Bought dream TV... heart broken... Sony my Arse.

[adm]

Jeez I can't feckin believe it.
I finally took the plunge, dumped my old LG tv and bought a be-all and end-all Sony Bravia television.. Android, WhatHifi award winner.. the works.

And now I find out... the stupid thing has a really crap EPG.. AND worst of all.. it can't pause live tv ??

Damn and blast.

I had to replace the LG cos it got a bad case of the well know blue'itis... and cos it has a number of really irritating quirks...
(like sporadically restarting itself and corrupting the USB drive for recording)

And I thought .. to hell with it.. its covid times and we don't go out much ... so lets treat ourselves...

So I bought a Sony KD-55XH9005... which looked beautiful in the shop of course...

But I was worried they couldn't show me in-store what it looked like with live tv.. and my fears were obviously well founded.

I don't use sky or any other box.. I was relying on this tv having digital (saorview) tuner and satellite tuners...
And it does.. but boy does it look half done...

The saorview tuner works ok.. the EPG does appear to be functional...

But for free to air Satellite the EPG is only sporadically populated.. some channels show you now and next.. the rest.. nothing...
And no showing tomorrow or anything useful like that..

When I had the LG I was able to solve that problem by setting up a UK postcode in it.. but with this stupid thing there appears to be no way to change the location.. it registers the TV via your gmail account.. and thats your lot...

I got recording set up using an external USB drive and thats ok.. but not much use if I can't look forward to see what programmes are available to record ...doh.

With the LG, once I connected a recording drive I was able to pause the live TV .. but not with this yoke.. FFS

Sony me Arse...

The EPG comes from the broadcaster. In mainland UK Freeview is a group of Free to Air terestrial channels where any box branded Freeview can recieve a 7 day over the air EPG. (Engima boxes running OpenVix can also obtain the over the air 7 day Freeview EPG).

Again in the UK Freesat is a group of Free to Air satellite channels where any box branded Freesat can recieve a 7 day over the air EPG (Engima boxes running OpenVix can also obtain the over the air 7 day Freesat EPG). Any box branded Sky can recieve Sky's 7 day EPG - Engima boxes running OpenVix can also obtain the over the air 7 day Sky FTA EPG but have to tune into the Sky IEPG channel for, say, 10 minutes each day to do so. On an Enigma box this task can be automated.

Enigma boxes also have the abiliy to obtain the 7 day EPG via the internet.

Without the ability (or without a licence to decode) the FTA satellite EPG will only have a now/next EPG. If the channels are encypted and you would nomally require a subscription to view them then the EPG maybe balnk.

You actually purchased a TV and not a PVR but the Sony Bavia manual says that it can pause live tv.

[birdman]

You actually purchased a TV and not a PVR but the Sony Bavia manual says that it can pause live tv.

It didn't for the OPs model when I looked just now.
I'm surprised (s)he didn't look before buying. I'd always find a manual on-line and read it before purchase for such an item.

There is a workaround (of sorts) for the problem, the last entry in:

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/other-tvs/sony-bravia-kdl37ex723-pause-and-record-problem/m-p/264649

although, as has been mentioned, the best solution would be to just use an enigma2 box, which solves the EPG issue too.