Skippa User Experience so far

Started by Naffnick, September 24, 2015, 11:31:02 AM

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Naffnick

As one of the few to have already received my Skippa, I just wanted to share my initial thoughts so far on the unit. Mine arrived yesterday and I have to say that, if you can get over the cheap looking green LED display straight from the 1990's, it's a neat little unit. The smaller form factor means it's unobtrusive and fits in well with my existing devices. The initial setup was easy AND there was an HDMI cable included in the box - a nice surprise seeing as a lot of other manufacturers consider it an optional extra on an HD device, so well done IceTV for that!

The remote looks nice and feels good in the hand, but there was a fair bit of button mashing going on as it seems at times either unresponsive or too responsive adding double characters from a single press. My next job is to complete the Skippa setup on our Hamony remote, which hopefully should alleviate this bugbear.

One thing I found distracting was the IR sensor flashing red when the Skippa wasn't even the device in focus and I wasn't even using the Skippa remote. That is to say, the unit was still receiving the blasts from our Harmony remote, when it was controlling our Topfield TRF7160 at the time. Difficult to tell if anything was going on as the Skippa wasn't the device showing on screen, but I sure hope not otherwise I could have done some damage somewhere! Perhaps that could be fixed by a firmware update or something?

I had no trouble connecting to my IceTV account, except for having to use the cacky remote, so no complaints there. I've scheduled a couple of shows to record via the Android app today so will let you know if they're successful or not, but all looks good so far.

I did notice a semi-annoying popup for HbbTV or Freeview Plus when changing channels, but I'm sure its a feature, not a fault with the model and that if I explore that a little deeper It'll probably be something I'd make use of.

That's all so far. Happy "Skipping" all!

monksy

Thanks Naffnick for your honest review. I still waiting on my Skippa (2nd batch) but I'm sort of glad that some of the bugs are been ironed out.

russell2200

#2
I'll consolidate my experience so far given the subject. Good place for it.

1) As the original poster also indicates the Skippa remote seems very sensitive or lack thereof. I get lots of hit and miss button pushes where the unit does not pickup a button push if its not precisely pointed directly at the Skippa unit and I mean exactly directly ... in the general direction doesn't cut it at least for my unit.

As I am sitting diagonally across from the unit I angled the Skippa 45 deg to point towards my lounge chair and this slightly improved the IR remote reception but not by much. I have several other media boxes and they all work as long as the remote points in their general broad direction.

2) Had many picture freezes  where unit becomes non responsive and I have to pull the power and restart. During these freezes I can still hear live audio but picture frozen.

3) All my setup recording which disappeared re appeared and  so I had a bunch of shows finish recording yesterday at night, good start I thought, but  only 2 of them have had auto skip complete. All the others are sitting there with no auto skip available and its now 1pm so been many many hours since those recording finished. When I go to settings/IceTV just says Auto Skip:  busy with 1 program and been like that for a while now.

I would say the single most annoying thing aside form frozen pictures  is the bad remote control sensitivity. Like others guess ill be looking for a Harmony remote but with a brand new designed box I would have through Ice TV would have tried to make an effort to knock it out of the park with basic things like this.

4) Missing Picture in Picture is disappointing so you can't monitor another show while watching another.

On the positive side:

- Recordings are clear and good quality

- Quickly setting show reminders and recordings and series recordings on the fly seems easy from the remote as your watching TV and find a program you like

- Freeview Plus seems to work well on Skippa so using the Freeview catchup TV I have not seen before and looking forward to using that feature.

- speed of there GUI is OK few slow points when you get wait loading but overall a pretty good experience and I'm sure will get better with updates


warkus

Hi Russell2200,

Being an owner of an Altech 9600T, i am acutely aware of an issue from these units (Skippa is similar to the altech) where setting the unit to 1080P resolution causes freezing.

Can you try setting the unit output if not already to 1080i instead in the PVR menu and see if the freezing continues.

The symptoms you describe are identical to the Altech if you set the PVR to 1080P and the TV does not properly support that resolution. Please check and report for me.

