVR,” either.

2004.02.08 10:53

Two shows overnight on BookTV, Word This Week and Prisoners of Gravity, actually turned out to be lectures.

2004.02.08 22:59

These two-minute warnings I don’t understand.

Wouldn’t let me watch a currently-recording show from the beginning.

Recording LED is too bright.

Should allow me to record two new shows and skip a rerecording of an already-recorded show.

Try turning on the diagnostic menu: Hold down centre button on front panel for 5 seconds, then press Info, then use left and right cursor keys. Captioning still comes through!

2004.02.09 19:34

Specifically deleted all but one Richler, Ink, but the endless Dershowitz repeat from Sunday was still there.

Lagtime in channel changing.

Cannot get any SAP to play, unless SAP and main happen to be identical in all cases, which I doubt.

2004.02.10 00:31

Rebooted. HAL2 6680 read the display.

2004.02.10 16:06

Fast-forward for a while, hit Stop, and it plays with sound for a second before giving the options screen.

2004.02.13 14:26

Turned TV on. Channel 6 is working, all other channels deauthorized. Unplugged PVR. Displays 6680 on reboot. Fixed.

2004.02.14 19:07

Told me I was out of space today.

2004.02.14 20:45

Just checked 60 Minutes. CC1 captions garbled, CC3 nonexistent.

2004.02.14 23:59

Missed the PERFECT BEAUTY SHOT as PVR told me of two recordings starting in 2 minutes just as I was watching Romeo + Juliet.

2004.02.15 19:36

Over and over again, the lagtime makes it misread the channels I type. Then it misreads the correction.

2004.02.15 20:08

The only SAP I could ever get was on Newsworld. Just now on Simpsons, I checked the VCR feed. DX. No DX on main feed until I deselected and reselected SAP.

2004.02.15 20:30

Lagtime in Settings key made me seem to press it twice.

2004.02.16 23:25

CourtTV 144 and Moviola 150 had no audio (the latter found out after snatching Neil Staite; a Chaplin silent movie running at the time, making things ambiguous). While on the phone with Rogers service, the box showed no video anywhere. Pulled cord out. I wouldn’t let the technician reboot remotely. Technician said I had enough volume – 14 dB on some channels, 18 dB on others. No change when connected directly to cable rather than through 1 GHz splitter. [He later booked a service call that I subsequently cancelled. I didn’t want to lose the programs on the PVR if they had to swap boxes. Plus I simply did not care.]

Here begins the leap-day bug

2004.02.22 12:02

Last night it recorded CSI: Miami without my permission.

2004.02.22 20:04

Cannot get SAP going on Simpsons, Newsworld, or anything.

HAL2 6680 on reboot.

Required complete cold boot (impatiently, I did it twice). What I did was: Started with silent audio → selected Disable SAP (result: main audio) → selected Enable SAP (result: description audio).

2004.02.22 20:12

And then it crashed by itself. Rebooted into correct DX.

2004.02.23 22:23

Channel 205 is simply a black screen when trying to record Kevin Smith (3h45). Says REC, but no red light, and 205 is black.

2004.02.24 20:53

Suddenly the only recordings on the schedule are Eleventh Hour and Prisoners of Gravity. Trying to add recordings of any kind manually doesn’t work. Rebooting. No better.

2004.02.24 20:59

Spontaneously crashed. Will not record anything, at least on future programming. Also cannot record a show in real time.

2004.02.25 13:11

Tried to set future recording for Volt. It sat there for two minutes and then crashed.

2004.02.25 15:01

At this moment, Rogers pushed through the new firmware to fix the leap-day bug. Onscreen displays included:

• r001 then ELr cycling blob (that is, all the outside segments of the digit circling in animation, like a sign outside a casino)
• Pr plus two blobs.
• Still r---

2004.02.25 16:00

It’s all this time later and it’s still going apeshit.

2004.02.25 17:31

Dead. Turned on. Eventually: “Advanced services are not available. When the Message light blinks, press Info for more information.”

2004.02.25 17:52

Hit Info for the hell of it and all stations were back to normal. (Could have done this before?) Tried to pre-record Volt and it looks normal.

In theory, the leap-day bug is now fixed

2004.02.25 17:52

Locker Room won’t show up on EPG search-by-title.

2004.02.26 22:34

BBC Canada, Discovery Civilization, TechTV, all three SportsNets have no picture or sound. CourtTV and Moviola have no sound.

2004.02.29 14:44

950 is PVR channel.

2004.03.01 21:12

Had to unplug power to get SAP to work. Then extreme delay in responding to keypresses (which were buffered). I think it might have started up in SAP, having buffered pre-reboot keystrokes, but I can’t prove that.

