Slow Sky Digital EPG - Zenith box. Is this normal ?

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pb12

5 posts

Wannabe Geek

# 15121 5-Aug-2007 15:43

Hi all,

I am wondering whether the slowness of my Zenith box's EPG is 'normal' .
I often book programmes a few days to a week ahead to change Sky channels on time for programmed recording on my DVDR. Usually the EPG will show 'No listings available', if I then wait for some minutes the programme listings will usually appear. However many times I give up and try again at a later stage. Eg this morning, I waited 3minutes before I gave up waiting for a listing for Sat evening to appear.(Sat evening is only 3.5 days away)

Is this normal for others with Zenith boxes ?

Is this normal for non-Zenith Sky boxes ?

If another Sky box will work better I'll try to get Sky to swap my box or else I'll set up a IR Blaster type solution.

Phil

Fossie

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# 81188 5-Aug-2007 15:54

Most sky boxes are laggy, the mysky boxes seem pretty snappy. Ours sometimes doesn't display the programing guide for channels, this is usually fixed by changing to that channel.

cyril7

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# 81193 5-Aug-2007 17:06

The Zenith is pretty slow, it along with the Pace DSR600 use the original SGS Thompson TP2/3 chipset that is pretty old. All the newer boxs use the SGS Thompson STi551? chipset which was the natural progression of the predcesor into a single System on a Chip solution. As with Intel processors each year the fabrication is pushed smaller and as such the clockrate upward, so the latter the box (and STi551? SOC chip) the more mips it has to play with. The main mpeg decoder remains the same but the ST20 uProcessor that runs the show and does the epg (and the amount or ram it supports) gets faster and bigger with each passing year. So the latter boxs run quite a bit better and can keep bigger storage of the EPG.

We have both a Pace DS230 (small silver box) and an old Zenith, and its a real ferrari and morris show.

The original Tp2/3 boxs were never really designed to carry the OpenTV middleware that Sky rolled out about 6-7yrs ago (remember the big change in firmware). This extra layer of firmware was really designed to a processor with the sportier specs of the latter STi SOC boxs.

Cyril

pb12

5 posts

Wannabe Geek

# 81200 5-Aug-2007 18:44

Thanks for the responses.

I'll approach Sky for a swap of my existing box to a Pace DS230 and see how i go.

Phil

cyril7

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# 81205 5-Aug-2007 19:25

Only thing to be aware of with the DS230 is that it only has two scarts (that support all the usual option including s-vid and component) but has no RCA's with audio or composite. It does naturally have RF aswell.

Cyril

richms

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# 81218 5-Aug-2007 22:00

Tell them that the box is crashing all the time, not that you find it too slow, or they will want to charge you for swapping it over.

Richard rich.ms