I've just bought one of these refurbished for 35ukp and thought I'd have a go at removing all the TUTV rubbish from it.

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/f...dyokel/epg.jpg

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/f...kel/custom.jpg

Hopefully it's going to stay that way.
We'll see if tomorrow's EPG update will wipe out my work...

Fredd

How did you do this - I never use and don't intend to use the topup tv programs.

Also where did you buy for £35! Mine cost £89.99 about 4 months ago!

Daz

This just looks like a format has been done without then doing a "scan for channels" (do the scan for channels first if it hasn't been done before - ie. with a new box, then do an HD format but don't do a channel scan afterwards)


The TopUp 14-day EPG will not be loaded however, the OP will just have the 7-day Freeview EPG without series link.


These boxes are available as refurbs on Ebay for £29.99 + £5 post. The sellers are apparently TopUp themselves.

The Ebay name is something like "The DTR People"

I did indeed get it from 'The_DTR_People'.

I've hacked the InView EPG script to remove the TUTV channel bar items and the adverts, but kept the EPG update.
Hopefully to prevent the next update overwriting my new script, I've made it read-only.

Tomorrow will tell if the update actually takes notice of the file permissions.

Fredd

Please tell all!

So basically connect up the HD as slave in a desktop PC? Is Linux required to read the files or is it readable from WinXP file system? (NT FS isn't it)

Right, this is very early days and what I've done might not work fully.

I chucked the disc in a PC and booted Linux.
The disc contains 3 partitions. All are marked as ext2 format, but the second one is infact swap.
The 3rd partition contains the .trp files which make up the recordings. Guides for converting these into something useful can be found elsewhere.
The 1st partition contains a number of directories:
/inview
/inviewepg
/inviewloc
/library
/message
/schedule

The 'messages' you receive can be found in the /message directory encoded as single frame mpegs.

In the /inview directory is a file called 'script' which is an odd tagged format that I havn't quite fully decoded yet, but it contains an entry for each channel in the TUTV bar with information about how much disk it takes up, LCN and pointers to files in the /inview/usr directory for the icons to be used. At the end, it has references to the advert images that get displayed on the top bar these are also found in the /inview/usr directory.

What I've done is chopped the script file short after the inital tags which dictate EPG Session start time and end time, and then changed the permissions on the file so the 'script' file shouldn't be overwritten when then new batch of advert images are downloaded.

Hopefully, this will allow the 14 day EPG update to happen, but still get rid of the adverts and TUTV bar.

Thanks for that info, TopUp are quite devious though in their desire to get everyone watching adverts and they also read these forums!

I will have a look at things myself at some point.

Is that the right name? Nearest I can find is The DTR Store, £49.99 plus £5 postage, but includes 1 month Anytime. Is this the same store but a different deal?

Yes, the refurbs were available from the the DTR Store. They had some at £29.99 +£5 P&P. Must be sold out at the moment.

I think they were repairs (more than likely hard drive or power supply)

The £49.99 ones are described as pristine used.


TopTV also sell them as brand new at £79.99/£99.99 on another Ebay store.


This thread briefly mentioned them:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=913220

Bahh.
Slowly my 14 days advance epg is dropping days.
However the TUTV bar and the ads havn't arrived.

I'm guessing that just chopping the script file hasn't worked, and I really need to understand the file format a little better, and probably work out how to understand how the CRC works too.

So, back to collecting data and trying to understand it.

Fredd

Cheers, I'll keep an eye out for the £29.99 ones. I've never been keen on the 14-day epg. The possibility of hacking it to use the 8-day freeview one permanently is appealing.

What was the file suffix?... If you can find it there is a version of Open Office for Linux somewhere on the Openoffice.org site. This has a built in file converter that might handle it. Ther must be another script somewhere that handles the Freeview EPG. Pity TUTV aren't forthcommiong about the USB port on the box, this could be a way around taking the drive out.