New User - Topfield 2400 - Reservation Problems

[JPP]

Ok, it's now been about a week since I've had the 2400 and most things work well - very well in fact for a brand new release.

But, I think there are some issues to be solved wrt to the ICETV part of it. After some intial trouble as per one of my earlier posts in this thread, evrything seemed to be going OK. Tonight I've noticed though that I have just one reservation set for tomorrow, when if fact there should be two. The Web Interactive shows two full red dots, so that's telling me that they have been sent to the Toppy successfully. Additional Timers or reservation that had been set for following days are now not there anymore.

Now, I know that it's possible that ICETV have deliberately deleted these as there have been so many late program changes. But, I'm beginning to think that all is not yet fully debugged between ICETV and the Toppy. I would love to know when and how often the Toppy polls for the TV schedule and Reservation shedules (apart from start up). Unlike on the Wiz, there is no info about this on the Toppy. Could we please have this important info added on the menu?

Another thing that's often in error is the program info/description. Often it is incomplete and severely truncated. I can tell this is the case as I use ICETV Guide on my 5000 Toppy. It runs an ICETV TAP on the 5000 series.

Now, as the 2400 also supports TAPs, I wonder why ICE chose to embed their code in the Firmware rather than as a separate and readily upgradable TAP. That would allow a much faster upgrade path.

I would appreciate some feedback from ICETV on this and I've sent them a copy of this post.

I love btw how easy it is to monitor what's going on with this Toppy via its web interface 

[vincent]

I have had a few yellow triangles but overall has not been that bad.  But I do check to see what is happening daily.  I dont turn the machine off.  That way I can set timer from work.

I ran in manual time for a while and that caused issues with the start time of timers, ir they appeared as 6:02 and not 6:00pm.  Switched to auto time and that has resolved it self to a degree.  Would love prepadding.

I am getting issues with late changed to HD channels that is starting to get anoying, but I blame tv stations

[JPP]

I have had a few yellow triangles but overall has not been that bad.  But I do check to see what is happening daily.  I dont turn the machine off.  That way I can set timer from work.

I ran in manual time for a while and that caused issues with the start time of timers, ir they appeared as 6:02 and not 6:00pm.  Switched to auto time and that has resolved it self to a degree.  Would love prepadding.

I am getting issues with late changed to HD channels that is starting to get anoying, but I blame tv stations

Were these triangles (which supposedly comes from the PVR indicating a timer/reservation programming error/clash) a result of YOU making a mistake (too many programs for 2 tuners to handel) or did they come up when they shouldn't have?

[JPP]

I have had a few yellow triangles but overall has not been that bad.  But I do check to see what is happening daily.  I dont turn the machine off.  That way I can set timer from work.

I ran in manual time for a while and that caused issues with the start time of timers, ir they appeared as 6:02 and not 6:00pm.  Switched to auto time and that has resolved it self to a degree.  Would love prepadding.

I am getting issues with late changed to HD channels that is starting to get anoying, but I blame tv stations

When you say you set the timesr from work, is that via ICE or directly from the Toppy web interface as manual recordings?

[JPP]

I think I'm getting closer to the problem.

1. Last time I had success was after I changed the name of my Toppy and resent all the timers. I did the same this time just now and now the Toppy has received the new timers. It seems as if either the Toppy or ICE looses the device name token, either as a legitimate one or the name altogether.

2. Another theory I have is that ICE stops transmitting timers once the Toppy sends back a timer clash notification. My problems the second time began when I had set too many timers. Clearing some of them to delete any clashes and then resend them all didn't work. It wasn't until I renamed the Toppy and then resent them that I got success - the timers reappeared on the Toppy.

One thing this has established is that the Toppy does look for reservation updates more than on just power up as has already been noted by others. From this one brief experience above, I'd say it's around every half hour which would tie in with the polling frequency of the Wiz.

[JPP]

Just noted one other issue.

For tonight  I have scheduled Yellow Stone at 7.30pm and Dateline at 8.30pm. Thus, only 2 recordings, so there should be no issues with clashing timers.

But, Dateline shows the Yellow error icon.

However, the Toppy shows that the reservation has been set and on checking it, via the Toppy's web browser interface, shows the correct starting time and duration.

So,

1. Is the Toppy sending out an erroneous error message?
2. Is ICETV creating the error icon by itself?
3. Will this now mean that since we have an error icon, however created, that no more reservations will be sent out to the Toppy? I guess time will tell. If I don't get any more updates or worse still as has happened in the past, currently existing reservations are deleted, we have a repeatable scenario.

[sladey]

I am having similar issues to others on this thread.  The support guys at Topfield suggest that the 1.05 firmware version should be out by the end of sept.  This firmware version should have icetv related fixes.

[adama]

After being severely traumatised  by several attempts / device resets (both device timers / ICE device deleting), I think I'm starting to get a picture of what's been happening (refer previous post).

I've come to the conclusion that setting the 2400 manual time is a big NO NO. I think this was causing my issue of every 'series' timer I set via the interactive page, was appearing as starting 3-4 mins late.  ie 6pm Nine news: 18:03 / ACA 18:33 / Home & away (fiancee!) 19:03....it was giving me the sh1ts!

I've set it to auto time again, and the series timers are again starting on the hour or 30mins as they should be.  Interestingly when I had the issue, recording direct from the 2400 via the ice guide was fine.

I've been in contact with ICE Tech Support over the last week about this issue and the fact that everytime I would change or add a timer via the ICE Interactive page, all of my existing timers would change to yellow alerts...  It was like it could not recognise the fact it had already sent these through to the box previously, and was failing when it tried to push them all through again.  Not sure if this was due to me using the "resend timers" function each time.

Anyway, I think from Wednesday this week (30/9) my reservations on the box are showing as 'on time' and that makes me happy no end.

