After your rescan leaving the region options on the default setting have you still had no occurrences of the freezing issue?

Colin

I don't think I have had any further occurrences of freezing although pressing FF button is slower to respond than before the update.

e.g x2 is ok, but when you press again for x4 and x8 it is slow to action request.

I have now updated the bugs website with four new bugs relating to v4.6.

I am pleased to have now "downgraded" to v3.4 and find everything much smoother than with v4.6. The only problem appears to be that my brief test of v4.6 seems to have "spiked" the low power mode, even when running v3.4. (see my bug report #0304)

Thanks for updating the website futaura - much appreciated.

I originally posted this in another thread but was shown this one and it is more relevant.

"This T835 update seems to be a "right cock up"!!

As previously suggested we turn our Hitachi box off every night to stop some of the problems and when we turned it on yesterday it wanted us to do a rescan and I presumed it was doing an update. After the rescan it was slower than ever (if it slows down any more it will be going backwards). The only other visible change was that the order of library was reversed.

On turning the it on today it wanted to do yet another rescan (is this going to happen every day?). On completing this we then discovered that all the timers had been deleted, very clever.

Extremely unhappy with this box and I looking to get something with HD on for the changeover in February, any suggestions would be welcome. Fast access to library and quick delete would be nice."

As an update when we switched the box on today it wanted us to do another install (this is about 4 times now) and all our timers were lost again.

Futura is having a very different experience to us because it is just getting slower and slower, plus these multiple installs.

I have now turned off the low power settings and will leave the box on to see if it stops these reinstalls.

Even more unhappy with it now. Bring back the Digifusions!!!

Thanks for these reports - detailed and concise, which is ideal. Anybody else reading this and thinking about making a report, please do take a look at Zill's style first. Specifically, please do not report more than one bug per entry, because it makes things hard to manage - lack of specifics makes it pretty much pointless for me to them on to Vestel.

And you probably already read my comment about the LPM issue - you need to turn automatic updates back on to get back the delay when powering off, although I understand why you switched it off .

My machine had slowed down quite a bit since the update so I decided to power cycle it (after remembering that they don't cold boot unless in low power mode). This certainly restored the speed, but also reset the Ok/ Channel list action so that pressing Info wasn't needed. I still have favourites set so I still don't know what killed it in the first place.

The speed didn't last so long though, less than 24 hours later it was sluggish again in all aspects - response to remote, movement through the epg, deleting recordings, setting recordings.

I decided to try low-power mode, on the basis that a cold boot ought to be near-equivalent to a power cycle. It certainly works, it's actually very nippy straight out of low-power standby, but a boot time of 80+ secs is something you need to be prepared for.

Apart from the sluggishness, it's otherwise a reliable machine, but I'm glad it's not my main one, I'll only be using it as an overspill recorder for those days when 6 tuners is only just enough ( I'm on the brink of cannibalising it for it's 320Gb drive though).

You need either the Humax HDR Fox-T2 or the Techinica Smart Box, as they both offer you what you want

I get this quite a lot , so much so I tend to watch with subtitles on. I've noticed on a couple of occasions it is more than the odd word missing and on rewinding I can find/watch the missing frames that it jumped over.

I think it occurs more regularly on channels 3 and 4. I'm not sure if it coincides with recording 2 channels at same time.

I'm hoping it is due to signal strength and it will go away after DSO. Or could it be a HDD problem ?

This problem occurred before and after recent update.

P.S I've found one small short lived advantage in the recent update - analogue comes on (to full strength) much quicker.

Maybe it is just me, but this has always been my experience of the T835 since day one. Keeping low power mode on is the best way to keep things nice and responsive. I don't think v4.6 is any slower in that respect - as uptime increases things do get slower, just as they did in all previous software versions (it was a little worse before v3.x even).

With everybody complaining about slowness, another factor is that pre-v3.4 software used to reboot at 3am every night, so even with low power mode off the slowness was minimized. v4.6 does not reboot at 3am anymore, so if you have low power mode off, then the speed is never going to get reset every 24 hours. It'll just get slower and slower, which is why low power mode really is a must. AFAIK, with v3.4 and above, software update checks are instead made directly after putting a box into standby.

When you say it keeps wanting to rescan, is it bringing up the first time installation menu all the time? If so, this can be caused by mainboard failure . The update wouldn't have done it, but failing solder joints under the processor will.

I would suggest specifically chosing first time installation from the menus, and letting it perform a channel scan. And if the region selection dialog pops up after scanning, make sure all changeable fields are set to "Any".

Unfortunately, the Vestel T7300 HD box suffers from relatively slow library loading and deletion too, at least with v6.3 software, otherwise I would recommend that.

