Sony DHG-HDD250/500: Official Thread - Page 868

I'm not just a TVGOS weirdo, but I do ham as well.

2m and 440 are right next to the two major public safety and commercial use bands...here in NYC, every single frequency is used by someone. Either ham band would be gratefully and greedily eaten by public safety/commercial interests if they could. Hams lost part of the 220 mhz band to UPS, infamously, a few years ago. Ham frequencies are allocated on an international basis, so are generally set aside for hobbyists and experimenters. The usual analogy is "like a public park". I agree that in todays' age of satellites, no one wants HF (translated: Everything below VHF-lo channel two), but if they could get 440 and 144 mhz, they'd be all over it.

Antennas are an issue, as we know from endless OTA threads. People don't want them. The iphone has no antenna you can see, even though a typical smartphone has two/three antennnas...phone system, wifi, bluetooth. Wifi antennas ? Hidden. Think nine foot CB radio whip, and that's why no one wants the lower frequencies. Lower frequencies also skip off the ionosphere in varying ways and this is anathema to any kind of cellular system. When was the last time you saw even an FM radio antenna on a car ? They are hidden away in the rear glass now...

OTA won't die-It will live on, like shortwave broadcast did, until a point is reached that your audience can get the content easier...and in this case, a computer hooked to the net (which you have anyway) is WAY easier than a long wire and radio. Shortwave died about 15 years after the connected home computer became a reality. TV will last longer, as it is not "niche". 20 years from now, there will still be OTA, and it will still be ATSC. They will, however, be in a narrow band of frequencies-the day of assigning half the spectrum to "TV" and letting licensees sit on channels is way over, no matter how it ends.
Edited by speedlaw - 12/9/12 at 6:40am

speedlaw;
Note I did state 2 meter and below. There already is/was a proposal to take away 440 last year. I don't know what happened to that.
In major cities, I can see the 2 meter band being of interest, but I wonder if the noise & intermod levels would reduce it's usefulness?

+1
Years ago it was K3ZAB. Now retired, I have time to get my license back.

Letting broadcast TV die would be like letting GM fail. [joke]

I have, and yes, they're sucking it down pretty bad. However, that's not primarily due to anything related to the DHG DVRs, and from the serial number comparisons I've seen in this thread, there might be a total of a few thousand of these units in circulation. Sony's quick ending of the line made it clear they're not interested in the US DVR market (understandable, IMO). So, from their perspective, why would they care about a few thousand (at maximum) users with 7-year-old DVRs? Answer: They won't. And as I've said before, this isn't a defect, and all these units are way out of warranty coverage. The US government won't care either. Any customer whose choice to buy Sony gear or not is based on whether or not Sony continues to support a 7-year-old DVR (which hasn't seen a code update in nearing 4 years now) probably wasn't going to buy Sony gear anyway.

I disagree. I'm in the market for new electronics, and Sony definitely would have been a consideration. Call it sour grapes or just plain spite, but I will NOT be buying Sony because of this fiasco. The initial poor design (no manual clock) and the later lack of support (Sony willing to let their gear die) has me thinking that this is not a company that I am willing to support. It may be a drop in the bucket, but word gets around and as we all know...image is everything.

Which would prefer: sour grapes or plain spite?

Lack of manual clock: yes, stupid and careless.

Lack of support: if not for the .21 update, dozens of DHG units would have hit eBay in '09.

Ditto. And I have a very long memory.

So I am guessing that Rovi has not answered our complaints? Besides the canned response. It seems that they do not care and not many here went to the Rovi page to complain. 20 people is not enough. 100's maybe is needed .

Friday night when I turned on my DHG-HDD250 I got no signal on any digital channels. Looks like analog cable channels are still there. I am going to shelf it until if ever there is going to be a fix. I am in the process of dumping everything I own with Sony on the nameplate. Saturday I traded my PS3 I used for Netfix for a decent desktop computer to set up as a media center. I already use a Silicon Dust tuner on my network but am going to dig out a couple of my old ATI tuner cards and see if I can remember what they do.

Front panel reset have no effect?

