I got in the beta bugs group.....
A few notes... nothing that impacted me heavily except one item that was present previously.....
First, the good..... I DON'T use OTA so I've been spared most of the headaches. HD mapdown worked great, other than Discovery HD and maybe a handful of others, which has different content than the SD channel, it works well. Easy to find, all my DVR recordings have a ghost like HD logo showing through the title list. Large HD logo also on the title bar at the top of the screen after a channel change. No issues with jumping forwards, backwards, or pausing. PIP works well as I have mine set for single mode, so no problem with the dual mode setting as I don't use it.
Played around with the HDMI button on the diagnostics screen, but mine wouldn't click, and it said "FALSE" on one of the lines, so my HDMI output is definitely dead. Once rerun season hits I'll swap it out for a refurb, using component outs until then..
A lot of the macroblocking I had has not returned. I don't know whether this was due to clearer skies, or more well behaved software.... will keep you all advised.
Now the only headache..... Since distants went away, I have to deal with multiple timer conflicts constantly. Sunday night is the worst. Desperate Housewives, Simpsons, Family Guy, Battlestar Galactica, L Word, Deal or No Deal, Surreal Life Fame game, and Gene Simmon's Family Jewels all jockeying for time and priority. BG and LWord go away for a while thankfully, but The Sopranos and Entourage are coming back as well..... Bottom line... the software is lousy at finding a way to juggle timer conflicts. Instead of adjusting the timers to eliminate the buffers before and after the shows like it used to, it uses the "automatically resolve by priority" function and just skips the shows where a conflict exists. I can manually go through and change the timer settings to eliminate the buffers SOMETIMES, but other times it keeps trying to skip the other shows in some cases. A suggestion, ... have the software search forward internally and look for repeats (common on HBO, Showtime, VH-1, A&E, etc.) and shift THOSE recordings to the later slots automatically. If it can't find a repeat showing, make it a priority and automatically bump something that can be easily bumped.
Otherwise, I am real happy. Watched a lot of shows this weekend since I was couchbound with Strep throat (cough cough).. Happy that the unit easily adjusted for the longer Battlestar Galactica episode without a hitch. Don't let the bug list scare you too much if you don't use the OTA tuner. Hope I didn't jinx myself there.....