Please note that I'm posting this simply out of frustration; I don't expect any solutions to these problems.
I'm one of the zillions of analog TV owners who ended up with one of these DTV converter boxes. For the most part, it's worked well. Picture and sound are fine, and it has decent software to navigate and choose channels.
But there are definitely some flaky aspects to its behavior. Most obvious lately has been the way that it "forgets" what time it is, or at least what the correct hour is. For the last few days it's been consistently off by exactly one hour, both in its display of the current time and in the time of "now" and "next" show times.
I actually called Zenith today about this problem. Of course, it wasn't long into the call that I was told "By the way, we don't support this product anymore". Not terribly surprising, I guess, given that this was basically a transitional device at the dawn of DTV.
Other flakiness exists. Many times, while scrolling through the "Simple Guide" menu, the information given for a given channel is either totally missing ("No Program Information"), or is wildly inaccurate, for instance showing a show that aired 5 hours previously.
The software seems pretty badly designed. Anyone else noticed these problems?
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Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism
Mine does those things too! I blame the television station: that's where the converter gets the time and scheduling info. Otherwise, the Zenith converter does a great job for me ... far superior to the crummy box I bought from Walmart.
Of course Zenith doesn't suppport it, it is a piece of chinese made crap... (sorry if that insults you, and yes I know you can't buy a quality one either.)
Well, how about some interesting comments? Would you be interested in those?
I've had good luck with both of mine. (One is an Insignia--Best Buy-- variant.) I've stopped using all of the ones I have, primarily because digital TV has been a fiasco around these parts, and it culminated in the coaxial cable breaking off of my antenna about a foot away from the top of the tower.
I tried very basic analog cable for a while after that, but I finally said "forget it" when I realized that I hadn't turned the TV on for more than a month. If I need to watch something, I've got an old 13" Zenith set with rabbit ears and a converter.
There's no hardware real-time clock in this unit. The clock runs as a process on the system CPU, and so it's probably not very accurate anyway.
(The CPU is, in case you were wondering, an ARM926EJS clocked at
200MHz.)
However, the firmware resets the clock *every time* you change channels. And when I was watching over the air digital broadcast TV, I discovered that most of the stations in this area don't even bother to broadcast the correct time. Only the PBS affiliate had it right. Others were off by minutes or hours. This would cause the program guide to be messed up.
(Why did I explore the Zenith converter so? I think Sam Goldwasser said it best on the SER FAQ: "It wasn't long before the workings of the TV were of more interest to me than the mostly stupid shows.")
I don't know. I find it surprising...but I've been inside mine and found that it has a flash ROM in place. It stands alone as the only converter box I've seen with one. I'm not sure how you'd deliver updated code to it, but they could fix the problem if they really wanted to. Maybe they'd do it over the air?
Yes, but they are definitely caused by stations broadcasting inaccurate time information. This messes up the program guide. If it bothers you, I think the only real fix is to complain to the stations that are broadcasting improper time data.
If I remember things right, there is a manual clock set function on the DTT-900/DTT-901. You could always try it and see...
After auditioning a lot of converter boxes, I found things that I didn't like about each one. In the end, I thought the Magnavox CECB was probably the best of any of them, although its feature set was a bit thin. The Zenith/LG unit came in second.
I actually drew up some crude designs for one of my own that solved all the shortcomings I saw in each unit. Of course, given how perfection is a secondary goal any more (if it even makes the list!), and how practically everything comes in from overseas, I'd expect that it wouldn't stand a chance if marketed on quality of experience alone...and there's so much I don't know how to do anyway.
Let me guess: You've just switched to daylight savings time, or you are about to?
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. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\\|/ \\|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
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Some stations mess up badly. One around here had the programming on
53-1 with no programming guide, while 53-2 had no program, but did have the guide. For about a week the local PBS station had the programs listed as an hour earlier than they really were, ie a program that actually came on at say 4pm was listed as 3pm.
On 10/17/2009 7:51 AM William R. Walsh spake thus:
"Not very accurate" is one thing; off by a whole *hour* is something else.
I'm sure this is the source of at least some of the problems, but not all. F'rinstance, one bizarre thing that happens occasionally is that the *channel* numbers on the Simple Guide are displayed wrong (e.g., Ch.
28-1 becomes Ch. 29-1, etc.). I don't think this is caused by erroneous info being transmitted by the station, but by the firmware getting confused.
I actually asked the guy specifically if they had any firmware updates available, and he said no, so it really is totally unsupported (well, aside from being able to ask the tech support guy questions).
Nope. The only clock function that can be set through the on-screen menu is whether daylight savings time is automatically set or not. No setting of the clock time is possible. Turns out that toggling the "auto" function on and off restores the proper time.
