I think you may have hit upon a likely reason. I wonder if it is a problem with the processor speed of the 9200 and 9300. This reminds me of a very similar problem with early hard disks (MFM & RLL types) . We had to do a low level format on these and set up the interleave. The interleave set the number of full rotations of the disk required to read all of the sectors on a track. So if you had a fast disk drive and a slow controller you would have a high interleave. The controller would then read 1 sector skip a set number (whilst storing the read data) and then read the next sector.

If you put in too low an interleave value then the time required to read a full track went up greatly.

eg 7 sectors (has to be a prime number) with an interleave of 2 means that data is stored on sectors 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6 in that order and 2 rotations of the disk are required.

If the interleave was set at 1 but the processing took too long then the controller would read sector 1, miss sector 2 and have to wait for the disk to go round again when it would read sector 2 and then be too late for sector 3. The disk would have to go round 7 times.

I can imagine that there is a signal to clear a block of EPG data but the PVR is unable to process the data quick enough to fill it all back in. When it comes round again it would be able to fill in a bit more whilst clearing other bits of EPG.

This is my two pence worth but I have no idea either.

I very much hope you're wrong, in the nicest possible way, as faults related to ageing hardware have a horrible ring of permanence.

But, if you are correct, would owners who have/haven't upgraded their hard drives be a significant variable, in case differing spin speeds & controllers could vary the timing issues you speculate could be the problem?

There's an interesting post on the toppy.org board about a holey EPG, but affecting the Topfield PVR. The post mentions that the EPG slots have been increasing in number over the years and that the player has possibly reached a point where it can't cope with the additional slots. I'm not going to suggest that this is definitely the problem for the Humax machines as well, but it's a possibility. Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, but it's still worth noting.

BTW, the poster does say that this happened back in May for the Topfield, but many here will say it affected them last month with the Humax machines, thereby saying that this is unlikely to be the same thing. However, I reported this problem with the Humax back in April/May here when Crystal Palace went DSO, and so did some others, so it might correspond. Still, as I said above, it's not necessarily the problem, but it's worth considering.

I've had a holey EPG on and off on my 9200T months before CP DSO.

I'm not sure the statement that it 'can't cope' with the number of slots really explains why EPG entries disappear and reappear. It might as well be because they keep changing the way the system works.

Did I dream this or did Humax at one point update the software so as to cache the EPG on the disk? I'm sure I remember there was a problem with the EPG taking a long time to populate when first switched on. Humax provided an update which saved the EPG to disk making a subsequent restart re-population of the EPG much quicker.

Has there been a change to the format of the EPG that makes it incompatible with the current Humax software?

If the answers are "yes it is cached" and "there has been no change" then I cannot understand why many people with Humaxes are having this EPG problem.
Just to reiterate, other people with different PVRs and my USB dongle seem to show that there is no problem with the EPG - the problem is somewhere in the Humax PVR.

If the only change is that there are more channels with EPG contents and not enough memory in the Humax to cope, then there is some serious software development required!

Yes, the current .26 software caches the EPG to disk.

I have not had this problem until the 17th October update, but it is now a big issue with huge gaps in EPG. Tyne Tees from Pontop Pike.

Caching of the EPG was introduced in a previous software version, .23 about 2 years ago. Version .26 was introduced on the 9150 and 9300 (the 9200 was not included) to improve other issues (see link here).

I doubt that it is because of system/epg changes.

The reason is that I have two 9200T and neither have this issue.
One of them is tuned to Sudbury and the other is tuned to Crystal Palace.


On my Sudbury 9200T I only have the SD PSBs tuned in. On my Crystal Palace 9200T I have more but not the full complement as the internet, pay, shopping, half the radio and half the data chanels are not saved when tuning.

I’ll retune the Crystal Place 9200T tomorrow and save everything to see if I can get this issue.

This is only a workaround, but the '+1' delayed channels seems to still appear correctly in the EPG whilst the 'live' variants of Ch3, 4 & 5 may be blank. Not a cure, but an easier way to keep going.

But it would be really nice to hear something, however small, from Humax......

I did a retune a day or so ago and lost my recording schedule - anyone get this?

Everyone gets this, it's the way it is. I'm surprised you've not read about it on this forum and others. The logic being you can't have a reservation for a channel you've deleted (during the retune).

It has just occurred to me that with the old software old channel delete was not included in the Automatic Search. Can anyone remember if the schedule was lost then?

The recording schedule was not lost on old versions of the software for the SD boxes. However no attempt was made to check it or repair its validity after a retune so you could have what looked like a valid schedule but recordings would fail until the item was deleted and then reinstated.

The custom firmware for the HD boxes has functionality to save and restore the schedule, including correcting the data as necessary after a retune so it is possible and I find it disappointing that Humax haven't implemented similar functionality.

Thanks Martin. It's not just Humax though, my Panasonic DVD/VCR recorder loses it's recording schedule after the equivalent of an Automatic Search, although it does give an on-screen warning that this will happen.

Since a retune can involve a channel changing its multiplex, offset, LCN and name all at once, it's not clear how software can automatically determine which channel to attach the former reservation data to.

Clearly there are circumstances where no repair can be done but the far more common case is that for many reservations nothings has changed.

I did the re-tune on Saturday and the EPG is still full of holes a few days in. Not good!

I have just received a response from Humax support regarding my report of a holey EPG. I haven't had chance to do it myself as I will need to make a note of all my scheduled recordings beforehand.

Their response is listed below - they have used Bilsdale details for retuning.



I will report on the success or not.

It won't work. I've tried several times without success.

I've just tried to manually set some recordings on my parents' 9150T (bearing in mind the clock change this weekend so I had to change the auto clock before setting and then change it back again afterwards) and failed miserably because Saturday and Sunday on ITV1 was almost non-existent. Their machine has been manually tuned too.

I have just received another email from Humax asking for my postcode and telling me to do a manual retune.

I keep explaining that I have done manual retunes, and can receive all available channels and that I have no channels in the 800 series, so the problem is not that I cannot receive programmes, but that the EPG doesn't work.

They can't seem to grasp this fact..

Maybe your clever technical solutions can persuade them to look further into it.

I don't know if there's any difference between searching for channels with no aerial connected, and deleting them all via the menu, but the manual multiplex selection procedure thereafter is the same one I always follow.

If this is all Humax have to say after this long and the length of this thread, I'm worried.

The situation is beyond a joke. Bog standard reply from Humax which has already been tried by some folk and found not to work.

I must be one of the fortunate ones that does actually have a full EPG without holes.
I did a retune at the weekend for the channel changes and everything's been fine so far.

Lucky indeed! However, annoying as it is, I'm not sweating too much over the holey EPG with the Humax: my new 1TB TiVo box arrives on 03/11/12 along with the full Sky Sports package and ESPN. Weekends will never be the same again!

Tried a few times and doesn't work. For the day it'll have a full EPG, then the next day it'll get holes.

Messing with the clock always ends in tears, simply check any reservation for next week after the daylight saving change. If you've got a reservation over Saturday night/Sunday morning simply leave the Hummy ON so that it knows the correct time throughout the night.