I live in the UK, and I have been fighting this battle with Sony for two years, with almost weekly e-mails. To be fair, this is only a small part of the battle I've been fighting, but nonetheless ....
I also used a 64GB USB stick. There are two USB sockets on my TV (a 32" Bravia), and I have to use the lower one. The memory stick worked, but it wasn't fast enough to be playing a program at the same time as recording another, and I replaced it with a hard disk. The manual actually says you should use a "HDD" - though I doubt the average housewife who buys a TV knows what an HDD is. Also, if I plug a memory stick into my PC, it says "Hard disk detected". To my mind, a USB drive3 is a solid state disk, and is, in fact, an HDD device.
I thought of using a USB-3 memory stick to get the speed, but in consultation with Sony support, I was told that the TV has only a USB-2 interface.
Having liberated my 64GB stick from the TV, I wanted to use it in my PC, but discovered that I couldn't. The TV had re-partitioned it into four partitions, and the Windows Operating System is not able to undo what the TV has done. It is possible you would be able to unravel it with Linux, but I don't have it, so I can't be sure. As far as I'm concerned, the USB stick is now a throw-away item. It would be nice if the TV would undo the partitioning when you de-register the stick - but it doesn't.
It is possible to use Windows to undo the partitioning that the TV imposes on a hard disk, but even that is a fiddle. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but I did eventually succeed - with the hard disk, but not with the memory stick.
Most of the problem I have been trying to get resolved is the program titling when you record a program. It is best illustrated by an example. Let's say I want to record Columbo - a detective series with a clever twist at the end. It comes on at 10PM, immediately following Football Roundup. I set up the recording, and look in the "Timer list" It says "Columbo" will be recorded at "10:00 PM". Fine! Great!
The next day, I want to watch Columbo. I look in the Program List (list of recorded programs), but Columbo is not there. Football Roundup is there! I watch the program, and find that Football Roundup overran its end time because of penalty time, so the first 5 minutes of what I see are the football penalties - then Columbo starts, but because it set up to run for one hour, of which five minutes were consumed by the football, the recording stops when Columbo still has 5 minutes to run - so I miss the twist at the end. It's like reading a crime novel with the last two pages torn out.
Why did it use an incorrect title in the Program list? If the TV simply copied the title from the Timer list, that would solve that problem straight away. But beyond that, the TV has a PIC microprocessor in it. As the TV is able to pick up the title of the program that is playing, why doesn't it sample it every 10 seconds till it reads "Columbo", and start recording then? If it did not modify the 1 hour recording timer, it would record the whole program.
I have even asked for the processor source code so I can work out the changes myself, but they won't let me have it, so they won't make the changes, and they won't cooperate with somebody who is offering to make the changes himself. I wish I'd bought from another manufacturer!