Just a quick note from a past Tivo hater.
Well, about a month ago, I retired both my Sony DHGs, ate lots of crow and bought 2 Tivo Premiere 4s. After using them for a while now both my wife and I wish we had made the change a long time ago. Both units work flawlessly with the Comcast cablecard. The firmware updates and cable channel additions and subtractions work in the background with message notifications from Tivo. Of course having 4 receivers is nice and the price was similar to what I paid for the Sonys. The season pass and wishlist options are very nice features. The only CON is, to me, an unconfirmed slight degrade in picture quality. My wife says the PQ looks the same.

Thanks
James

Trust your wife.. she's a good woman.

I think some other factors will also help speed the end of OTA TV. The cost of maintaining the transmitter and tower, and the biggest cost is the electric power that is consumed for the transmission of the signal. Also there will be no need to comply with FCC regulations if they no longer use the public air waves. The cable company that Joe Kustra and I belong to has been receiving our broadcast signals by fiber for about a decade now. A few years ago WNEPs tower collapsed from ice and took out all the tv signals in the Wilkes Barre market. The other cable companies and the two sat operators, got the tv signals from my cable company for a number of months until they got some temporary measures in place at the antenna farm.

I agree with you about the OTA encryption as it would not make very much economic sense for the broadcaster to set up such a system especially in the rural areas. I was looking at what Ion broadcasting is doing and they seem to think that there is this big market of hispanics that are going to use this as most of the channels are spanish. Most of the hispanics I know have a satellite or cable subscription. I do not know of any that are using an antenna in my area. I do see the cable providers coming out ahead if we do move to a pay per view system that is streamed over an internet connection. A lot of the upgrades my cable sytem is doing now is mostly internet related. In 2016 we will see if Disneys gamble with Netflix will pay off or flop. If they succeed then it is an easy guess that the rest will follow. This is another reason to consider the Tivo because they have some streaming services included so the unit is somewhat future proof.

I do not think broadcast tv wil die but its method of transmission will. The network call letters will still be used but they will be only available through cable/sat subscriptions and possibley through pay per view streaming.

I boxed up the DHG over the weekend as my division just went through the first phase of the analog shutdown and they still retained the four digit sub channels for the in the clear digital channels. The 30 new HD channels they added all have signle digit sub channel numbers. The second phase will probably be after the new year. This will leave only the broadcast channels in analog and I will get the remaining 15 or so HD channels and DOCSIS 3.0 internet. I reported the channel lineup changes to both Rovi and Tribune last wednesday, and Tribune had it done the next day. I still did not recieve a response from Rovi.

The reason I boxed up the DHG is I am not really into to manual recordings as the only two shows I recorded on it were The Good Wife and NCIS. Since the Good wife never starts on time because of football I end up watching it live. Also since the guide is going to end in April, if we make it that far, I see no point in renting a cable card for only four months at the most. I am currently trying to save up for at least one Tivo with the 4 tuners. I have to admit that I am going to have a hard time letting TVGOS go as I have been using it since 1997-1998.

Thanks for the info. I'll take a run over my mother's place and check out the new lineup.

Speaking of the internet feeds, I can receive KYW's AM newsfeed on my AVR. There are about 10k radio stations already sending content this way. Some even tried DD 5.1, but I haven't found any active ones recently. TV shows have been dipping their toes in the stream (pun) for a while.

I just received a personal reply from someone at Rovi about updting the channel lineups. They are only updating the lineups for the internet connected guides and since no internet connected guides have cablecards they have eliminated those lineups from their database. If any of the remaining inserters malfunction before their prescribed shutdown dates, they will not be fixed as there is nobody there to fix them and nobody is working on the TVGOS data anymore. Also it appears that this was a spur of the moment decision because I was told by my contact to send in the new channel lineup for my system as soon as I got it. This was in the third week of October. It also appears that the Canadians are losing guide service also as it states it in an internal document that my cable company received from Rovi. It appears that a lot of people have lost their jobs because of this. A sad end to a once fine TV Guide.

She is! Another recent data point is the fact that I could not pass the drivers license eye test without wearing my glasses........that I usually never wear because there's nothing wrong with my eyes. :-)

Thanks
James

I have had experience with several competing HD DVR recording products. In the interest of helping anyone else out there looking for options, I thought I'd share my experience.

