PVR odds ’n’ ends
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 plus a pause, which it views as 1 + Select
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.