2004.03.04 12:57

DejaView 143 is a completely black screen with no sound. As is Court TV, 144.

2004.03.07 19:13

Many, many times, the box clearly pauses between quickly-consecutive keypresses.

• Type 176 + Select
• Machine interprets it as:
  1. 1 plus a pause, which it views as 1 + Select
  2. 76 + Select

So you get lost in re-attempts in trying to get the box to understand where the delimiters are: before the 1 and after the 6!

2004.03.07 20:02

Yet again had to unplug to get SAP.

Other annoyances

1. When you’re in List view or running any kind of playback, to return to watching TV you must either press up- or down-arrow or type a channel number. The Exit key doesn’t work.
2. Once you press the up- or down-arrow key, you end up on Channel 1, Channel 960 (the PVR playback channel), Channel 998 (running a hideously-captioned Rogers infomercial), or Channel 760 (Max Trax Treehouse – nonstop kiddie music, eliciting homicidal feelings toward the fictional character Tinky Winky). No, there’s no pattern.
3. When playing a program, you can stop playback and return to watching TV if you press the arrow keys or type a channel number. When you do that, then press the List key and go back to playing the same show, playback picks up where you left off. (When you’re in the list of recorded shows, Selecting that program unconditionally plays it. Usually it gives you another screen asking if you want to select or erase it.)
4. If you stop the playback, you can’t type a channel. The only way to get out of that screen is to press up- or down-arrow. Even the Exit key doesn’t work.
5. I haven’t quite figured out the circumstances in which a paused playback resumes at the very beginning or at the point you left off.
6. The French localization is a joke. I only looked at a couple of screens, but in one of the options for a recorded program, the screen read Sauvegarder: All derniers. This is a failed Atlanta attempt to say Save: All episodes. However, “all” isn’t a French word.
7. As mentioned in the list above, the lagtime between keypresses and action is simply ridiculous. I know the PVR buffers everything you watch, but a simple up-arrow keystroke shouldn’t take two seconds to register.

Conclusion

The Explorer 8000 is generally inaccessible, unreliable, poorly tested, bug-prone, difficult to control, inconsistent, and overpriced. A TiVo it ain’t. It’s barely a TiVo manqué.

I’ll give you my expert opinion right here for free: The Explorer 8000 PVR is completely inaccessible to blind and visually-impaired people. Great way to grow your subscriber base, huh? Make a product that an entire swath of potential customers simply can’t use.

What are the problems?

Visual interface

Like absolutely every other digital cable or satellite box in existence, you control the 8000 by onscreen menus and a remote control. It seems that PVR designers develop products for people exactly like themselves – geeks in their 20s or 30s. They’re good with computers, and maybe they wear glasses (which caused them to get picked on by Nelson Muntz types in gym class), but otherwise they’re perfectly hale and hearty. I merely surmise this; I haven’t talked to the developers, and this is an invitation for them to talk to me to set me straight if I’m wrong.

But where is the contrary evidence? Where is the evidence, anywhere, that Scientific Atlanta developers took disability into account at any time?

The fact that the only way you can control the box is by looking at control screens is a dealbreaker right there. It ensures that the box could never be used by a blind person. Some low-vision people might be able to struggle through, but as we’ll see, they strike out with the 8000, too.

The 8000’s remote control makes things worse, since the too-tight clustering of buttons makes them hard to distinguish by touch and location.

What we need

An interface that works for blind and low-vision people. That will probably mean speech output (and possibly input), plus a redesigned information architecture, and new typefaces.

Fonts

Screenfonts for captioning, subtitling, and PVRs are, in broad terms, a disaster. They’re not custom-designed for their respective media, and they’re not tested. And they’re ugly and there aren’t enough of them.

In the 8000’s case, they’re also ridiculously small.

• If you have low visual acuity, you could still use the PVR, especially with a nice big TV. You could get right up close to the screen and peer at it. You might have to look at one quadrant at a time. It’s slow, inconvenient, and kludgy, but possible.
• If you had a small telescope, you could scan even very small fonts adequately well. Perhaps some people would be able to do that. But why should they have to? You’ve got a whole screenful of space to use, yet the PVR displays very small, tightly-spaced sansserif fonts in widely-displaced regions. The 8000 wastes an enormous amount of space. It acts like a 1980s letter-quality printer confronted with an entire page to fill with 50 words: No matter how hard it tries, everything it writes will be small and dispersed.

What we need

Custom-designed, tested screenfonts in selectable sizes.

