A90K - 42" OLED - How do you record programs?

[patansl]

A90K - 42" OLED - How do you record programs?

Bought 2x  Bravia XR4290k TV's, open plan house, one is a different room. Have connected a Sandisk Extreme USB SSD drive. Registered it as a recording device on the living room TV. Now what?

All the instruction pages say - go to the guide, then press Timer REC. Thing is, there is no Timer REC either as a button on the remotes (neither of the two remotes has a record button, which seems madness, since this TV is meant to be able to record things). I've emailed customer support and they keep replying with solutions that simply don't exist. Today's suggestion was to go to guide, highlight the program I want to record, then press the 123 button, then press Timer REC. But that button doesn't exist on the TV nor on screen in any of the menus that come up. 

This is driving me mad. It should be so simple to record something. Someone somewhere on the planet has surely managed it with the A90K tv's?

BTW - the TV's are superb in all other aspects. Picture is incredible and the sound is pretty darn good even with a soundbar. 

[LightFoot]

Hi @patansl 

It looks like you are using Live TV & Catch Up. Recording is not available in this mode because you can use Catch Up instead. To use the recording facility you need to use the native TV Guide so use the TV App instead, not the Live TV & Catch Up App.

[patansl]

@LightFoot 

That's interesting. Though now I'm more confused. What native TV app?  How do I access that. Because if I press the Guide button, it takes me to the YouView app side, which is the same as Live TV so far as I can see. And when I press the 123 button it brings up the same menu - with no options to record anything. 

What am I missing?

[LightFoot · Accepted solution]

Hi @patansl 

Here is a picture of the two Apps side by side. You can also set which one you want for watching live TV by default in the settings. Settings -> Channels &Inputs -> TV button shortcut-> Digital -> image below

[patansl]

@LightFoot  - Wow!  I never even knew there was another TV guide on the TV. 

Recording does indeed work on that guide. Thank you for solving that mystery. Something that Sony support seem perplexed and unable to solve. 

Now though I'm totally confused as to why the TV has TWO TV guides? One, the YouView one, is lovely to look at, this new one the built in TV guide is a tad on the ***** side. Why include two guides. Seems confusing and unnecessary. I wonder what the thinking was behind that. 

I'll be honest, the recording process is all a bit useless and they shouldn't really even advertise it. I have a YouView box, a Humax DT2000, which is a few years old, but has YouView and twin tuners, so can easily record everything we need. I thought the TV adaptation would be very similar, but just with one tuner, to perhaps easily record something occasionally. But alas, it's a right PITA to have to go into a separate TV guide and set the recording etc. 

Sony are missing a trick. I can well remember my lovely old Tivo box, when they first came out about 20 years ago. It could pause live TV and record things easily. Why someone can't build that functionality directly into a TV is beyond me. It can't be that difficult. And it's all well and good there being "Catch Up TV" but you cannot watch all catchup TV live. You can on the BBC, you can start watching something that has already started from the start, but not on ITV, Ch4 etc. For them, it's better to record them, then you can start watching them from the start, even though the program may have started 10 minutes ago. 

[royabrown2]

@patansl 

A bit of history. In early 2015, these Android TVs had the Sony Guide (Freeview), could record, had satellite tuning, though not Freesat, but didn’t have the itv and All 4 players. These were supposed to come along with YouView, which was going to allow recording also, as well as pause/rewind Live TV, and the ability, like the YouView boxes, to pick catchup programmes from the backwards EPG, and so on.

Well, YouView was launched, with the players sure enough, but initially (we were told) YouView couldn’t record or do pause/rewind, but it was going to.

It never did, and the claims that it would were quietly dropped. People also found that when you were on the YouView side, you couldn’t use the satellite tuning. But on the Freeview side, you couldn’t access the itv and All4 players. And even to have these players on the YouView side, you had to have tuned in a terrestrial aerial.

Also, people found the YouView side rather slow. And it was a big deal back then, to go between Freeview and YouView, not the easy choice from two side by side icons it is now.

From 2015 until now, there has been some slow progress in resolving some of these issues, though the 2015-2021 sets are all still pretty much as they were at release as regards Freeview/YouView issues; the improvements were never back-ported to the earlier sets.

So now, you have the choice of icons for the easy switch between Freeview and YouView, compatible satellite with Freesat, use the Players on either ‘side’, and no need for terrestrial aerial tuning to get the Players.

But a few limitations remain. Still no recording on the YouView side, and Players that don’t show live TV (except for the BBC one). Because here, the old assumption that “Well, you won’t need live TV, because you can watch on the terrestrial channels” has never been corrected, even though the assumption has been corrected in terms of actually getting the players.

Why the YouView situation has never been fully corrected over the years is something I would dearly love to know, but both YouView and Sony are incredibly tight-lipped about it.

It may have something to do with the Sony Android TVs of a certain model year not getting the players until late December. Or it may not 😛

[patansl]

@royabrown2  Interesting history, thank you for that. We don't have satellite, can't get it as we live in a forest and there is no direct line of site to any of the satellite services. So we rely on the good old TV aerial connection. 

My tv history dates back to when Tivo first launched in the UK. I bought one of the first boxes that came out, must have been around year 2000, I like tech. but didn't really have a clue as to what it could actually do. It was superb. Still stands head and shoulders above any other system I've seen. 

When that started to die after many years of service, I moved over to YouView. Not as good, but not bad. YouView various boxes has always been able to pause live TV and record series, for as long as I've used it. My current Humax box a DT2000 I think is the model, can do all those things and has twin tuners. This is what I don't understand about Sony's implementation. All those functions are available but they chose not to add them. Just odd. 

The other thing about YouView is that I get the feeling that it will die at some point. FreeView and YouView appear to be a very similar offer with the same companies sponsoring them. But support for YouView seems to be far less than for FreeView. 

On the A90K, the built in tv guide doesn't look (visually) like the normal FreeView guides that I've seen on other tv sets. Has no branding for a start. It reminds me more of the basic digital tv guide that our old Sony tv's had. Not sponsored by anyone. Just a list of what's on next etc.