Good points from 'ianmb1' who I think is getting close to the root of the matter and 'grumpybloke' for "this nonsense has got to stop"! Indeed it has!
However, I hold out no great hope that it actually will! All of these items of equipment are now getting quite old. My RDR-HXD970 was bought Dec 2007. Typical life of any electronic kit these days is only 5 to 7 years before it becomes obsolete. I also imagine there are several other factors at work here.
Firstly I suspect that Sony have no commercial interest whatsoever in keeping older items of kit going and would much rather we all went out and bought a newer product.
Even if Sony do have an interest in fixing this issue, they may be limited in what they can actually do in so far as the core technology of these units seems to be from Pioneer so they may have minimal ability to fix things by way of firmware updates etc.
Finally the Electronic Program Guide (EPG), which seems to be at the heart of this problem, is generated and issued by a third party. I imagine Sony will have litle or no influence in how that is produced or deployed and thus-far have been exclusively relying on the EPG to be issued correctly to stop these problems occurring. They appear to have done nothing obvious since the first issue in July 2013 to remedy the situation by way of firmware etc.
Clearly the latest two problems in the last week show that it is not possible for Sony to rely on the EPG happening correctly. Indeed the latest problem seems to be tied to only one region from the Crystal Palace transmitter so there seemingly isn't even national consistency in how the EPG is deployed or configured.
The organisations who seem to be involved in this as far as I can work out are: Sony/Pioneer (for the firmware side of things); Digital UK (who seem to be responsible for the EPG for terrestrial Freeview) and OFCOM who seem to licence the EPG providers.
(I am happy to be corrected on the above as I have only got those names by Googling and trying to find out just exactly who-does-what in this process seems to be extremely difficult indeed)
The harsh reality is that this is quite likely never to be fixed reliably. This probably means having to replace this particular generation of hard disk recorders.
I imagine, however, that anyone affected by this problem is unlikely to put Sony near the top of their list for a replacement recorder! (Not even sure they make them any more!)
It would be really nice to get an official statement from Sony on what their position is on this:
* firstly some kind of apology for a very annoying inconvenience (yet again)
* secondly have they identified the root cause(s) of the problem
* thirdly what are they going to do about it to stop it ever happening yet again (if anything)
If the final answer is that they are not actually going to do anything to fix this, they should just be up-front and say so. That way we could all plan accordingly and move to using some other equipment. I'd be very sad to do that as I love my RDR-HXD970 and it is a great bit of kit.
Finally, thanks to Quinnicus (and other members on this forum) for providing useful suggestions and feedback. If it wasn't for this forum, my Sony hard disk recorder would have (unnecessarily) gone down to the tip by now!
(seriously : I hope not - well not this issue anyhow)
