I bought one of these as faulty from ebay for £15 (it just needed a forced reformat of the hdd by connecting to computer to get it working again) but it is on v12.9 firmware. Consequently I'd like to update it to v13.3 firmware if at all possible and I had a few questions about how to do this.

1) before i go and buy a usb to serial adapter, is a manual update at all possible any other way than connecting via RS232? i couldn't find any mention of other possibilities on the forums so would i be right in guessing there's no way of updating the firmware by dropping it onto the hdd?

2) is there a copy of the v13.3 firmware available to download or is the best i can do the v13.0 from futaura's site?

3) since the v13.3 update was relatively recent is it likely to be repeated in the near future thus negating any need for me to buy the serial adapter anyway since it is presumably the last update these boxes are likely to receive?

thanks for responses in advance.

1) No and yes. Has to be done via RS232, and also some USB->RS232 adaptors do not simulate the serial transfer properly causing the upgrade to not happen.

2) V13.0 is the newest file that I have, but somebody may have saved V13.3 from the Sharp OAD.

3) Maybe. V13.3 was only ever broadcast for the Sharp models, so far.

Do you have problems with V12.9? If not, I'd recommend sticking with it - a few people found V13.0 to be worse, but I'm not sure what changed in V13.3.

Isn't 13.0 required to overcome the issues that some users had with DSO in the Granada region? Or are the Hitachi T825 units not affected by these issues?

Colin

12.8 was the version with the initial fix for this in that was tested by various owners here who were affected by the issue that happened with older versions, but was never an OAD. 13.0 was the OAD, but some of those who had tried 12.8 found that the stuttering returned with 13.0, and reverting to 12.8 fixed the problem. I'm not sure if 12.9 is more similar to 12.8 or 13.0 in this respect .

I have a copy of the Sharp 13.3 OAD firmware (GordianT825UK010 & GordianT825UK011).


AFAIK yes. I've not seen any OADs higher than 13.0 for other T825 models.

thanks for the replies.

the couple of problems i've got are: it seems to forget the aspect ratio that is set on it and when turned back on defaults to 4:3 instead of 16:9; and it also suffers from random freeze/reboot problems.

guess i'll wait for now and see if there's an OAD update for v13.3.

thanks again for responding so quickly.

I'm sticking with v12.4 on my Hitachi HDR253 for as long as humanly (digitally) possible - it's stable allowing for hard reboots now and then, and I've still got full programme info via the Info button.

I'd love new software for the Wharfedale version though, that one's a head case on v12.8 (sent to me by Vestel UK to try and fix it, failed).

I recently bought a "faulty" HDR253 from ebay (probably from the same supplier as you ) and they are the two problems I am experiencing as well with v13.0. So it seems that the problems are common to this model.

I have v 13 on my non-Hitachi Alba 825, and stuttering comes and goes, in monthly increments, on different muxes. Currently, I'm recording Batman while I can, having had stuttering on mux d for about 1 month .....

.... when recording part 1 of the recent 2 part Queen (pop group) documentary on BBC2, mux1 was stuttering, but I recorded anyway for the heck of it. The stuttering suddenly stopped after 10 mins, and part 2 the next night was fine.

As previously discussed with Furaura, the stuttering problem is power supply related, and root caused by garbage in the mpeg2 data fields. I don't think the v13 software has anything to do with "curing" the stuttering .......