Colours

Colours are an absolute joke. They’re the worst-designed aspect of both my boxes, the 3200 digital-cable converter and the 8000 PVR. “You can’t possibly be serious” is my response to most of the provided colour combinations, one of which is actually green and hot pink.

Worse, most of the other colour combinations use at least one bright hue, which is a problem two ways:

• Bright pure colours can throb on even quite good NTSC television sets, like mine.
• Quite a few low-vision people simply can’t tolerate staring at bright illumination.

I have barely been able to make do with the cutely-named Campground colour scheme, which is (variously) black and white type on (variously) beige and brown ground.

What we need

Selectable colour combinations, with several of them dark-on-light (as white or yellow on black, brown, or navy blue).

Audio description

The punchline here is that you have to unplug the PVR and reboot it to listen to audio description on SAP. Space-age, isn’t it?

As explained previously, the Explorer 3200’s interface to turn on Second Audio Program was simply fabulous. You used the same sequence of three keys on the remote to turn it on or off; those keys looked and felt different and were centred around the thumb’s basic location, the Select key; you didn’t have to be able to see to make it work; and nothing went wrong if you tried it on an all-digital station with no SAP. You just zipped your thumb in a circle and hit three keys. It was great.

Whatever could go wrong with that?

Well, first of all, with the 8000’s remote they screwed up the capacity for eyes-free usage. The proprioceptive cues are simply destroyed – yes, all because the Settings key is a different shape in a different place. The method to turn SAP on or off is unchanged, so if you can find the keys to press, it works – if you unplug the power and let the PVR reboot.

Yes, friends, you cannot turn SAP on and off at will. The audio stream simply doesn’t change. If you want to be sure you can turn SAP on, unplug the PVR, let it sit, plug it back in again, and let it reboot. You must cold-reboot the PVR to get SAP to work. I kid you not.

Here are excerpts from my notes:

• Cannot get any SAP to play, unless SAP and main audio happen to be identical in all cases, which I doubt.
• The only SAP I could ever get was on Newsworld. Just now on Simpsons, I checked the VCR feed. DX. No DX on main feed until I deselected and reselected SAP.
• Cannot get SAP going on Simpsons, Newsworld, or anything.
• Required complete cold boot (impatiently, I did it twice). Silent audio → Disable SAP (main audio) → Enable SAP (DX).
• Had to unplug power to get SAP to work. Then extreme delay in responding to keypresses (which were buffered). I think it might have started up in SAP, having buffered pre-reboot keystrokes, but I can’t prove that.
• Yet again had to unplug to get SAP.

For an unspecified time after a cold reboot, the Settings key continues to work: You can keep switching back and forth between SAP and main audio. But at an unspecified later time, the PVR seizes on main audio and won’t let go.

Because rebooting the machine sits outside any rational conception of the normal range of operations, I judge the Explorer 8000 incapable of transmitting SAP audio. Essentially, if you have to put a new battery in your car every day just to drive to the office, does your car actually “work”? Not by any practical definition.

What we need

Control over SAP audio that’s as reliable and easy as the Explorer 3200’s interface.

Recording SAP

One bit of good news? If you manage to get actual SAP set up and running and schedule a recording, you do in fact record the show with SAP audio. Hallelujah!

However: You should be given the option to save both main and SAP audio with every program that has both. You could then select, via an accessible interface, which one you wanted to listen to upon playback. What’s wrong with recording SAP all the time?

1. You could get bored of the descriptions on a show or movie you intend to watch more than once.
2. You might not be the only person in the house; not everyone else might need to listen to descriptions all the time.
3. SAP stays on indefinitely once you turn it on. (I really mean “indefinitely”: You cannot tell just how long.) This means all your shows from that point indefinitely forward will be recorded with SAP audio. You will thus record:

   On a digital channel

   normal stereo sound

   On an analogue channel

   • in the best case, monaural sound (as on a station that duplicates main audio on SAP when there’s no description playing, or does so at all times)
   • silence (for stations with silence on SAP when no description plays; I have at least one such station)
   • some other service, like a radio station or VoicePrint (carried some or all of the time on certain stations’ SAP channels, e.g., VoicePrint on Newsworld, which Canadian subscribers pay for whether they like it or not)

What we need

An option to record both main and SAP audio, either of which could be selected during playback.

So let’s sum up

• Blind people can’t use the all-visual interface – period.
• Appalling colours and too-small, uncustomized fonts mean low-vision people must strain to use the interface. Many of them won’t be able to use it at all.
• You can record a show in SAP, but you’ll end up recording every show with SAP until you turn it off (or the Explorer turns it off unbidden).
• You can’t turn audio description on and off with any reliability.