Thanks

Mantorok

I've had a brief play so here's my initial experience:

1.  Setup is easy enough. The first time it starts it will autoscan for channels, ask for your IceTV credentials etc.
2.  After a couple of minutes it prompted me that a firmware upgrade is available and would download in the background.  A short time later it asked to be rebooted.
3.  I got a random reboot for some reason.
4.  I don't like the way the Favourite Channel feature works. I like to be able to press Ch Up/Down and only see my Fav Channels. You have to press the FAV button to cycle forwards through the channels and then press OK.  Maybe a feature in a future firmware update.
5.  It appears that you can't rearrange the order of the channels.  I like to group the channels by the boardcaster.  eg.  ABC, ABC2, ABC3 and ABC24. Again, maybe in a future firmware update.
6.  I also find the remote unresponsive.  I plan on using my Harmony remote so not a big issue.
7.  The UI is not bad compared to my old Beyonwiz S1

I've set a schedule to record Cheers as I'm keen to see how well the autoskip features works.  If I get a chance I'll report back.

russell2200

I had mine on 1080i not 1080P

Friendly IceTV phone call and replacement Skippa on the way seems I have a hardware fault

IanL-S

Quote from: russell2200 on September 24, 2015, 03:56:56 PM
I had mine on 1080i not 1080P

Friendly IceTV phone call and replacement Skippa on the way seems I have a hardware fault

That is good news ... that the issue is hopefully sorted. :)

I get the feeling that you will get the replacement before I get mine.  :'(

Ian

PS Good that they held back some units for replacement of defective ones.
IceTV: IceBox + BYOB IceBox + 2xTRF-2400 + 2xTF7100HDPVRtPlus + SKIPPA [RIP] + T2 + U4 + V2
No IceTV: a few Toppys and T2
Synology NAS
Check out the oztoppy wiki and oztoppy Forum for Toppy help

EdQld

Yippee, my Skippa hopped through the door this morning (Gold Coast)

First impressions:
I'm OK with the external power supply after reading the benefits of having them by Mark, makes sense to me :-)

I don't have a problem with the looks or build of the Skippa, it fits nicely in my setup

Setting up the Skippa was straight forward, although it did freeze on the first Channels Scan, I had to power it off and it then went smoothly the second time around

Small learning curve for me, I have never had a IceTV EPG subscription, but I was able to setup several Series Recordings via my PC and a few Movies. I included a few recordings that are not currently running (or just repeats), so I will see what happens when the next new Series of these come back ie set it up to only record New Episodes (one of the main features I was looking for). The current Series & Movies I set to record via my PC showed up on the Skippa, so far all seems to be working OK

I will report back if I strike any problems, so far so good, makes me happy with my purchase at the intro price :-)

I agree with points 4 & 5 of Mantorok's comments


Muddy

I set mine up last night and played with it for a while....here are my initial impressions:

Setup was easy.

I tended to have to mash the buttons on the remote to get a response.

The system froze and was unresponsive once last night requiring a reboot. It was also unresponsive when I got home tonight and tried to switch it on. Reboot fixed this but I hope this won't be a regular occurrence.

When I use my apple tv remote the skip IR sensor flashes.

The unit is quite noisy even when in standby mode. I can hear the whirring of the hard drive over the program audio (and when I was in bed in the next room).

The picture is not great when watching TV (not too sharp and a bit off colour). The signal is 100% but I will replace my aerial cables and see if that helps as the signal from my TV tuner is now not great when looped through the skip and not connected directly to the aerial outlet.

The ad skip function seems to chop off more than it should but I need to experiment a bit more to really have a solid opinion.

