Shaw HD

[Delphinus]

Are customers obligated to use Shaw's PVR if you go HD? I seem to remember hearing that early-gen HD tuners had their IEEE-1394 ports disabled so you couldn't use say your own PVR.

[Ryan_Lap]

I believe you can go HD Receiver or HD PVR Receiver.

[StirCrazy]

I have had shaw HD for about 2 comming on 3 years now.. not a problem ever. I did recently upgrade for the 10 bucks a month for the extra HD channels so now I get them all.

Steve

[bullit67]

Well at least I am not the only one getting the audio drop outs about 1/2 second blips in the audio once in a while it is worse. I recently switched from Bell as the trees on my neighbors property have got too big and they were blocking my Sat signal for my HD dish the standard def dish was ok as long as it didnt rain or get windy. The Picture quality is MUCh better with Shaw I thought my TV was dieing untill I got my new Shaw hook up it is like a new set again. the customer service is by far the best I have ever delt with.

[fishguyxd]

We have the hd pvr box and so far so good you can just get the reciever without the pvr but the pvr works nicly big difference with hd channels but you can still watch other channels (no hd). you can buy the shaw reciever from future or best buy etc.
and if you don't like it at least you can return it. Where as if you get it from shaw's office you can not return is my understanding. We like it. Now if I can only get the dam remote from the wife.

[DanG]

For a while they were selling an HDPVR box made by Pace and not the motorola ones. I've got the Pace one. It's got an eSATA port on the back and I have a 1TB drive set up off that port and that gives me roughly 175 hours of recording. Plus the box is a dual hdtv tuner, so I can watch HD and record HD at the same time.
If you can find one of those boxes, get it.

[Delphinus]

I think they still do sell it in smaller markets (like if you lived in Canmore instead of Calgary). That's the thing that annoys me about Shaw's PVR offerings. I'd happy with the off the shelf offerings so long as it had expandability on drive space. The Motorola ones don't, the Pace ones do. What I've been told is that eventually there will be something better offered for the bigger markets.. that's great but in the meantime I wonder if there's a way to use my current PVR on the HD tuner. I think I heard the firewire output on the tuner itself is disabled (thus making a blended solution either really difficult or outright not possible), is that true?

[Pescador]

Try the firewire Tony, two of mine work and one doesn't. I had one running to a media PC to record. There was an emulation program for the PC to load I'll have to check what it was.