Anyone out there using a SA 8300 or 3250 able to archive either to
tape or disc.I'm on my second SA 8300(first one died with all the stuff
I wanted to keep) and I know about adding the extra hard drive but
that won't help when the machine dies, and it will.Is there any way of
activating the firewire ports or USB ports?
Are there other machines that will work with Rogers?
How are others recording?

Sil

All you need to know is posted on this thread. It is only 8 pages and describes the issues with recording to PC via FireWire.

See this thread in this forum:

AVS Forum > HDTV > HDTV Recorders
- Recording to PC from a SA 8300HD via Firewire

Vaskill,
I believe that thread is talking about the US version of the SA 8300.
I tried mine and the computer did not recognize the STB.I don't think
the firewire ports are active.I've called Rogers and they tell me they are
not allowed to activate them.

Sil

Hi sil i'm from montreal canada and here we have videotron whit the sara software on the 8300hd pvr and the firewired are active so what roger"s telling you is BS that in canada they can't activate the port, the only restriction so far to be abble to transfert the content is with a mac system ,the firewired driver from microsoft are crap and even vista has the same old driver from xp and you will not be able to capture hd without dropout sd content work but is also not very stable anyway if you have a mac g4 400 mghz and up you can capture hd or sd content no problem but for hd playback you need a fast machine pc or mac the file capture are mpeg 2 ts or m2t so you can play them on any platform