The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 PVR (Explorer from now on) is the absolute worst piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. Nothing else I have ever owned causes me to say out loud about once a week, “what a piece of _____” (the blank word varying depending on how exasperated I am).
I owned a series 1 Tivo for 3 and a half years before moving to Canada where the service is not offered. The Tivo isn’t perfect but it’s very well designed and pretty reliable. I can only guess that Scientific Atlantic required their designers to not look at the Tivo (or Replay) for fear of patent or copyright infringement because if they had seen the Tivo interface they would not have made so many dumb decisions for the Explorer. Even so, the designer should be fired and Rogers Cable (the provider of this mess) should drop this set top box immediately in favour of almost anything else.
Harware unreliability: I think my Tivo crashed twice in 3.5 years. The Explorer crashes (i.e. requires a hard boot) about once a month. I include in this total the many times when my remote control isn’t “seen” (i.e. the Explorer is sending a signal to the tv and the controls on the box work but the controls on the remote don’t until the Explorer is rebooted. Since this only happens when at least one recording is being made, it means that I lose about 5 minutes of the program(s) during the reboot).
For several weeks (and they never called me to tell me when it was fixed so I don’t know the exact duration) all recorded programs could not be watched while another program was being recorded. This would cause the Explorer to freeze.
For the past week fast forward and reverse have been broken on the premium movie channels. It still works fine on the extended basic cable channels.
Interface shortcomings:
Time shifting when a program is being recorded: This is my biggest complaint. How you watch a recorded show varies depending on whether the recording is completely finished or not. If the recording is totally finished then as you would expect, replay begins at the beginning of the show and progresses to the end. However, if the show is still on you from the recorded shows list you will instead be thrown to the live point in the show. To watch it from the beginning you then have to fast reverse back to the beginning. Not so terrible and I’ve learned that to watch an hour show without commercials I can start around 15 minutes into the show and then I will catch up at about the point the show will end. However, the worst, most frustrating misfeature is that if you have to pause for any reason during the playback and the show ends in real time before you have caught up it then throws you out of the playback as the program magically changes from one state to another. You have to then restart playback from the beginning and fast forward to the point where you were tossed out. When I get a phonecall or something that takes me away from the program for a few minutes there is nothing more frustrating than have to do this fast forward for just a few seconds of program (you never know, of course, how much time you have missed). It is even worse for long programs (e.g., sports events, award shows, or movies) where you have to spend a lot of time forwarding and/or reversing.
Replay “channel”: a separate channel (996) is arbitrarily used to replay recorded shows. This means that when you are finished watching the recording the channel you were on before is gone and you always have to change channels (not a trivial task in a world of so many channels).
Also, if you don’t finish watching the recorded program it will still be on that playback channel. If you go back to the playback you can continue from where you left off. However, if you play back a different program it uses the same pseudo channel and your progress in the previous show is lost. Time for more fast forwarding.
There are no season passes or wishlists. To record a show on an ongoing basis you select it in the program guide and select one time or continuous. You then get a choice of recording in the same time slot or all times on the same channel. There is no manual record (like a VCR) so you can set your own times although you can pad the times from the listing the show. What this means is that if the show isn’t in the guide you can’t record it in the future. Since the guide only goes for 1 week (Tivo goes for 2) that means you are out of luck if you are going away for more than a week and know all the details of the show you want to record.
Now this is among the worst bit of interface design I’ve ever seen: the way repeated recordings appear to work is by an exact match of the characters in the title in the guide. Recently, the guide has been varying the description of some shows so that, for example, some weeks it will read “Six Feet Under” and sometimes it is “Six Feet Under [LTBX]“. The “[LTBX]” seems to be significant because if you set the Explorer to record one of these descriptions one week it will NOT record the show with the “different” description the next. It’s bad enough that the match used is so fragile that it is based on a strict character match instead of the name of the show. It’s worse because the same company is providing the guides as the PVR and isn’t taking the limitations of the PVR into account when publishing the program guide.
There are also many small irritants:
- you can’t remove channels that you don’t received from the guide
- when you finish a fast forward there is no bounce back like the Tivo has so you always end up too far forward in the program
- very limited descriptions of programs in the guide
- there is no way to navigate quickly through a recorded show (Tivo has tick marks you can jump to)
- the on/off button is meaningless. The only thing this button does is enable/disable the signal to the tv. Recordings will still take place so the cpu must still be working. I do not hear the disk spin down so I doubt that any energy savings is taking place. What the Explorer needs is a reset button so that you don’t have to pull the plug to do a reboot.
Finally, here are things done well with the Explorer:
- 2 tuners so that you can record 2 shows at the same time
- built in Picture in Picture
