The Adventures of Bell Expressvu!

[rage2]

So here I am, holding on the phone for over an hour now. I've talked to 3 different people during this time, kinda bored, so I'll post what's up so far.

Basically, I'm trying to cancel my Bell ExpressVu service because Shaw HD PVR is awesome. Records everything I need to watch in HDTV, no need to go home to catch HD shows! So I have no use for my Bell ExpressVu subscription anymore.

CSR #1 (hold time 10 mins before talking to her) - She can't disconnect my service, spoke with her for 2 mins, and she asked why I'm disconnecting. She transferred me to a hold queue, says it'll take about 10 mins hold time.

40 mins later...

CSR #2 picks up. Asks why I'm disconnecting. I tell him why. This is the funny part. A 10 minute argument ensues...

Me - I'm disconnecting because Shaw released their HDTV PVR and I can record shows now.
CSR - Who told you Bell doesn't have one?
Me - Every Bell employee, CSR I've spoken to.
CSR - Well we have one it's called the 6000
Me - The 6000 doesn't record
CSR - Well Shaw's doesn't record either
Me - Yes it does. I've been doing it for almost 3 weeks now.
CSR - Well that's impossible. Rogers' doesn't have it, and by law Shaw can't have it (??????)
Me - What are you talking about. Do you want me to play back yesterday's showing of Hawaii? I'm not sure if Dolby Digital 5.1 can go through my phone to you OK.
CSR - That's fine, well we have the 5900 PVR.
Me - That's Standard Definition. Not High Definition.
CSR - It's 100% digital high definition.
Me - Trust me, it's not HD.
CSR - Do you plan on coming back?
Me - Maybe, but if you guys are this clueless and arguing with me right now, I really have no confidence in coming back.
CSR - Well, what if I told you we have a HD recorder next month?
Me - I'll tell you that you're lying. I've already got information from high level employees that ExpressVu is dropping the 921, and waiting for the next HD PVR from Echostar because of problems with the 921. That and the price is around $2000cdn.
CSR - I see. Well, you need to notify us 30 days in advance to disconnect.
Me - Well here's my notice.
CSR - Would you prefer vacation disconnect?
Me - What the Fuck??? I'm not going on vacation. I'm with Shaw now. Bell Expressvu is useless to me. I want discoonection now, or 30 days or whatever!
CSR - OK, I can't disconnect you. Let me put you on hold for someone that can.

Fuck man, my cell phone battery's gonna die haha. I started this call from work, and can't really switch to my home phone. Been typing this out on hold, currently, call duration is at 1hr 15mins.

[EK 2.0]

hahaha Rage...just go on the Vacation Disconnect and stop paying the bill...:D

[Superesc]

Oh damnnnn what a bunch of bastards!!!!

[rage2]

Oh yea, for all you HDTV PVR'ers waiting on Bell's PVR... it's not gonna happen anytime soon. The 921 Bell project has been scrapped... the base software is too buggy, and Bell has decided against software conversion because people will bitch about paying $2000 for a hunk of crap that misses shows, reboots randomly, hangs, etc.

Apparantly, they're waiting for the next generation box, the 942, and hope it's stable enough to convert to Bell. That's not gonna be released for Dish Network until spring 2005, which means we'll see the Bell HD PVR sometime in fall 2005.

It's too bad really... Bell has WAY more HDTV channels including East/West timeshifting for HDTV shows. Shaw only has like 5 channels, but with recording, it doesn't matter, don't miss anything :D.

[rage2]

woohoo, CSR#4 got on the phone and OK'd the disconnection!

CSR - ok sir, you're gonna be disconnected on Oct 7th.
Me - thanks.
CSR - Please keep your box, we'd love for you to come back
Me - Until you have a excellent product, I mean leaps and bounds above the shaw product, you prob. wont see me again.
CSR - Well, we will be getting the HDTV PVR "soon".
Me - That's what you told me last year haha.
CSR - Well, it's coming soon, that's all I know. It's got Picture in Picture, dual tuners, HDTV.
Me - You're talking about the 921 right?
CSR - Yea, that's the model.
Me - Good luck with the wait. See ya.

Man, so much work to disconnect lol. Final Call duration, 1hr 25 mins. My ears are hot from the cell phone :rofl:.

Time to rack up the PPV's and throw out the box and smartcard!

[Ed the SOHC]

haha.... man, now i'm scared to cancel my bell. I was going to switch to Shaw because they finally fixed up their crappy menu.

[rage2]

Yea, their new menu, which the 6802 has, is pretty damn cool.

