What with failed recordings; corrupt hard-drives and generally worse machines I think we can all agree that v21 has been a bit of a disaster...

Humax have left us with a PVR that we can't trust to record - bit pointless really. Humax, get it sorted, and quickly please.

I must be on a different planet!

On balance the benefits offered by SR are excellent and the other minor tweaks are all appreciated. Nothing in my experience is worse than it was before. I find the convenience and speed of set-up of SR is amazing compared with the status ante quo! My wife is particularly impressed.

If you don't like the latest version, why don't you go back to a previous one - then you'll be in the same position as when you first purchased ..... a bit like the vast majority of buyers of electronic equipment when the manufacturer moves things on!

Barry

I have to agree with you youngbaz.
My Hummy is so much better than it was 2 years ago.
I have no problems with recordings, series links, AR etc.
The only problem I do have is that weve got too much stuff on the hard drive to watch.
mcin I do hope that you have emailed Humax with your complaint as otherwise its a bit pointless moaning to them on a public forum that that they will probably not see.

I think it is fair to say that all is not 100% right with the Hummy.

There quite a number of people reporting lock-ups, a number that miss the first few seconds, or worse the last few seconds of a recording.

Strange happenings with the recording list, now you see it, now you don't.

Lots more HDDs that need formatting, not had that since the early days, why is it back again?

Some may be due to the TV companies, some not; but what is happening?

It is no good burying your head in the sand, maybe it has not happened to you yet ...... but will it happen in the future?

Just think how you would feel if you were suffering from these problems now ...........

Has anyone reported disk corruption while running v21 *after* they done a disk refomat? If they have I must have missed it. My feeling is that any corruption predates installation of v21 but this new firmware is less tolerant of problems prevously ignored.

Yes there have been a small number of reports but at a level where the cause may be hardware rather than software.

Oh and my recording of the Bill to-night is 1 min 11 secs long ...... another strike!

I've only had my 9200 a few months. It came with the 2.0 firmware and was updated to 2.1 at the first available code drop. I don't use it as heavily as my V+ box but I've had no problems with series links though I'm primarily using it for the BBC/C4/E4 channels so perhaps they provide more accurate data. Some stuff does start and stop late and early but nowhere near as bad as the V+ and I must just be more tolerant of this because missing even five minutes of the start of a show wouldn't bother me and cutting off the credits is no major problem for me either. I don't think I've had a show cut short so severely that it registered with me but I CAN understand why some people would get upset. There are a lot of easily upset people out there, after all.

It's not like the hummy is a toaster, it has an incredibly complicated job to do that is reliant on a lot of variables. Also, TV is not life or death.

I can totally disagree... its by far the best version to date...

Yes, I fitted a new disk while on 1.00.06 and things went mucho doolally a few weeks after the OTA upgrade to 1.00.21

I've now reformatted again and fingers are crossed.

The UI improvements in v21 are very welcome, but I do wish
1) It would use two tuners for recordings that overlap due to padding
2) It wouldn't totally fail to record stuff when overlaps prevent it getting the first few minutes/seconds.
3) Humax would fix the remote bug that causes commands to be repeated when you use an unrelated remote.
4) That USB wasn't borked, but I've done the mod so it doesn't really bother me that much.

The other thing that makes me fairly immune to the Hummy missing programmes is that we've got 8Mb/s broadband so can download anything we miss.

Ian

SL and AR have not missed a beat for me. Just about everything I've recorded using them has started at the opening credits, and the endings have all been in place. One or two have started a few seconds early, but I can live with that.

We are getting intermittent lockups which is a pest. It seems to be centred around the BBC News at Six (which we record each evening to watch at our leisure so we can skip through, for example, the US President stuff), but I've just tried another reset to defaults and this time, instead of deleting channels after the rescan, I let it save all the channels then used the "Edit Channel" option to take them out later. May or may not work .. who knows.

One question on that point: I delete all the teletext channels (numbered around 100), but leave BBCi (105 is it?) and all the 300 channels. Is that a problem?

We have two and both are fine. No issues at all. One 9200 we have had since Oct 2005 and with every firmware it gets better and better.

Only issue we have is series link with ch5, ch5 doesnt seem to support series

Wanted to edit the above to add ..