In post #139 I reported that the problems seemed to have cleared following Tweenies suggestion, Sadly this turned out not to be the case and the box failed to record several programmes that night and I noticed that the Now & Next info on the information bar was not updating and then found that the EPG is not working as it should. When I start up and then enter the guide, items in the guide disappear and then some come back. Paging through the days show much of the guide being missing and it takes quite a long time to populate.

Pressing the button to bring the box out of standby takes around 40 seconds to bring the box live. I do not use the low power mode because of the long boot time and have for sometime had the boxes connected to a timer to power them off through the night and power on in the morning. This had avoided the normal slowdown experience.

Yesterday all of the tuning information disappeared and a message "service not available" required a power off and FTI to get stations back.

I have lost confidence in the software and would like to try reverting to 3.4 however after making up the lead as advised at Futaura I cannot get the box to respond to the Hyperterminal. Can Zill confirm that he wired as shown on the diagram since pin 3 on a serial connection is normally transmitted data and the Futaura diagram has pin 3 labelled as RX which presumably means received data.

This is not the only box I have and I still use a digihome with version 13 which works pretty well.

With regard to Chrisardy asking about HD boxes I bought a Philips HDT 8520 at John Lewis when they were on offer a few weeks ago at £130 and I have been pretty impressed with it even though there has been some negative comments by other users. Unfortunately none seem to be perfect!

I can confirm that I have connected my serial cable exactly as described in the SCART->RS232 pinout diagram. i.e. using only pins 2, 3 and 5 of the (female) serial connector.

The "Download Instructions (PDF)" file details exactly how to setup Hyperterminal for the transfer, although personally I used the CuteCom terminal application as I don't have MS Windows.

When you first power up the T835 you should see info about the bootloader in Hyperterminal, then you need to power cycle the T835 to initiate the file transfer. Wait at the end for a minute or so and you should see "OK" to confirm that the new file has loaded correctly.

Is there a specific reason why you suggest setting the region selection options to "any"? Is this in response to the suggestion from some posters than this prevents the freezing issue? If so this doesn't cure the freezing issue for me. I believe using the region selection options would be of benefit to users receiving signals from more than one transmitter which, produces duplicate Channels.

Colin

Yep - it's a case of try what has been suggested here, because I'm afraid I'm all out of ideas myself . I'm also wondering if those who are getting corrupt recordings too have their boxes tuned to the correct transmitter. I'm kinda lucky as I can only pick up one transmitter, but if the box is choosing incorrectly for others, then maybe that could be a problem.

It's hard to say for sure because I'm not privy to the change logs, but I don't see why Vestel would have messed too much with the software apart from adding the new stuff like TRD support, trailer booking, and recommendations in the EPG (at least, I think that is new ). And I don't yet understand why it is behaving pretty well on the 3 boxes I have here right now, and so badly on others. Anyway, it seems a lot changed between v4.1 and v4.6, compared to between v3.4 and v4.1.

Ok, I've seen the "Service is not running" message tonight - seems one of the tuners stopped responding, because if I open PIP and press SWAP, live tv works ago, but then the PIP doesn't work anymore.

At the time I had low power and auto power down off, and the box had been booted for 14 hours or so. I suspect this problem and most reported here may be due to "long" uptimes. So, for those with problems, do you have low power mode off? And how many hours does it take for the problems to start after plugging the box in, or switching on from low power standby? If, for example, you plug the box in at 9am with low power mode off and it is in standby and then don't turn it on until 9pm, then this counts as a 12 hour uptime, because the box running even in standby (when low power is off).

When using v4.6, the only sensible advice is that you must have low power mode and auto power down on, otherwise the box is likely to exhibit problems and possibly crash.

I also have experienced the un-usually long EPG population time and "service not running" banner, as well as freezing and acute slowdown.

I have experienced dismal performance from my box today. I set 12 one-off recordings to be performed this afternoon in addition to the 55 I already had on Series Record for a later time. So a higher number of recordings than usual. The unit was set to LP standby for the duration of the 12 recordings (although for most of the time the unit was probably not fully in standby as it was recording). I brought the unit out of standby in the early evening. From the start it was obvious that there were problems with the recordings and the unit was virtually un-usable due to freezing and/or very slow response. Playing back the later recordings of the 12 displayed serious problems. On 4 of these, playback ran normally for between 30 and 60s then the video froze but remained on the screen and the sound continued. Then a minute or so later the sound was subject to intense distortion for a few seconds and then went silent. A second or so later the playback stopped and the unit reverted to the Library display. This behaviour was duplicated exactly on repeated play-back of the same recordings immediately and also later in the evening after the unit had been re-booted and was otherwise operating normally. So the issue was clearly with the recordings and not just playback.