I've had my Sony DHG 250 since 2005. I don't remember what it cost, but it was new full retail and probably $600-$700. It was my first hard drive based HD DVR, and it rocked. I had previous experience with a TiVo Series 2 SD, and by comparison, the TiVo had a more user friendly experience, but the Sony DHG was high def and that more than made up for it. San Diego has been one of the more stable TVGOS markets this whole time, so for the most part I've had a good run with the Sony.
Video sources: 4.5 stars – supports NTSC (still available on many cable feeds), ATSC OTA, clear QAM over cable, and (with CableCARD) encrypted QAM over cable, all with full guide, but does not support switched digital video at all, ever
Futureproofing: 1.5 stars – user can't replace hard drive, dependent on external source for everything; user can replace fans and can recover some kind of a clock by replaying VCR recordings of analog TVGOS information, but can never recover a usable guide or truly accurate clock this way
Expandability: 1 star – basically can't add anything
Usability: 4 stars – on-screen guide makes it easy to schedule recordings, nice programmable skip-forward and skip-backward buttons; but has limited ability to find programs that move or have special air times
Quirkiness: 3 stars – 26,000 posts in this thread, 'nuff said. When it works, great, but expect quirks.
Cost: $600-$700 one time purchase price for a 7 year lifetime, no complaints!

Later I bought a TiVo HD used on Amazon. This is the Series 3 variety, not the new Premiere. The seller had been buying their TiVo service monthly, so it came without a lifetime subscription and I had to add that. I love it. Really, I can't recommend it highly enough. For the “set it and forget it” crowd, nothing beats the TiVo!
Video sources: 4 stars – supports NTSC (but has a known bug with this), ATSC OTA with full guide, clear QAM over cable with no guide, and (with CableCARD) clear/encrypted QAM over cable with full guide; switched digital video supported with tuning adapter
Futureproofing: 2 stars – user can replace hard drive and fans, the two most likely points of failure, but you are dependent on TiVo supplying clock and guide
Expandability: 4 stars – user can self-upgrade to ~2TB internal, with external options available; also can offload recordings to PC over the network
Usability: 5 stars – really the best user experience of any devices I've tried; setup is mindless; can easily find programs in any timeslot, record only new programs or also reruns, avoids recording duplicates; Season Pass rocks
Quirkiness: 5 stars – not quirky at all; I have never worried about TiVo missing a recording
Cost: (my case, YMMV) $70 for used TiVo HD, $120 for 1TB hard drive replaced immediately upon receipt, $399 for lifetime guide subscription = $590... lifetime unknown but at least several years so far

I also tried a DTVPal DVR. Part of the motivation for this was to experiment with digital to analog TVGOS conversion around the time of the digital change over in 2009. As luck would have it, San Diego never had analog TVGOS problems, and this device was never useful for that purpose. As a DVR, it sucks. The clock was horribly unreliable (even with the F208 firmware, I believe the latest). I ended up babysitting it every night to get the right stuff recorded, and around the DST clock change dates, it is inexcusably bad.
Video sources: 1 star – only ATSC OTA
Futureproofing: 3 stars – user can replace hard drive and fans, and in the event of loss of both TVGOS and PSIP data, user can set the clock and operate in VCR mode
Expandability: 2 stars – user can self-upgrade to 1TB internal, but cannot offload recordings
Usability: 2 stars – clumsy guide, difficult clock, actually requires more babysitting than the Sony DHG
Quirkiness: 1 star – I never trusted this thing and within about a couple months, turned it off and there it sits
Cost: $300 one time purchase price for a 2 month lifetime; probably still usable but I gave up

