Early this year I got an HD TV since the prices were getting more reasonable. I upgraded my cable service with BrightHouse to digital cable. They brought me the new Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, which was the generation before the one listed in the title. That DVR did a great job with HD channels but had lots of trouble with older analog channels. The picture would pixilate and I would reboot and it would be OK for a while until finally recordings of analog channels would record sound and the picture would be blank. I think I went through three DVR's before I got one that worked reasonably well. A couple of weeks ago the DVR would freeze any time I was trying to watch something while it was recording, so I took it in to the Birmingham office of BrightHouse cable for a replacement, but instead of getting another of the same, Scientific Atlanta had come out with a completely new model with lots of wonderful new features and a new remote the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HDC. Oh My how wonderful technology is!
In creating all the wonderful new features Scientific Atlanta lost the feature that allowed me to adjust the volume of my TV without changing to TV mode on its remote. Oh that's really nice.
And as for the software on the 8300HDC we lost the ability for series recording to record only the 6 PM edition of Hardball. With the old DVR I could specify the date and time I wanted a program recorded. Now if I want to record the series of a repeating show like Hardball it records it every time it comes on during the day. The default number of episodes it will save is 7 and the minimum is 3. Oh and by the way the program guide does not specify which editions of Hardball are new and which are repeats, so if I set the series manager to record only new programs nothing is recorded. If I do not want the disk loaded up with repeat recordings I have to manually set the recorder to record the new edition of Hardball each day and erase it after watching.
Oh and the remote lost the button to advance the program guide by one day, which makes it harder to locate repeating programs. And while on the remote, the button that moves left, right, up or down has to be mashed very carefully or you will move in two directions at the same time. I often find when I am in the guide trying to advance I will have inadvertently changed the channel, and when I get to the desired date and time I then have to move back to the channel I was searching. NOW THOSE ARE REALLY NICE NEW FEATURE THAT SCIENTIFIC ATLANTA PROVIDED WITH THE 8300HDC!
Oh did I mention that I am on my second 8300HDC. I have found that playback while it is recording there are hiccups in the picture and spaces of silence. They always occur during the program never during commercial breaks. The 8300HDC I have now recorded half of Torchwood Saturday night and then recorded nothing else until I rebooted it. After rebooting it recorded two programs before it ceased recording scheduled programs. I am going to take it in today and see if they will give me another.
I have a shiny new HDC-8300. I believe it is defective. On 720p programming only, the picture will flash on and off in a most annoying manner (although the sound remains stable). This does NOT affect 1080i or 420i programming, only 720p.
Also, on recorded material of any kind, the SOUND will dropout periodically.
When I follow Bright House's instructions to cold reboot the device, more often than not it will lose my "registration" and permit no programming until I perform a SECOND reboot. This is quite burdensome since each reboot takes about eight minutes.
I believe that these may be symptoms of a defective hard drive.
I'm already calling to swap out my 8300HDC within 24 hrs of getting the unit. Most procedures on 8300HDC are more tediousthan 8300HD, I've had to power cycle the unit to unfreeze controls on remote and set top. I can't get it to save show/series recording requests. New doesn't always mean improved.
I called my cable provider, Bright House Networks, back after I wrote my previous submission on December 7. They swapped out the 8300HDC with an older 8300HD.
The first thing I noticed was the enormously more pleasant formatting on the channel listings. On the newer HDC it was very crude and the four-digit channel listings had numerous "overstrikes," as the font was too large for the column width in the channel listings.
The second thing I noticed was the GREATLY faster speed of bootup. Where the HDC took around nine minutes, the HD only takes somewhere between one and two.
I still occasionally have one of the two problems I had before with the HDC but MUCH less frequently -- maybe once every three days with the HD rather than four times a day with the HDC -- but the reboot required to clear it takes so much less time that it is hardly a nuisance at all.
And I no longer get the sound dropouts on recorded material at all.
I have a problem on 1080 programming with the 8300HDC box. Sometimes the sound refuses to work on the hi-def channels. Sometimes the box just refuses to boot up and cycles a couple times then gives me a message it is booting. Are there fixes for the loss of the sound?