Too bad the Shaw PVR is so laggy... if it was more responsive, it'd be a perfect unit. Not a huge deal, since I come home to all recorded HDTV shows now, instead of rushing home to see good HD episodes.

[boi-alien]

that's retarded dude... i don't even know why those guys would want to argue with you. If you want to d/c just D/C the service in 30 days or whatever... frig... what idiots

[D'z Nutz]

Hahaha! You gotta give them credit for being so persistent!

[Ed the SOHC]

Originally posted by rage2
Yea, their new menu, which the 6802 has, is pretty damn cool.

Too bad the Shaw PVR is so laggy... if it was more responsive, it'd be a perfect unit. Not a huge deal, since I come home to all recorded HDTV shows now, instead of rushing home to see good HD episodes.

They say it's laggy because you're able to pause and rewind live tv and it needs time to "buffer."

The new menu on the regular dcts are very fast; way faster than my Bell. Only one thing I love about my bell is the time shifting/watching shows earlier.

[Ben]

haha, ah damn, thats pretty weak!

I really hate those kinds of call center employees, I mean hell, if a customer is pissed and wants their service disconnected, ask them why once and then just do it...screw trying to save them, especially when you have a good reason and know more than that overpaid tool CRS does.

[rage2]

Originally posted by Ed the SOHC
They say it's laggy because you're able to pause and rewind live tv and it needs time to "buffer."
No, that's not what it is.

When tuning to a HD channel, it takes about 10-30 seconds before you see anything.

When you play a recording, it takes 10 seconds before it begins to play.

Sometimes, the remote is completely unresponsive for 30 seconds. Rare, but it happens about once a week.

It's bizarre, but it doesn't affect my viewing too much. The pros still outweighs the cons!

[GoChris]

in comes my dvb box im making to the rescue :)
recordable bell HD channels lol
just buggin

[Xtrema]

Do you have to ship anything back to Bell to process the deactivation?

If you keep all hardware, can you keep watching Bell signal for free? May be that's why they are being so anal about it.

[rage2]

Originally posted by rlde.us
in comes my dvb box im making to the rescue :)
recordable bell HD channels lol
just buggin
First off, it's illegal to decode the Bell HD signals with your DVB crap.

I did some quick google research, and man, even if you pirate the signal, the DVB software out there is fairly ghetto. None of the ones I've stumbled upon has HDTV support. I looked at ProgDVB, WatchTVPro, and DVB Extreme. Are those the same software you're looking at?

Let's assume that I missed it, and one of the software packages does have HD support. In order to do HD playback, you'll need some pretty beefy hardware, and fast video cards. I'm guessing the cheapest box to build that could playback HDTV material would cost around $1500. I've done a lot of HD video editing, and it takes stupid amounts of memory and CPU to get clean playback.

Good luck with your DVB project... unless I missed something, it's gonna cost a hell of a lot more than a proper PVR.

[Kobe]

yah bell is a bunch of scammers, we got our dish for free, now we are on warrenty with them for like 2 years, and we have to pay min $40 a month for satalilte...its such b/s.. Hopefully it won't be as bad for us, when we try 2 disconnect our satalite dish :)

[jdmakkord]

Hell ......., I'll buy your reciever and card if the price is right!!!! ;)

[Davetronz]

They did the EXACT same thing to my dad on Saturday... Wow...

[Gonthro]

yeah, thats not uncommon, same deal with anythign else though, i tried to disconnect my cable because i was moving, took me like an hour on the phone for finally get it done... they work so hard to get your money, get you to sign up, treat you like shit and then make you work hard to get disconnected... maybe, just maybe one day these companies will learn that in order to keep customers you need to have a good product AND good service to back that up... but i wont hold my breath on that.




BTW rage, how what PVR did you get and how much did ya pay for it?

[sputnik]

Originally posted by Gonthro
BTW rage, how what PVR did you get and how much did ya pay for it?

http://www.shaw.ca/Tmplt.asp?PageID=651

[sputnik]

Does the PVR have dual tuners?

I want to buy one... however then I would "need" to get a DLP TV too. Better do it before I get married.

[TrevorK]

If I'm reading correctly - you can store HD channels as well as normal channels?

And it's $800 for the receiver - and nothing additional in terms of monthly fees?

[Gonthro]

Originally posted by TrevorK
If I'm reading correctly - you can store HD channels as well as normal channels?

And it's $800 for the receiver - and nothing additional in terms of monthly fees?

you also need cable.

[sputnik]

Originally posted by Gonthro


you also need cable.

You also need an HDTV ready TV.

