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[Please end an email to support@icetv.com.au if you want a native application for the Mac OR if you are a Mac application developer email us for assistance]

On the positive side you are at least no longer claiming that you have any intention of developing the loader for Mac. On the negative side I still recall being told over a year ago that it was.

Businesses change their plans, in an ideal world there are any number of software projects that I would like to undertake. The reality is that we are a small company and have limited resources so we need to target areas that we think will provide the greatest benefit to us. Currently we are focussed on building up our brand with the new iwatchthis.com.au site and working on a number of projects with PVR manufacturers. We are stretched too thin to have time for a native Mac solution at this time. If a third party developer or open source project wants to take up the slack then we have provided the resources they need. We would also be willing to provide a reasonable level of technical support to anyone wishing to do the work.

Is it not just a little ironic that..

1. The Mac user base may not be worth spending the moderate development costs, but you have no problem asking those users to pay you several hundred dollars more than you ask of a Windows user, to buy your router based solution. You also have no problem asking us to pay the same fees as Windows subscribers, despite the lower level of support.

When you purchase an IceTV subscription you are purchasing a licence to use the guide on up to three supported devices, we don't care what mixture of devices you use and we don't charge different fees for different devices. We have no desire to limit use of the guide beyond our standard conditions and it would put an unreasonable administrative burden on us to try and provide a special "Mac using Topfield Owner" discount to offset the lack of official connectivity options.

For a subscriber to use our guide in a Topfield PVR they must be able to get the EPG data onto the Topfield. The officially sanctioned method to do this is to use a windows PC and the Topfield supplied Altair software or our own Iceguide4Topfield loader that is built using the Topfield supplied drivers. We have also chosen to provide an additional method via the IceBox as a value add for people who don't wish to leave their PC on all the time or find it more convenient to use an always on appliance to manage the guide updates, or in this case are unable to make use of the support connectivity options.

I appreciate that this solution is not to your liking but the lack of Mac support for the Topfield should really be addressed to Topfield. I am sorry that you feel we are singling out Mac using Topfield owners for some kind of "tax", but this is not the case.

As a Mac owner myself I can sympathise with your position, if I owned a Topfield I would probably use Nathan Oates' program with some AppleScript to make it run periodically or if I had the time write my own application, I know this is not possible for everyone which is why I asked people to rally all the Mac using Topfield owners to contact us so we could see if the demand was high enough to warrant writing an app for you. I don't think we have had a single request yet.

2. You don't want to risk damaging our Toppies using lethal third party code, but are content that in not offering it we will use it anyway if we don't pay extra for your router. I'm not aware of any software vendor that takes responsibility for damaging equipment, I'm very used to seeing a big waiver on the install screen and would happily admonish you of that responsibility. I've been using Nathan's solution for over a year and it has not cooked my Toppy yet. I'm sure not all of us want to sue the pants of you.

Unfortunately there is a big difference between acknowledging the existance of unsupported and potentially damaging programs and actually supplying a program that may brick your Toppy. I'm sure that the majority of Mac using Toppy owners aren't planning to sue us but we are not prepared to take that risk at this time.

With regards to our router, we make a very small margin on the IceBox, just enough to cover the costs of the custom firmware development, it is an enabling technology for delivering our guide not a source of income in itself.


Please end an email to support@icetv.com.au if you want a native application for the Mac OR if you are a Mac application developer email us for assistance

[That's]

Maybe you misunderstand what we're asking for.  We're not talking about an IceRemote solution for Mac-driven Toppies (though that would be nice!), as that obviously is not trivial.

We're talking about adding some simple USB upload code (which you already have from Nathan Oates' Mac ICEGuide4Topfield as I understand it) and cutting and pasting into into the Mac IceTV widget.  That's it!  That's all you would need to do!  The widget already does the scheduled download bit from IceTV on a Mac; if it would then be so nice as to then automatically upload that to the Toppy for us then all the Mac/Toppy users would have everything we ever wanted.

That's why we're frustrated... it's seems so simple and we've been so close for so long, but nada from IceTV on actually doing it.  I guess all you guys are using EyeTV cards in your Macs. ;)  But please spare a thought for all the other Mac based users who want to drive PVRs or anything else in the future.  That's what I meant in my original followup about consolidating your base first before launching into heaps of new features that only a subset of your users might be able to actually use.

Before I go any further I want to assure you that we are not unsympathetic to the plight of the Mac owner, I switched to the Mac two and half years ago and I haven't looked back, one of the guide team is a Mac user, the major shareholder for the company has a totally Mac centric household and you're probably familar with the handywork of our Marketing and Content Manager in the form of iStatPro and iLoveLamp...

For us it all boils down to a few factors

1) Development cost - Even though it seems a simple thing to do it is a big enough job that we need to make a conscious decision to do it and allocate resources to the project. Without getting bogged down in the details, an official IceTV supported loader for the Mac would need more than a little copy/paste, it is definitely a few man-weeks to do properly.