Lookin fwd to that reported firmware update anyway 

[tonymy01]

If ICE send the timers as GMT (they send the EPG as that, so probably send the timers as that) then this would explain your issue.   The Topfield manual time handling is garbage (LOTs of 5K experience on this, hacking MIPS code in the firmware to attempt to code around this stupid stupid algorithm they use for manual time).   When it uses dumb mathematics to subtract your Toppy panel clock from the current* broadcaster timestamp to determine the GMT offset, this is opening you up for a world of pain.

Why on earth they don't let you setup your own GMT offset like you have to for AUTO time, I have no idea.

*With the 5K, if you are watching a file from the HDD, the "current" timestamp is actually the last one that it received, so the GMT offset gets bigger and bigger until you get back to watching the TV!!    So if the 2400 is like this, and ICE sends a timer while you are watching a file, you could end up with the timer set for hours out!!   Hopefully Topfield at least weren't as stupid as they were for the 5K and used the last *offset* it calculated, rather than use the last *timestamp* it received from the broadcaster, so at least you are only out by the few mins between front clock and broadcaster gmt offset+10hours.  Of course, if the broadcaster is screwing up and sending something dodgy, then all your timers created during this time will be dodgy.
Can you definitely verify your stored timers show the wrong start times in the Toppy reservations/timer list screen?

Regards

[adama]

Yep - I can confirm the stored timers for ALL my series recordings had the wrong start time in the Toppy reservations / timers screen (in fact by 3 mins late exactly on each show).

I wanted to leave all the yellow alerts so ICE tech support could actually see them (by the time they got back to me last time , I had cleared and reset my 2400 on ICE and everything looked fine!).  So my guess is that it downloaded the next 5 days timers while I had manual time set (and everything got stuffed up).

Then since changing to autotime again (+10 hours offset) timers from this Wed (30/9) onwards appear to be ok.  Also I've updated a few extra movies today and it seems to have downloaded them fine AND without any yellow alerts for all my other series timers.

Could this be the change to autotime or have Tech Support been doing some sneaky changes without getting back to me 

[tonymy01]

That probably explains LOTs about these exclamations and the dramas (for Toppy owners).    The Toppy feeds back that it has particular timers set for a particular time to ICE, and maybe when the times are not the same times as ICE is expecting (i.e. right on the hour/30 min mark) ICE thinks the timer didn't get set and brings up the exclamation.
You should ALL hassle Topfield to get rid of all dependence on the broadcaster when you are set to manual time.   It is ridiculous they still use the timestamps for some parts of the unit operation, the idea of running manual time is to 100% remove that dependence.
Not only this, but because the timer start times are dependant on this "moving window" between delta's of different broadcasters and your front panel clock, there is the potential when ICE says "set a timer for 1000 GMT" and the PVR adds its dodgily created GMT offset, lets say 10hours and 2minutes (because, say, Nine time of day GMT timestamp is 1minute different offset to ABC for example), while other timers already existing in the reservations have 3minute offset, you will have unnecessary clashes and possible rejections for what are meant to be adjacent timeslots, and/or 3 way overlaps which the unit will likely reject also.

So continuing that example above: 1000GMT+10hours2mins=20:02HR=8:02pm... but say some other timers show something starting at 7:03PM with a 1hour duration... bang, you get a clash, some finishing at 8:03PM while the new one you want to create is starting at 8:02PM (lets say that you added this show later in the week than the others, or ICE took a while to realise the proper timeslot of that particular show... there is all sorts of reasons why the timers aren't necessarily all created at the same time for the same day).   All because at any one time, your offset could be a minute or a couple or more different due to your front panel clock drift, your seconds being different to the broadcaster seconds, and broadcaster subtle clock variations between each other (and not so subtle for some of the regionals where they set the clock to localtime instead of GMT by accident/negligence and so suddenly your box is 10 or 11hours behind for timers/EPG!)

5K owners would have hassled them, but various timer taps work around this anyway, and Topfield probably aren't interested in anything further with those old models.

[prl]

I can't think of any good reason why the Topfield doesn't round off its time zone offset to the nearest 30 min (or 15 min if you're being pernickety, or want to market the product to Nepal).

[tonymy01]

Yep, that is what I essentially do for the 5K EPG_uploader TAP I wrote, to confirm the possible timestamp discrepancy between front panel and broadcaster.   I then extended this to hacking the MIPS memory location that the broadcaster GMT timestamp arrives into, and putting in a TAP generated one there :-).

[vincent]

I have had a few yellow triangles but overall has not been that bad.  But I do check to see what is happening daily.  I dont turn the machine off.  That way I can set timer from work.

I ran in manual time for a while and that caused issues with the start time of timers, ir they appeared as 6:02 and not 6:00pm.  Switched to auto time and that has resolved it self to a degree.  Would love prepadding.

I am getting issues with late changed to HD channels that is starting to get anoying, but I blame tv stations

When you say you set the timesr from work, is that via ICE or directly from the Toppy web interface as manual recordings?

Ice interactive

[vincent]

I have had a few yellow triangles but overall has not been that bad.  But I do check to see what is happening daily.  I dont turn the machine off.  That way I can set timer from work.

I ran in manual time for a while and that caused issues with the start time of timers, ir they appeared as 6:02 and not 6:00pm.  Switched to auto time and that has resolved it self to a degree.  Would love prepadding.

I am getting issues with late changed to HD channels that is starting to get anoying, but I blame tv stations

Were these triangles (which supposedly comes from the PVR indicating a timer/reservation programming error/clash) a result of YOU making a mistake (too many programs for 2 tuners to handel) or did they come up when they shouldn't have?

Some are my mistake but I have had some that I have no idea why - example Channel 7 news on one day.  I have just learn to do a quick check each night