Posted by GaryP on 11/05/05 20:58

After two and a half weeks with the new DMR-EH50 firmware I have mostly good
news to report. I've had no incidents where the timer failed to record when
it should - both by selecting a show off of TVGOS and using the manual
timer. I power cycled the system once after TVGOS was fully populated and
also did a factory reset (channel up and down simultaneously) and the timer
continued to work. Previously I saw problems the first couple days I had
the unit, and after having to unplug it briefly after it was working a few
weeks without a problem, which is why I did these tests.



Unfortunately, I did have the TVGOS portion of the system freeze up entirely
overnight once where I was unable to access any of the listing, schedule, or
other screens. Pressing any of the buttons to access these screens from the
remote yielded nothing, and the scheduled recordings failed to start the
next day as well. The Panasonic non-TVGOS menus continued to work (pressing
Functions), but I finally had to power cycle the system and set up TVGOS
again to get it all working. I've never had this problem before the
firmware upgrade and it only happened once last week, so it was either a
fluke or it's possible that this new firmware introduced a new bug. Prior
to this one lock up, it took about three days for TVGOS to present me with
the screen to select the channel line up in my area (we have two cable
systems), where normally I get this prompt within a day. I don't know if
this had anything to do with this, but given the things I've read where
Gemstar is trying to fix the issues the E85H owners are going through with
the U99 errors, there are enough changes going on right now to where it's
going to be difficult to conclude anything without more time.



After reading issues with the E85H, I conclude that Panasonic has a poor
design depending so much on TVGOS and Gemstar. They seem too vulnerable to
mistakes and problems in the data feed from Gemstar. One of the reasons I
choose to go with a standalone unit over either a Tivo or Replay unit was
the thought that the functionality of the unit couldn't be changed - no one
could add or remove functionality - without me choosing whether or not to
upgrade the unit, unlike some incidents that have occurred with Tivo
recently. Because of this tight integration with Gemstar, it seems
Panasonic and possibly other vendors have put them in a position to create
lots of havoc for all of us owners.



I'll try and report back anything else significant with the EH50 firmware
upgrade I received, but other than the one incident, it seems to be working
better.

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