My primary HD DVR for ~5 years now has been an HTPC. I use two HD HomeRuns (4 simultaneous recordings) and SnapStream's BeyondTV 4. The HDHR's by themselves are not really a complete product, and you need something like Windows Media Center, or BeyondTV, or SageTV, or a Linux MythTV setup to really make the whole thing work. With BTV, I get the full HD DVR experience, including programmable jump-forward and skip-backward times, a very good guide, infrared remote (including Harmony support already in their database), and all of the features that make the TiVo so much better than the other competition. This is my favorite HD DVR device, but it's not for everyone. It falls a little short of the “set it and forget it” experience that TiVo has. But when it's working, which is 99% of the time, it's on par with TiVo. Setup is painful, but once it is setup, this easily competes with the best DVR's out there.
Video sources: 2 stars – ATSC OTA with full guide or clear QAM over cable with full guide; no CableCARD or switched digital video support
Futureproofing: 5 stars – user has complete control of hard drives, sizes, external USB hard drives, adding additional tuners, replacing any components that fail; recordings are in industry standard raw MPEG-2 TS format and playable on many other software and hardware players (may I recommend the Diamond HD Media Wonder player, since it is the only (??) player that supports 30 second jump-forward and 10 second skip-backward feature); but depends on SnapStream to continue supplying guide as long as using BeyondTV; user can install other PVR software (eg, Mythbuntu) at little or no additional cost and end dependence on SnapStream; clock is just the PC's clock which is always user-settable and worst-case is usable in VCR mode where recordings are named by the user
Expandability: 5 stars – I have added an additional HD HomeRun (2 more tuners) and several terabytes of external hard drive space since this HTPC was originally setup, and can add unlimited more
Usability: 4 stars – with infrared remote, provides an excellent experience in front of the TV; web browser based configuration of recordings, etc, makes management from your main computer (not the TV) a breeze; -1 star because the occasional problem can take hours to fix with your nerd hat on
Quirkiness: 4 stars – works 99% of the time, but it does fail and require some nerd attention
Cost: $450 for original HTPC, $130 for one HDHR, $70 for BTV license = $650 originally. Since then, I have transplanted it into a new case ($80), replaced the power supply ($60), added one more HDHR ($130) and 3TB of USB hard drive space (~$300), but those add-ons are optional. Lifetime so far is 4+ years and I see no reason it will go out of service until the US changes their TV standards again. Small incremental costs will be incurred to upgrade/replace hardware as it fails, but in no case should I have to replace everything all at once.

Hope that helps anyone!
Edited by pf2008 - 12/11/12 at 8:36pm

Very nice. One correction. I have replaced fans in three of my four DHG units. Parts on eBay can be found, just not the OEM fan. Other fan was just cleaned. This gave me a slight noise reduction and 2 to 5 degree HDD temp drop.

How to watch TVGOS die on your Sony DHG

I ran the following test on a spare DHG-HDD250. It has .21 firmware and a legacy analog cable feed.

On 11/30 I gave power to the unit and by 12/2 it had full 100% listings. On 12/2 I removed the rf connection to kill the TVGOS and video feed. For the next two days I used the 753... diags to monitor what was happening. Except for the date, nothing moved. I lost listings for day 8, then day 7 as expected. The unit still was working fine. I made one recording from the guide.

On or shortly after day 3 the host channel was blank, the host ID was 0x0 the VBI state went to 03 and the SUFlags went to 0x0. The last DL attempt was 12/5. At this time the front panel would show the channel number but not the channel call letters or network. My host is vsb 12, QVC.

On 12/10 the listings were all gone. The clock lost time at about 1 second per day. My normal time is six seconds slow, now it was perfect. The internal clock still had [3] after it. I then removed power to simulate a power failure.

After restoring power the lineup remained. The previously made recording was ??? on everything except channel. The front panel clock and internal clock were 1 hour 40 minutes slow. The red record button would not function, but manual recordings would work if I entered them via the guide button. The internal clock now had [2] next to it.

The date was accurate within the time setting limits. Midnight is still midnight. Several power cycles changed the time but not the date since I did these about noon. The time was always different.