On those later recordings that were playable in a fashion throughout their full duration any navigation commands were extremely slow to respond (10 to 30s delay typically). Not only was the first response to button presses delayed but other steps in the procedure generated by the software were also delayed by similar amounts. For example pressing the Skip button resulted in a delay before the video and audio skipped forward the appropriate amount but then the Skip icon (displayed in the top LH corner of the screen) and the INFO banner remained displayed for extended periods of time.

The overall behaviour gave me the impression that the processor was occupied in doing some spurious operations for most of the time leaving little ability to perform it's proper functions.

I will have to dig out one of my more trusty T825 units at this rate.

Colin

I only receive signals from one transmitter so can't be the reason for issues in my case.

Colin

I have always had the Low Power mode enabled since the recent update. Although the unit has been generally very responsive initially after coming out of LP Standby and remained so for at least several hours I have experienced freezing within a few minutes of admittedly intensive navigation of the user interface. I have usually (maybe always) experienced the first freeze whilst navigating within the Timers list.

Colin

Haven't been here for a while, but was surprised last week when I noticed a change of screen aspect ratio when booting up the box. When resetting to 16:9, noticed that the software version had changed to 4.6. This is an upgrade from the previous 4.1 that we were running. Haven't had to retune, reset Timers or anything.

Clearly this upgrade has caused problems for a number of people. Can't say that we've noticed the same problems. We use the T835 as a fill in, with our DigitalStream as our main PVR. We use Low Power Standby, have over 100 programs in the Library, so boot up time is slow, can't say that it seems noticeably different on 4.6. We also have few Timers.

Possibly the only noticeable change in 4.6 is that general navigation/remote response may be a bit more sluggish, but it's really not that different. Also the update coincides with me setting up a Harmony 650 remote, so wasn't sure if this was related too. I think there may be an issue with the interactive services/visual display being a bit intermittent on radio, but we used to see odd quirks with radio on 4.1 too, and not using radio that often its difficult to judge. At least the audio stream seems fine, so not really bothered about this.

If Vestel do issue any further tweaks/fixes, would be nice if thay could also:
- Sort the Timers list by date/time (seems totally random)
- Tidy up the Library sorting e.g. sorting by Name, still leave a random Date order, would be more sensible to sort by Name + Date

Cheers
MarkA

From what I remember from making up my cable, the diagram shows the pin layout of one plug from the front and the other from the rear. My first attempt didn't work either, so I looked very carefully at the plugs and could just see some numbers against the pins on the plastic moulding and that's when I realised that serial plug was wired back to front. Swapped the cables round and it worked a treat.

Hope this helps!

Cheers
MarkA

I retract my earlier statement as had another occurrence of freezing last night when toggling subtitlles, and also slow response selecting a program to play from library.

I agree with Futaura that sluggishness seems to get worse the longer the box is on, as tested it this morning and it seems ok.

However, initial load time is 90 seconds

I stand by my earlier statements that more disadvantages than advantages(none) with this release.

It is astonishing if this action is by design! It is easy to exceed a 12 hour uptime if Timed recordings are set for during the day. The T835 will only go into LPM if no buttons have been pressed and no recordings are imminent.

My Linux PCs have uptimes measured in months, rather than hours. PVRs should also be able to achieve similar uptimes with no problems. Shoddy software?

I didn't say it was by design. It's just that LPM is the only real way to avoid the bugs as best as possible. But, I agree about the uptimes because the box itself runs Linux of course .

Tonight I'll look up my box to my computer and see if the stats and processor loadings look abnormal once the problems have started. I agree with Colin that it would seem likely one of the background processes (there are about 50 normally, IIRC) has gone rogue - perhaps it could be a memory leak, because if the box is running out of ram, crazy things like this could happen. I have already mentioned the problems (well, symptoms) to Vestel, but until I have some specific details as to how to reproduce the problems, timeframes, etc, my reports will not be much use.

Can't speak for the 650, but I've tried the 300 and it's easily the slowest remote I've ever encountered. It actually queues your keypresses and sends them in sequence at 1/2 sec intervals between them, so it's never possible to operate menus faster than that. I gather your 650 is software programmable though so you may be able to reduce or remove these delays. My 300 is only online programmable and there's no such option.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

We did not have to do a rescan today after turning the low power option off and it doesn't seem any slower yet.

When we did the rescans it did not give us the option to refuse I think it was the first time installation menu, we left all the options as any.

Will not change now until after the Feb 8th switch over when we will have to rescan. Will that delete all our timers?

Have now ordered a Humax HDR Fox-T2 although I haven't been able to see one working.

By the way your boot up times of 80 to 90 seconds are very quick ours was taking 2 or 3 minutes minimum.

I don't understand why delete takes so long on these boxes, are the processors multitasking? If they are why doesn't the software do the deletion in spare time after it has been requested and let you get on with something else?