I switched from Analogue Cable TV to Digital Cable TV back in August. I also purchased an Explorer 8000 PVR manufactured by Scientific-Atlanta. I am generally pleased with the Vidéotron services for the illico Digital Cable TV as well as for the Extreme High-Speed Cable Internet.
Today (2003-12-08), there was a scheduled blackout by Hydro-Québec between 09:00 and 16:30. When the electrical power returned, I noticed that I lost all Scheduled Recordings and Recorded Programmes on the Explorer 8000 PVR, including the 3 Nova episodes that I had planned to watch during the holiday period. Since the hard disk on the Explorer 8000 PVR is a permanent memory with magnetic media just like any personal computer, it should not lose the content after a power loss. It must be a firmware/software problem rather than a hardware problem specific to my unit.
I received a letter dated 2003-11-10 stating that Vidéotron had addressed some problems with the Explorer 8000 PVR. Whenever the software is updated, I would like to see a list of bug fixes on the Vidéotron website and also a notification in E-mail. At present, there seems to be no way of knowing which version of software is installed in the Explorer 8000 PVR.
There are still problems with Manual Recording. First of all, a TV programme that I scheduled to be recorded every weekday was recorded OK for a few days but got dropped for some reason after a while. Second, when I cancelled one scheduled programme, another scheduled programme got cancelled as well. Third, once I scheduled a TV programme to be recorded for (Start: 17:55, Stop: 18:00) every day, it was entered correctly for that day. However, the entry mysteriously changed to (Start: 17:00, Stop: 17:05) for the next 2 days. The following day were back to (Start: 17:55, Stop: 18:00).
The Explorer 8000 PVR did not accept my request to record "X-Men" from 20:00 to 22:00, stating that "Schedule Conflict: You cannot schedule 3 recordings at the same time". The other 2 programmes schedules to be recorded were both from 19:00 to 20:00, so "X-Men" was the only one that was to be recorded starting at 20:00.
I noticed that the Guide/Menu shows all TV channels. I would like to see an option to filter out the TV channels that I do not subscribe to so that I can navigate only among the TV programmes that I can watch.
BTW, "Space TV" should read "Space Channel" on your promotional materials.