2) Financial Risk - As I explained earlier there is no support from Topfield for the Mac platform, as such we would be compelled to use the USB code that third parties have written, I think the best code so far comes from puppy which was written by Peter Urbanec. The problem here is that if we use a reverse engineered unsupported protocol to interface with your Topfield and a bug in the underlying USB code kills your Topfield then we may be held responsible with no recourse back to Topfield. We do this in our IceBox2 product currently and it was necessary to weigh the risks versus the rewards of doing this..

So, where do we go from here??

The only route that I can guarantee for the immediate future is to open the floor to third party developers to come up with a loader, currently the code we used to develop our IceBox1, which includes an older version of puppy and the daemon that communicates with our server to download guide and TAP updates, is available for download on our website and is released under the GPL, anyone who wants to implement a loader for the Mac is welcome to download the code and put it all together, see http://www.icetv.com.au/gpl.shtml for details.

For IceTV to develop a Topfield loader for the Mac we would need to know that the potential gain in subscriptions is enough to offset the development costs and the financial risks to us, I would suggest that you organise all the Topfield/Mac owners that you know to send an email to support@icetv.com.au with a request for a native loader and if the demand is great enough I will take it up with management and see what happens...

Your original service was centered around people who had Topfield 5000s.  To this day, you cannot get automated ICE updates to a Toppy connected to a Mac (to my knowledge).  The only "solution" that comes close was Nathan Oates' alpha release of ICEGuide4Topfield, but that didn't do scheduled updates and it also doesn't support using a proxy (so it's useless on my network).

We do have a method to supply guide updates to your Topfield that you may not be aware of, we have a re-purposed wireless router we call the IceBox that plugs into a wired network or accesses a wireless network and provides guide updates to your Topfield.

This solution requires no intervention once set up and only needs a connection to the internet. We support proxies so this may work for you.

As far as a native solution for the Mac, I understand your frustration, we have debated this topic at length here at IceTV and unfortunately the lack of Mac support from Topfield makes it hard for us to supply a robust commercial solution as a native application.

Thanks for the additional info, I'm thinking at the moment that Elgato may have changed the format of the plist files such that MacPIMP no longer gets the channel info correctly. My dev system is still on EyeTV 2.1 (2066), could you please send me the two files

/Library/Preferences/com.elgato.eyetv.world.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.elgato.eyetv.plist

These files contain the info on the channels present at your location, I want to compare them to the files from my dev machine to check for format changes.

If you could email the files to support@icetv.com.au I'll have a look and get back to you shortly.

Regards
Dan

Thanks for the report, we have seen one or two reports of this bug and we're looking into it.

Could you please send me a little more info, I need to know

1) EyeTV version
2) Location of the following files

com.elgato.eyetv.plist
com.elgato.eyetv.world.plist

They are normally in /Library/Preferences.

My guess at this point is that MacPIMP is unable to find the files listed above, or, there is something wrong with the files.

That looks like a bug in the filemanager, I don't know why it cannot delete the file as requested. I would suggest connecting the topfield to your pc and using the Topfield "Altair" application to delete the file.

We will have a look in the office and see if we can figure out what the problem is.

Regards
Dan

There have been a few reports of old guide data not being deleted so that on a reboot old data could be loaded into the EPG.

We tried to reproduce the problem in the office and found that it appears to be related to the firmware revision on the Topfield.

Of the two boxes in the office that were tested we found that version 5.2.56 ( Aug 18 2004 ) showed the problem while 5.2.60 ( Dec 06 2004 ) did not.

You can check the firmware version by going to the menu, selecting "Information" then "IRD Status", you should see something like this

System ID 416
Loader Version L4.16
Device Version v5.2.60
Application Version TF-NPTA 5.11.32
Last Update Dec 06 2004

The "Device Version" is the number you are looking for.

If you are experiencing these problems could you reply to this post with the firmware revision number so we can see if it is indeed firmware related.

Dan

The Green button goes back one day and the Yellow button goes forward but I haven't seen a Jump to Today option. I usually exit the Guide and go back in.

[UPDATE:]

Shane,

Are you certain about the loading of old guide data?

The very first thing the TAP does when it loads is to search through the cache files looking for old data, the files are named YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_EPG_CACHE, the TAP takes the current system date and generates a string like YYYYMMDD, this is then compared with the first 8 characters of the file names in the directory and any matches are deleted.

This functionality has been in the TAP since the very earliest versions, I have never seen the TAP fail to delete old guide data.

Could you do me a favor and create an empty file called 20050101000000.EPG_CACHE and put it in the directory with the TAP, then restart the TAP and see if it deletes the file.

Regards
Dan

UPDATE:

Russell has confirmed the same behaviour, I'll have to look into it, there may have been a bug introduced recently, the code that controls EPG loading was heavily modified a couple of versions ago....