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Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism
The Tivax has an externally accessible port (serial?) to update the flash it has. Of course, there is no guarantee that anyone has ever debugged the flash update code (though I can't believe they would have gone through the expense of adding the extra connector if the interface didn't at least APPEAR to work).
I never had any expectation that the manufacturer would provide new flash images. However, I had hoped that the presence of the connector might entice someone to hack the box (since hardware accessibility seems to be the thing that inhibits most would-be hackers)
I suspect there is fault on both sides. I look at the design of the user interface in most of the converter boxes I evaluated and found they all seemed to have been "designed on the back of a napkin". And, often seem like they
*assume* the broadcasts would be perfect, available 100% of the time, etc.
That's an interesting idea. I've heard mostly good things about the Tivax converter. I've never happened to get one and try it out. For various reasons, I stuck to what the retail stores around here were carrying. I tried all of the readily available Apex Digital, Digital Stream, Insignia, GE/RCA, Magnavox, and Zenith converters. I finally arrived at the conclusion that the only real contenders were the Magnavox, Insignia/Zenith and (I forgot!) Digital Stream units.
(There was very little cost for this. I ordered coupons on the behalf of family members and got a different converter each time. And I bought one at list price.)
The GE/RCA unit, built around a Broadcom IC, was very slow to do anything and the firmware felt stupidly designed at best. Like "we don't care let's just see if can get this thing to the market". Two different Apex (Zoran powered) units worked fine for the most part, but I noticed a lot of noise on the RF output and both units had their remotes go stupid in the same way. The Zoran IC also gets *hot* in operation.
The DTT-901 has a populated set of header pins on the board. I don't know what they are for, maybe a JTAG? They sure *could* be.
Not if the timekeeping routine isn't getting enough CPU time!
Although...I really do think that this is a problem coming from the broadcasting station. You'd think that the station would care, as knowing the time is, ahh, kind of important for what they do.
It seems that there are two "channel numbers" in use here. One is the actual, real channel that is being broadcast on. The other (displayed by the DTT-901) is a "vanity" channel number. There's a station here that moved from their analog VHF channel of three to a digital channel # of 49. Punch in 49-1 or 49-2 on the DTT-901 and you go to 3-1 or 3-2. Interesting--and maybe something that the firmware really *does* lose track of!
I really thought they were still selling it, but maybe not. I haven't verified that. It's still on the Zenith web site.
Perhaps they don't have an easy way to upgrade the firmware and therefore they tell everyone that no such thing exists? It makes sense to me--and would keep users who are dangerous because they know words like "firmware" from bricking their converter.
Those of us who could handle it--or wouldn't mind trying--are left out in the cold. An unfortunate but understandable position.
Ah, yes, you are correct. Memory fade I guess. :-)
Digital TV, it seems, has finally eliminated what little interest I had in broadcast TV to begin with... (And yes, I know that doesn't mean it did for everyone.)
We ordered a pair of the Tivax boxes. Our "problems" (to date) seem mostly to be related to antenna choice and/or location. We are approx 12 miles as the crow flies from the *cluster* of broadcast towers (almost all of the stations transmit from this one complex). And, it is *almost* line-of-sight from our house to those towers (with the exception of a single tree).
Yet, the stations that we receive on one set are not the same as on the other set. E.g., 9-1 comes in on one set but not
9-3 while 9-3 comes in on the *other* set but not 9-1 (!)
The box runs warm. I'm sure the components inside are quite toasty! It is left on 24/7 since powering it off would mean having to turn off *two* devices (silly that the remote didn't learn how to talk to our TV!).
The remote is also a potential gripe as it is pretty crappy quality
*and* doesn't appear to be documented anyplace (i.e., using a "universal remote" is problematic as none of these have "codes" for "Tivax blahblahblah")
Most of the noticeable bugs in the Tivax have to do with the on-screen display (program guide, etc. -- there are two different functions that provide this information).
For example, you could be stepping through the list of upcoming programs on a particular station and suddenly the list falls back to "the current program" (i.e., at 10:12 it shows the 10:00 program followed by the 10:30, then 11:00, then 11:30... until there ARE NO MORE DATA AVAILABLE. Yet, while you are stepping through this list, you might find it redisplaying the data for the 10:00 show instead of the 11:30 show that *was* next in the list!)
You'd have to trace foils to see where they go. JTAG only needs a couple of pins...
For the program guide issues I have been seeing, it could simply be a problem of trying to skimp on resources (in the STB) and simply
*expecting* to be able to grab the data AT ANY TIME off the air (so why waste resourcces storing that internally?!)
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