[403Gemini]

Originally posted by rage2
*snip*
Man, so much work to disconnect lol. Final Call duration, 1hr 25 mins. My ears are hot from the cell phone :rofl:.

Time to rack up the PPV's and throw out the box and smartcard!

probably got a brain tumor starting with that much time on the phone ;) haha

[rage2]

Originally posted by Gonthro
BTW rage, how what PVR did you get and how much did ya pay for it?
It's the shaw 6802 HD+PVR. $800+GST. It's fairly buggy for watching Live TV... takes about 30 seconds to tune to a HD channel, remote lags once in a while randomly.

If you just use it for recording shows and watching them not live, it works really well. Fast forward is a bit slow, but I hacked the 30 second skip on my remote already, so skipping commercials takes only 5-10 seconds.

[hjr]

i had no trouble with shaw disconnecting. Granted it took like 20 mins to get a csr, but once i did, i was disconnected in about 2 minutes.

[Doomsday88]

Reason why it lags when switching to HD is because the receiver needs to switch from the SD tuner to the HD tuner and then it takes time to buffer the HD signal coming into the rcvr. HD bitrate runs at 19.2MB/s!!!! So you're 10s wait isn't too bad if you think about the amount of information that the rcvr is taking down/decoding/outputting.

Just my $.02

[Kamen]

:rofl: :rofl: It's like a real life example of the Dilbert world...

[rage2]

Originally posted by Doomsday88
Reason why it lags when switching to HD is because the receiver needs to switch from the SD tuner to the HD tuner and then it takes time to buffer the HD signal coming into the rcvr. HD bitrate runs at 19.2MB/s!!!! So you're 10s wait isn't too bad if you think about the amount of information that the rcvr is taking down/decoding/outputting.

Just my $.02
No, this is from switching HD to HD as well. The SD to HD lag is actually quite minimal at around 1 or 2 seconds.

It used to be quicker, apparantly it's slow now because of the new copy protect flag that's enabled by Shaw.

Even though bitrate is higher, it shouldnt matter, because the amount of mpeg key frames per second is still identical to SD broadcasts, making the delay the same. If the receiver hardware has problem processing that bitrate, it wouldn't be powerful enough to show the HD video stream anyways heh.

[sputnik]

"copy protect flag"?

Does this have anything to do with the firewire port on the back of the receiver?

[rage2]

Yes, with the flag enabled, there's nothing coming from that firewire port now :(.

Its pissed off a lot of 6800 users who uses it to record shows without PVR.

[yohan4ws]

I like my DVB Crap .. you CAN get HDTV .. (this is assuming you are goin to FREE TO AIR SATELLITE , not hacking BEV/DISh so thpt u cant delete this :P)

Requirements:

Hauppage/Technotrend DVB-S PCI Card , cost $260/$289 CDN.
Technotrend has ability to decode 5.1 while the hauppague nexus-s does not. The 5.1 daughter board is $60bux and includeds s-video output. No component video out.

Both cards have hardware decoding .. the catch

HDTV is only decipherable by Software Video Codecs.

Requirements, almost any DVB-S card ranging $101-$300 (based on pricing at www.dvbwest.com).
2.4Ghz Processor (Celery etc.) (with integrated video) if you have a better video card you can maybe get away with using an athlon 1.8 .. I can play HDTV feeds, but keep in mind if you'll be decoding Bell/Dish it will suck MORE juice... so 2.4Ghz is a good benchmark.

BUT, this includes everything ..

Sure its fun to go this route, but as rage said your looking at about $1500 to do HDTV. WIth hardware decoding and some unix patience you can get away with using a 500Mhz box and have a full IRD / PVR for satellite.

Keep in mind you will be spending lots of time tweaking this thing always because it is a computer ... and well .. we like to play..

if you buy a box like Rage, you have it .. it works .. and you dont have to muck .. if it messes up.. you exchange it for a working model .. done deal.

I'm working on a Non-HDTV project right now for my uncle using Linux and VDR .. for more info, http://www.dvbn.net.

[kenny]

Originally posted by rage2
Yes, with the flag enabled, there's nothing coming from that firewire port now :(.

Its pissed off a lot of 6800 users who uses it to record shows without PVR.

The firewire port is still active with the flag enabled, but it just wont let you connect it to any device that can record. If your TV has a firewire port it will still work if you want to use that to watch tv.

Its 6200 and 6208 rage :)

[TomTom]

what your saying really sucks cause i just bought a HDTV and was looking at future shop and they got the recorder and the HDTV box but not both and i want both and now i dont know what one to get

i would go with shaw but i will be moving to a place just outside of brooks alb that does not have shaw digital(dont know if they will or when)