Daylight saving for TMS Toppies

[JPP]

It appears that my Timers that have been sent out by ICETV have already been adjusted one hour back to allow for the change over of one hour forward this Sunday. Note that all Timers from Sunday onwards are early by one hour.

This is a welcome change and certainly a lot simpler (i.e. you have nothing to change at all) which is a far cry from the procedure outlined in the email sent our by ICETV today which advocates a complete fresh install which includes doing a rescan of services and re-instatement of all your preferences and passwords.

If a Factory reset is needed, you can do a SAVE settings before doing a restore to Fact defaults and then do a Restore of Saved settings after. This will clear the ICETV cache. All you need to do after this is a Resend of Timers from ICETV. the time should be automatically adjusted on the Toppy if you have had it set on AUTO with Daylight Savings ON. At least, this has how it worked for me last year at least.

Note btw, that the last Timer entry is NOT an ICETV one (it shows as WL which is a WeekLy timer - ICETV's are One Time timers) which is why it shows up as the correct starting time. BUT, the Toppy takes care of that itself during the changeover.

So, for locally set Timers, there's nothing that has to be done  .

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

The even better news is that the next firmware that Topfield releases will include an option to clear the IceTV cached data which will make it even easier.

[paulgraham]

The even better news is that the next firmware that Topfield releases will include an option to clear the IceTV cached data which will make it even easier.

Hi Daniel, I know you don't work for Topfield, but any idea when this might be released?

Cheers, Paul.

[JPP]

Now that Daniel has let the cat out of the bag, I can say that it's in the current ICETV Beta FW, but it's not quite ready yet for public release  .

[JPP]

The even better news is that the next firmware that Topfield releases will include an option to clear the IceTV cached data which will make it even easier.

The next step should then logically be to have the Toppy automatically perform a Cache clear on DLS changeover time  . Then we truly have a fully automated mode which apparently from reading the ICETV recent e-mailout already exists in the Strong and a couple of other PVRs.

[JPP]

Hmmm...this is all very fascinating....just turned on my 2400 Toppy and....

Firstly, my clock has automatically adjusted itself. This is on a 2400 running the public Mar 2010 FW. I had DLS on AUTO.

But, my ICETV timers are now one hour behind - they didn't re-align themselves as I thought they would.

On the other hand, my locally set timer (an EPG/Timer harvesting time slot) is still OK, so it was automatically adjusted through the Toppy's firmware.

I'm going to wait for an hour now to see if ICETV is going to fix the issue automatically.

I deleted the Tropic of Cancer WL timer at the bottom of the Timer list last night btw, as I ended up with 2 timers for the same program - one that I had set from JE earlier and another other that came through later from ICETV as I had subsequently also set a timer for this program via my iPhone ICETV App (and forgotten I had).



There is one other thing I should report which I can't figure out for the moment.

Last night I tried to set a timer for a movie (the Great Escape on ABC2 which started at 93.30pm and ended at 12:15am, via JustEPG. I attempted to set it at 9:10pm. But, it came back with the message that the program had already started and set the timer for the remainder of the movie.

I then tried setting it via the Toppy's EPG and this time there were no problems getting the start and finish times right.

Not sure what to make of this just yet..............I can see that the program went past 12 midnight, but it was NOT going past the official 2am changeover time......

the EPG has also adjusted itself automatically as you can see.

[JPP]

Well, nothing happened wrt ICETV timers, so I deleted them one by one and did a resend of the website. Now all fine

Notes for this DLS changeover: (Toppy 2400 running March 2011 FW).

1. I did NOT do a Factory Reset
2. The Time was correctly updated by the Toppy  (was set to AUTO DLS)
3. Local Timers updated by themselves correctly
4. ICETV timers, which had been sent out with earlier starting times (by one hour) did NOT update at all and had to be sent out again

So, the strategy to set/send out ICETV start times one hour earlier failed in this round. Perhaps if they had been left at the proper time, nothing would have needed to be done at all.

All is well now as seen below.

[dippy]

JPP,

Glad to hear you got it working. However, as a cautionary note to other readers, we do NOT recommend you use this method to fix the wrong timers on the Topfield. Don't delete them from your Topfield and click on 'resend all recordings' from our website. The reason why is if you delete the timers on the Topfield, it sometimes sends a message to our website that you don't want to record those programs at all, and once that message is sent, those episodes will never be resent.

Our recommended way of fixing the wrong IceTV timers after the daylight savings change is to factory reset your Topfield using the below instructions:

http://support.icetv.com.au/entries/20177028-how-do-i-clear-out-the-cached-guide-and-force-an-update

David
IceTV Technical Support

[JPP]

Fair comment David. But, how does the manual per timer deletion differ from a factory reset? In both cases the timers are forcefully deleted without the ICETV server knowing about the deletion.

I guess the issue arises when you do a manual deletion and the ICETV server just happens to be up loading a timer schedule to the Toppy at the same time? But again, this can arise using either method to delete the current timers.

I'm not trying to be difficult here - I just want to get this DLS changeover scenario procedure to an absolute minimum - going through the whole factory reset operation - which is essentially a fresh install the way it has been outlined in the ICETV procedure - is just bizarre and the sooner this gets improved upon so that it's fully automated, the better. Heaven help you if you're away from home during the changeover the way it currently operates.

It would appear from results so far, that if ICETV had have sent out the timers set for programs occurring after DLS with the correct starting times, the whole DLS process would have gone OK without any user intervention. Again this is for the 2400 model running the current March 2011 public FW.

[dippy]

JPP,

Deleting the timers on the Topfield and doing a factory reset are not the same thing. If you manually delete the timers on the Topfield, it will give a 'delete' signal to our IceTV servers for those episodes after about 1/2 hour. And if that delete signal is sent, we'll never schedule that episode again - even if you ask us to resend timers. A factory reset will remove the timers without the signal being sent.

That's why we recommend you factory reset. While it's a pain to have to do, it's the safest way to update your Topfield. We'd love to have an easier way to do it - particularly those of us in support who need to talk customers through the factory reset steps twice a year.

Believe me, the last thing we want to do is put our customers through more hassles than necessary, and have already tried the other, less time consuming, methods for dealing with daylight savings changes. They all have their own set of problems. If an easier method existed, that's what we would be telling our customers to do. Hopefully with the new firmware due soon it will be fixed (or at least a lot easier to handle).

Finally, we can't change the time of programs we sent to our customers' boxes as you suggested because it all depends on the timezone setting on the box. Lots of users have manual timezones set and we have no way of knowing when that setting is changed by the customer. We need that exact timing to know when to start sending the different timed programs.

[JPP]

JPP,

Deleting the timers on the Topfield and doing a factory reset are not the same thing. If you manually delete the timers on the Topfield, it will give a 'delete' signal to our IceTV servers for those episodes after about 1/2 hour. And if that delete signal is sent, we'll never schedule that episode again - even if you ask us to resend timers. A factory reset will remove the timers without the signal being sent.

Thanks for the heads up on this dippy.

I guess in my case I was quick enough (well within the half hour) to avoid having the Toppy send the Delete signal to ICETV. I appreciate that some people might be a bit slower or get waylaid/interrupted in the process which can then lead to the Program Timer Delete scenario you mention.

The only improvement then to the "full" DLS procedure you've outlined, is to do the Save and Restore Settings operation. This at least avoids having to enter all your setting again which is the most "painful" part of the procedure as outlined. In other words do a Save Settings>Then a Factory Reset>Then Restore Settings. Doing it this way is pretty painless and takes but a few seconds, also ensuring of course that the Time is correct as you've outlined in your procedure.