2 of my 3 8300HDs received a major new firmware upgrade yesterday (the 3rd was purchased vs rented). The new firmware redesigns the user interface and adds some minor new features like an improved progress bar, bookmarks, and so forth.

On my primary unit, the first time I tried to rewind live TV it gave me a black screen. It let me change channels, and when I tried to rewind again it mostly locked up on a black screen. So I rebooted it.

All seemed to be going fairly well. I was watching old recorded shows, and new shows were set to be recorded. The messages kept popping up before recordings. However, 10 minutes into yesterday's The Mentalist (12 minutes after the pop-up notice appeared that it would be recording) I tried to play it from the recording list and got only the PVR channel, but no show. Looking at the recording list, it shows as 1 hour, but not highlighted as if it were recording. The EPG also doesn't have the show highlighted, and tuning the channel doesn't show a record dot. Another show recorded at 8PM plays back fine, so I have no idea what happened (or is happening).

Also, I only got 13 minutes of Fringe in the 9PM hour, however WUTV has been causing issues like that (or the infamous split recordings) for about 3 weeks now... so that might not be upgrade related.

I've set Mentalist to record again on the west coast feed. Tonight I checked and... it didn't record it. From reports, I'm assuming it's a problem with my eSATA drive.

I have a Western Digital "My DVR Expander" 500gb. It was sold specifically for use with DVRs such as the 8300HD. And for as long as I've owned it (25 months) it has been flawless.

Tonight, I had scheduled a total of 5 recordings.

7:30 - Wheel of Fortune on CBC - Recorded
8:00 - Medium on CBS - Recorded (I think)
9:00 - CSI NY on CBS - failed at 5 minutes into recording
9:00 - Good Guys Fox - failed at 25 minutes, says "ended early program unavailable" in description
10:00 - Blue Bloods CBS - failed entirely
10:02 - tried to manually start recording Blue Bloods, failed without any error.

At this instant none of my HDD recording functions are working - I can't play *anything* back, live record isn't working at all, but it's still showing me the program list.

I rebooted (2nd time since upgrade) earlier in the evening, before Wheel of Fortune recorded, just to ensure there wouldn't be issues.

At this point Rogers has replaced my ugly but reliable DVR with a pretty but utterly useless one.