We went from 06 to 21 using the OTA update 'cos I'm too lazy to download. Our only non-default setting is the adskip and instant replay, at 60s and 15s respectively.

Also, we've not noticed the box being particularly slow to respond to the remote which seems to be quite common for others that experience lockups.

Rather than being a firmware problem couldn't this "just" de down to a bad batch of hard drives? When a PC has a bad drive it tends to become sluggish to respond as well.

You think wrongly. I don't have experience of previous versions but my experience so far has been one of reliability. The UI has a questionable (to me) design decisions but the operation has been flawless. I haven't even experienced any significant missed starts/ends.

I disagree with the OP as well. I have had a few oddities with late starts and recordings made of repeat transmissions (Torchwood) but all have been reported by other users so I am putting those down to finger trouble by the broadcasters rather than bugs in the 9200.

I am frustrated by the slapdash way that the non-BBC channels seem to operate AR - or not implement it at all in the case of 5 but as most of my recordings are from the BBC that may explain why I am happier than the OP.

I can just about understand why we can't pad AR programmes but I still wish we could have been given an option at reservation time to book using AR or global padding criteria rather than having to manually adjust the unreliable channels. However despite that gripe I also feel that I have a box that I now could not manage without and which I would recommend to others,

Any chance that you could list any non default settings that you use? This thread demonstrates that many people have a good experience with this firmware version but some have a very different experience and I am still struggling to understand why.

I don't understand the need for padding with AR. If AR data is wrong then that's down to the broadcaster, who then needs a boot up the backside. What I would like to see is some regulation and fines introduced if broadcasters do not send accurate data. I would like to see SL and AR data mandatory on DTT , made part of the broadcasters license and enforced .
This way its dealt with at source.

Disagree with the OP.

Had mine for nearly 5 months. No corruptions, and can only remember two failed recordings out of several hundred (one, i think, was caused by the broadcaster changing the programme ID, and one was where 3 SL progs were scheduled for the same time which will happen when SL progs move around the schedule each week).

Had a few C4 progs miss their start/end but the situation seems to be much better now than back in December.

The box has never locked up.

All in all the best £230 I've spent in a long time!

In a perfect world you would be completely correct. However there are several channels that haven't bothered to implement AR yet (dave and 5 are 2) where I do record and know from bitter experience that picking up the EPG listed times will result in missed endings more often than not and it's a PITA to have to adjust each booking when I make it.

Is this some new algebra? I always thought: (-3 and 5 are 2) !!

I think it is very easy to get a warped view of peoples experiences on this type of forum as people are much more prone to posting problems than their good experiences unless (as this thread shows) the OP is rather over critical and all the loyal hummy owners jump to its defence. I agree the humax has some quirks but show me a PVR that doesn't. In my experience it is a superb piece of kit and every software upgrade has made it even better. I have had virtually no problems with AR and SR except a few seconds missed occassionally but never enough to spoil the programme.
I think we have to bear in mind that many of our boxes are approaching (or over) 2 years old now and the hard drive is under pretty heavy use especially those owners that leave it on 24/7 as it constantly buffers what ever it is tuned to.
Many of the reported problems seem to be down to incorrectly transmitted signals from the broadcaster or tired hard drives giving read/write errors as you would expect on a PC if it was heavily used.
I have noticed a few odd glitches recently and am trying to empty my HD to do a format but if this doesn't cure it then I am quite happy to fit a new HD. I think the cost of a new and possibly bigger HD every couple of years is still pretty good value for money and worth doing.
Overall the best thing I bought since my Humax 8000 about 4 years ago.

I think that AR and SR problems are broadcaster-created is accepted.
That very many users have experienced HDD corruption problems since the .21 upgrade it's to be expected that .21 will bear the blame. There seems little else in common between all corruption reports than that the symptoms appeared on .21 even if the problems were previously present.
A reformat is not desirable to users who've carefully collected recordings and have to choose between losing those all now or trying to watch them whilst risking further symptoms.

Just a thought for the love it hate it brigade..... there are two hardware revisions, 1.0 & 1.1 - does anyone know the differences?

1.0 ... original nice quiet 9200Ts

1.1 ... modern nasty noisy 9200XXXs