It's been available as beta for some time, no one seems to have any real issues with it - although it doesn't seem to do much that's worthwhile unless you suffer from power cuts - and yet there's still no announcement of its general availability.

To be fair the working downmix to lpcm stereo must be welcome to those with external AV kit without AC3 decoding.

Still reading posts from Foxsat-HD owners with the same problem.

Yes, and I suspect that the power failure bug took some serious thinking about. So well done to them for sorting that out.

Just wondering why they aren't transmitting the update.

One thing you can say about Humax is caution, they take a while but looking at the write date of the firmware update it's pretty obvious that there is a really early release to beta testers before a full release. Compare that to the Samsung freesat debacle

Yes, you have to admit that the Humax was completely usable from day 1.

ROFLH
http://media.urbandictionary.com/ima...rofl-50476.jpg

Your point ??

No constructive contribution to make obviously!

I got so pi€€ed off with the Humax freezing up, prior to the last official release, that I turned it off and didn't use it for many months. I gave it a "last" chance, before giving it away, with the most recent (ie. not Beta) software release. At the time, some regular contributors tried to downplay the problem, and suggest it was a faulty unit - it wasn't. Since the last update it has been fine, apart from the known bugs, and the unofficial updates have taken it to another level.

While it was nowhere near as unfinished as more recent products, it was clearly rushed to Market and not fully finished - hence my earlier post.

I suggest you did have a faulty unit.I have had mine since it was launched and have not encountered that problem.
The regular contributors were not trying to downplay it,they clearly(like me) did not have the issue you had.

I would second that.
I've had mine for over a year and it has never freezed. It has rebooted but it is so infrequent that I can't remember the last time it did it. If I had experienced your problems I would have got a replacement.
Still it is a long beta period.

Thirded.

Two and a half years now. No freezes and around 8 spontaneous reboots (don't think I've had one this year).

It also hasn't failed to record anything for probably over a year. It was the last but one series of 'Lewis' and ITV were fouling that up.

I would rather have a long Beta period so that when it is released OTA there are no issues.
You can download the upgrade from the Humax web site.
By all accounts those who have done so have found it to be stable.

I'll be the 4th witness to the Humax not freezing all the time. I've had mine now well over 12 months and have only had the one problem with if freezing. I think that was because my girlfriend was going down the guide too quickly. Its never happened since.

Add a 5th, Hillel was told at the time he had a faulty unit and chose to ignore the advice despite assurances his experiences weren't typical.

When new there were certainly annoyances.

Channel updates deleted ITV-HD reservations.

Adding, moving or deleting non-freesat channels deleted freesat recording schedules

The power cut bug.

are 3 that spring to mind.

Nothing that made the box unusable if you were aware of the problem.

Sounds like a classic case of faulty RAM - new firmware build lays out its data structures in a different way and the fault happens not to manifest in the same way if it corrupts something less critical. Trouble is it can just as easily come back with a future firmware build.

Indeed Hillel, and many others, were. Yet, the issues disappeared over a year ago, following the last OTA update. You'd be hard pressed to find any references to them more recently. In my case the the big issue was freezing, I strongly suspect due to a memory leak. With others, the issue was the spontaneous reboots.

@mjr Please give me a reference/research to support this, by pm if warranted. I am also interested in Use Cases, Unit Test Cases for Firmware, ... (I have a professional interest in this area and want to follow it through.)

So who were the many then ?. If it was a software problem then pretty well everyone should have been affected. They weren't as you were repeatedly told at the time.

The real bugs were repeatable and experienced by all.

Never had a freeze, had maybe 4 spontaneous reboots since Nov 2008.

So far I make the score 5-1

You don't think that memory management is left to Linux? The HDR is running several applications and clearly the settop applications is multi-threaded.

I'm generalising here about problems with computers or embedded systems where one particular unit experiences random behaviour, especially if the problem disappears with a new software build that wasn't trying to address such an issue. A common explanation would be faulty RAM, where under certain conditions one or more bits are faulty and misread. The data or code that occupies that part of RAM may relate to some important underlying function in the OS, e.g. thread scheduler, in one firmware build. This being a critical function to the OS, if corruption occurs either in terms of the instructions being executed, or the data structures being manipulated, then a crash could occur.

But in a later build, memory could be allocated in a different order and the size of the code will likely be different, so the RAM will be used differently. So perhaps that faulty memory is now unused, e.g. the alignment/packing of the data structures mean the faulty bit(s) never store any data. Or let's say that the fault is that a single bit always reads 1 regardless of what was stored in it, maybe the code or data that is now stored there should have that bit set to 1 anyway, so no anomolous behaviour occurs.

There would be other hardware related explanations too, e.g. faulty CPU - only takes one time in many billion instruction cycles to do the wrong thing and incorrect behaviour could occur, which could manifest as a crash.

The best analogy I could give would be to look at what happens when people "overclock" their PCs, i.e. run the CPU and/or RAM faster than its rated speed. When they push the tolerances too far (and this varies from one piece of hardware to the next, even if they're supposedly identical), they experience random crashes (e.g. blue-screen crashes on Windows) or other anomolous behaviour, ultimately because of a hardware error.

Though this doesn't completely rule in a hardware fault (could be for example that you had an uncommon usage pattern that just happened to trigger a bug that was silently corrected in a later build, e.g. something quite innocuous like the timing of remote control keypresses, leading to triggering a subtle thread race condition when two operations overlap with very specific timings) but it would make me wary of ruling one out.

The main memory management may well be left to Linux but that doesn't mean that the PVR software won't affect the layout of the memory.

Yep, Jepson illustrated what I'm getting at - the in-memory location and layout of data structures etc can change between firmware builds.


Actually, disregard that paragraph quoted above - not really relevant in this context where we're talking about a fault that cleared after applying a new firmware. (Would strike it through in the original post, but it's no loner editable.)

Conceded but not attributed to this cause.

Some of the "many" were in the post I linked to!
As for the 5-1, I never suggested that the lockups were happening in the last year. Therefore, more recent Humax HDR users would not have seen the problems.

The nature of many software bugs is that they only affect
some users. It is not a credible position to suggest that "real bugs" would be experienced by all. I can assure you, from professional experience, that software development is not that simple.

I disagree. If there was a serious bug somewhere in the primary functions of the HDR it would be known about by now. I have owned five PVRs (an Inverto, a 9200T (gawd that was bad) my HDR, Sky+ and now Sky HD).

For all of those when someone was regularly seeing a problem the response on forums would be agreement and sympathy. There would be a constant undercurrent of complaint. That doesn't happen with the HDR. Such complaints are rare and are usually met with puzzlement by others.

I am not historically a great supporter of Humax. My experience of their 9200T led me to be very critical. I even vowed never to buy any of their kit again. But the HDR changed my mind. There were so few complaints after the first update that I bought one anyway and I've been seriously impressed.

For the record I had my second freeze last Friday. I marked something for series record and it just froze after I 'clicked' okay. After powercycling I checked and it had set the recording up. Interestingly I had been on vacation so hadn't used the box for nearly a week which might have been a factor. But still - only the second freeze I can remember in over 18 months of ownership. It has also never missed a recording except back when I was using AR and ITV was pratting about. It doesn't get as much use as my Sky box but I rely on it just as much. I never watch anything live so any PVR I own has to be reliable.

So to anyone experiencing frequent issues, anyone who doesn't feel they can trust the box - it's a hardware fault. Not that that lets Humax off of course. A fault is a fault - I just don't think it's accurate to label the HDR as unreliable. My experience and the support forums just don't support that judgement.