Yes, that is the problem. Humax have no competition in this arena so they don't NEED to do anything and hence it would appear they aren't bothering to. If there was a good working alternative machine my HDR would already be on ebay.
I too purchased the HDR based on my experience with the PVR 9200, that was a very buggy machine and crashed lots in the early days but, and I suspect only because there was competition in the market, Humax made the effort and turned it into a good reliable device.
I decided to switch to DSat for my main receiver and recorder because there is no such thing as good and reliable DTT reception in my area no matter how good the box is or how big your antenna is (currently using DAT75+MRD+Distribution Amp for DTT).
After a couple more recent problems ( a) Top Gear failed to record (Sun 26th) while box was left in standby, b) a crash the other day when my daughter accidentally pressed channel down from BBC1 and hit the Teletext channel ) I'm ready to give up on Humax and I am seriously considering spending the extra and getting a Panny.

As has been said over and over and over again. I have a team of engineers here working on the product. I am sorry if you feel disenchanted by the process but this is the decision that was made.

I can't say what competition will do but I can say that a release is already planned but I won't announce a date until it is 10,000% certain, otherwise I will just see more complaining. We had considered a release earlier in the year but decided for the sake of economy to group feature improvement and bug fixes in the same download. Sending out updates costs us a not insignificant amount of money not least because we have to spend time testing the impact of each change to the entire product.

All development must consider the market forces and resources available. It was stated that a software company might turn round an update quicker, that may be true, but they typically have one project at a time not the dozens. I don't want to make excuses but as much as you might debate it the update will come when it is ready and not before.

Questioning the competence of the developers isn't productive or humane.

Bob

Bob

I think it's a great bit of kit with good functionality that does require some tweaks... but then again what doesn't.
Thank you for keeping us as informed as you can & ignore all the ingrates.

Either they are failing at their job or Humax in failing to employ the correct amount of people and are overworking their current employees.

It has to be one of the 2 or it wouldnt take 9 months for basic fixes.

If testing is time consuming, get 20 people on here to test, youve seen all the problems that have been listed and people on here spotted bugs that obviously werent spotted before release. The more people test, the quicker the testing will be.

It's probably not practical. When I worked in the software industry the source code was locked-out to development during an update project. Bug fixes only happened immediately after release of a new version and until the next update project began, to ensure bugs didn't reoccur in the next version.

Quit with the arrogance, you have no clue of the internal workings and resource constraints of a company whose only connection to you is that you bought one of their products.

You do not know what bugs were picked up before release, I'll bet some of them were, but in the time available could not be fixed.

As for picking people from this Forum, as we have previously been advised there are testers, surely some of them must lurk/post on here, but keep things to themselves.

We used to get updates from testers in the 9200 sub forum, but unfortunately some members who thought they knew better ruined it for the majority, and the testers stopped posting.


Agreed 100%

Amen. (but please do listen a little to the griping on losing recordings following a loss of power - anything that could cause several weeks of recordings to be missed should be in your top list of bugs to attack).

Bob

I am curious - was there market pressure to get the box out?

I ask because having had a Humax Freeview PVR for a year before this one some of the "features" of this box seem totally bizarre

Quit with the shilling.

There is an expression: "The customer is always right".

That may be an exaggeration but some people here - and I can't help but wonder if a couple of them are not Humax employees posting incognito - seem intent on silencing any criticism of Humax.

Of course all they succeed in doing is making sure that even more critical posts are made.

So tell me the reason its taken 9 month then if its not due to lack of manpower or poor workers?

Yes, I don't think many of us help with our attitude

What's worse is that often these type of threads just degenerate into technical discussions that Joe Public isn't interested in. I find snippets, such as Bob_Cat explaining that the bootloader raises the HDMI presence, interesting (yes, and even annoying that something like that should happen), but I don't think it helps to then try and tell people how to do their job.

At the end of the day, Humax will live or die within the Stokes' household depending on what happens in the near future. And people like me and all other customers will cause consumer reactions which will affect Humax; that's their decision.

Mind you, I still want to know who in history is guilty for making it acceptable for code controlled products to be imperfect, leaving customers in the hope that a fix is just around the corner. Is it that Gates fella?

The Campaign For Real Appliances!!!!

Ask someone who knows.

Eh?

Read my posts again, I'm not against any criticism of Humax, I have posted in plain english here that I'm disappointed not to be able to delete when a recording is in progress.
But it's crossing the line when people start making it personal by casting aspersions against the quality of people working for a company that they have no direct contact with.

So you have no clue then, I used logic to find the only 2 things I could think of for the 9 month delay. Im quite happy to accept any examples for the delay that dont put Humax in a bad light if anyone can think of them.

No company is ever going to admit to either of my examples so it would be stupid even asking them.

One reason could be because the product is on the market and there was no competition?

It's ok rushing a product to market to cash in but the updates should have been just as quick to appear.

Being harsh, as a consumer, I really don't care about any costs to Humax - they should simply have better tested their product.

In defence of Humax though a point in their favour is that bob_cat has said he wants to be 10,000% sure that the release date will be ok when he announces it. Good news after the teasing February, March, April,May and June dates, and let's hope we don't have much longer to wait!

Patrick

So they just couldnt be arsed? Still doesnt come out good for them. Ill admit its a possibility to add to my two, I didnt think that low.

Other thoughts... I wonder if they had fewer programmers than they needed at the start of the process and perhaps the numbers of programmers was upped recently? That could be because of a new development box and much of the code they are writing now will also be interchangeable in the new box??

It could be win win for Humax.. if the update is good that is..

Patrick

LOL, after about 25 years in the software business I actually have a very good idea what the effect of competition is.

Yep, and in my experience getting the budget becomes one heck of a lot easier as soon as you drop in the words like '... to beat xxxx to market' or '... we are losing ground to xxxx'.
The Freesat HDR was a first-to-market product, unlike the PVR 9200, and as such I should have expected the experience to be different - foolish of me I know but I didn't think about it like that at the time I dived in and bought one.

There is a third option; they could be spending all their time making petty comments on internet forums instead of working

Bob_cat, I quite understand your reluctance to announce a release date till its been cast in stone. I would however like to ask have you any idea what sort of timescale we're talking about? A few months? Towards the end of the year perhaps? Next spring?

Maybe a major reason why so many of you are frustrated is the lack of transparency into what's going on (Bob_Cat's occasional posts notwithstanding)?

As an example, I use products from the software company Developer Express. They have a support website where they list bug reports for each product and indicate whether they can reproduce them or not and if so whether fixed and which version the fix will appear in. They don't say when the next version will be released but at least customers are able to see that their problems have been addressed. If it turns out that a problem is not in fact fixed in the next version then at least the customer can see that the problem was in fact addressed rather than ignored.

But if, say, there is no visibility between releases and after a long interval a new version is released and many problems are not fixed then customers are understandably annoyed. They might be annoyed anyway but they would be more annoyed in this scenario.

Now, I don't know how feasible it is for Humax to operate quite like this but it's a consideration.

End of summer was the last thing he said but that happened weeks ago.

Agreed, if people wait 9 months and then find out their problem is not going to be fix, they will be really, really mad (not sure if they are little but they will at least be mad).

Lots of software works this way and you get statuses on the bugs

Fixed
due to be fixed
cant reproduce
cannot fix.

We have a list of over 100 bugs, how much time would it have taken to give each one a status

Sky+ does
Bt Vision did