So unless you are like me and check day 8 every morning, your first indication of TVGOS loss should be lack of call letters. If you don't reset the unit, lose power and use manual recording the unit will still work. Your clock may drift. I never lost my clock set channel. After connecting the rf, the clock set in about 30 seconds. For now, Rovi is maintaining their listings but not lineup changes (as posted by Jed1). On the internet, tvguide.com has 15 days of data. It will be sad when all this stuff goes away, but plan for it unless we get a manual clock set or you can work with the tool to make manual recordings easier. I have a TiVo that will replace two DHG units and will get a new TiVo next year after I see how the future plays out. Too many variables to be more specific.
Edited by JoeKustra - 12/11/12 at 2:22pm

Re: "How to watch TVGOS die on your Sony DHG". Appreciated. Very interesting.

I am also waiting to see what my options will be when TVGOS is gone here in SE Michigan.

Damn, Joe... That was just downright depressing.

Yeah, that's reasonable. I mentioned fans regarding other options, but glossed over them for the DHG. Although to be fair, how many DHG users are worried about their fans failing? How many are worried about TVGOS ending? Still, I'll go up my rating of DHG's futureproofing based on replaceable fans and VCR-based recovery of a "pseudo clock". Probably only a half-star bump, though, because the fans are minor in most peoples minds, and VCR recovery of an incorrect clock with no usable guide is not much of a DVR.

Also, I've been thinking that I maybe underrated the futureproofing of the HTPC solution because of the dependence on SnapStream providing a guide. While BeyondTV (mostly) requires SnapStream to provide a guide and will be VCR-style recording (with names on the recordings) without it, the reality is that with little or no additional cost I could install other PVR software on the existing HTPC hardware and have full guide-based recording functionality again. For example, Mythbuntu uses SchedulesDirect, and would be easy to install, free and work with all my existing hardware (including the infrared Firefly mini remote I got with the BeyondTV purchase).

(Updating earlier post momentarily.)

I can update the time via VHS tape. It does, quickly with legacy analog data, but also changes the date. That makes it less than ideal.

As for the fan, some work was done in that area due to the wide range of HDD temperatures. The fan inside the DHG pulls cool air in from the right bottom and right rear, then across the HDD, then out the left rear (only) while pushing it over the power supply.
Edited by JoeKustra - 12/12/12 at 10:23am

The difference might be this. The HDD passed whatever format was recorded, seamlessly, using the TV to any format changes (ie convert from 480, 720 or 1080 to 1080p screen format). TiVo appears to be unhappy if you try to use it in "variable" mode. Mine would seize up occasionally and need a restart. It is very possible the tivo does a worse job changing scale than your TV would. This has always been a bit of an trial and error thing. I've also seen times where doing the conversion outside the TV looks better. I left my TiVo locked in 1080i out and its been fine ever since. Also, lots of cable TV signals ARE crap if you are comparing to an OTA experience. My OTA vs Cable signals are always a hair better OTA-no extra cable co compression. I recall watching a college game once (very minor college) where the signal was HD but so compressed that any fast pan or sweep would just be blocks.

Thanks Speedlaw

James

Funeral For A Friend

Yesterday I gathered the family to the livingroom. Well the kids moved out years ago so it was the wife and the dog. Rovi and Sony had left me with little choice. Our sony dhg's have been on life support for so long but alas it was time to pull the plug.At first I disconnected the antenna.Then the HDMI, and last pulled the power cord.Without a sound the light on the front pannel went out.Days before I had recieved the Tivo . At this point I'm not jumping up and down and waving the Tivo flag but Rovi and Sony had left me with little choice.Thanks to all here who had spent so much time and effert to help.

SS-Stingray
Edited by ss-stingray - 1/1/13 at 6:49am

I saw your DHG on eBay. You will find many from this thread on the TiVo thread. Good luck and have fun.

Here's another one who bit the bullet and got a used Tivo Series 3 from Ebay with lifetime subscription. As far as recording goes, it's flawless, no dropped recordings, no need to check EVERY DAY that the weekly recording is still there, no sound drop outs. It is also smart enough not to record the same program more than once. Replacing the original 160GB drive with a 2TB drive gave me 318 hours of HD recording time. Hate the remote but adding the Tivo to my programmable remote was a breeze. An old router set up as an Ethernet bridge takes care of the connectability and also allow me to transfer programs to my PC and watch programs from my PC on the TV. The OTA turner is VERY good.

So you guys gave up on going to Rovi's facebook page to complain about loss of TVGOS?