The printing on some of my remote buttons is dodgy with half of the text on the "back button" missing for example.

rob762

Hi I've just joined up to this forum, I got my Skippa yesterday
I've applied the firmware update that I was prompted with and have rebooted the Skippa (with a power-cycle afterwards as well)
1. Setup was easy and quick
2. Remote is OK, but a few of the buttons "stick" down when pressed - annoying!
3. Watching live TV is generally good. Got a moderate amount of "searching for signal" messages and image break-up ... this hardly happens at all on my TV or existing PVR. The unit crashed and rebooted during a channel-change. Channel change is slow. Have had a few times where I've changed channels (by selecting the channel from the TV guide) and the picture froze but I could hear audio. The picture eventually un-froze about 15 - 20 seconds later.
4. Ad-skipping is hit & miss. Watching animated shows (Simpsons, Futurama) seems to trick it and the ad-skip triggers in the middle of the show and cuts off minutes of non-ad content. In non-animated shows it does OK but is only correct about 50% of the time.
5. When watching-back recordings (and I had 3 recordings going on 3 different broadcast streams at the time) the image break-up is severe and frequent. Made most of my recorded content unwatchable.

Not stable enough to use full time yet... I guess I'll put it in a drawer until I hear of new firmware or fixes to the above problems.

DaveD

Regarding the remote control issues....
I remember when I first started playing with my Toppy TRF2400 the remote seemed flaky.
Until I removed the almost unnoticeable clear plastic film from in front of the IR receiver.

Just a suggestion.  Maybe not applicable to the Skippa!   ;D


stretch4x4

#11
Mine arrived in Ballarat today.

Got it up and running so far so good and pretty impressed :)

Issues so far:

  • Had multiple issues trying to set a static IP for my wifi, it locked up once and failed to get internet several times and even failed to detect the wifi adapter a couple.. I suspect a couple of times I typed in invalid settings though.. It also doesn't remember the wifi password only the ssid.. So that wasn't great..
  • Never used icetv before other than playing with the windows phone app, tried to set a couple of series recordings tonight and not familiar with how it works, so can't tell if I am going to get a recording or not.. my week on the app suggests not but the skippa does seem to have the series recording so I shall keep reading and see what happens.
    Edit: Ok so one of my series recordings worked as I expected, the other one was a mythbusters series recording.. The ST symbol appears on all the eps the first one recorded on 7mate (despite two emails telling me there was an error) however the one that is currently on SBS does not appear to be recording.. Will do some more reading I probably have made a mistake somewhere along the way but it does seem a little un-intuitive in that respect..

Did take a few pictures that I can upload if anyone is desperate for more pictures while they wait :)

EdQld

I can confirm that there are problems with the Remote, as mentioned earlier, some buttons tend to stick when pressed and they are sometimes unresponsive! This afternoon the Skippa just refused to change channels for several minutes, using the number keys or ch up & down button (IR light showed the Unit was given an instruction signal), then spontaneously began working again  :-\

I decided to watch my TV via my FetchTV STB & Remote, and only switch to the Skippa when I want to play a recorded program (first of which will hopefully happen tonight)


EdQld

#13
First test of a Series Recording tonight and the show is not in "My Recording" folder ie it didn't record

It still shows in "My Series" folder (and "My Week" with a bright red "R" in front of the shows name), but it just didn't record! (my FetchTV shows recordings while in progress and lets you start to watch the show before recording stops, not sure if this is the same for Skippa?)

Not a good start, the show just didn't record, not happy if the Skippa turns out to be unreliable for recording shows, the most basic & important function of a PVR   :(

stretch4x4

Hmm I wonder if you are seeing a similar issue to me Ed?

I have setup a series recording for both Mythbusters and scorpion using my phone to record every episode regardless of time, channel etc Now all episodes have the series record mark on them, however it only seems to be the episodes that are on the same channel as where I setup the recording that show up in my week.. So all the scorpion episodes on one appear but 10 is ignored and all the Mythbusters on 7mate appear but not sbs..

Not sure if it is an issue with the windows phone app or some other combination of circumstances..
I will probably create a new thread later..

I am also curious to know how long it takes to sync between my phone and the skippa.. I would expect max 1-2 minutes but it seems to take a much longer period, which could be an issue for last minute recordings when out..