[TelstraClear] T-Box issues continued

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#566557 9-Jan-2012 16:19

In all fairness we have not had nearly as many problems as we used to *touch wood*. I'm just hoping it records everything when we go away.

I went away for just over a week and when I came back everything was fine. I must admit that I have never put mine in standby though.

Kirk

ChristineNZL

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#566564 9-Jan-2012 16:37

kharris:
In all fairness we have not had nearly as many problems as we used to *touch wood*. I'm just hoping it records everything when we go away.

I went away for just over a week and when I came back everything was fine. I must admit that I have never put mine in standby though.

We don't put ours on standby either. Last week though it powered off during a recording and didn't record the next programme and I had to reboot the next morning as it was frozen with the red record light on. Now if we had been away at the time it would not have recorded anything until we got home and rebooted. I think I will set the HDD DVD for some of the programmes just in case and their is always On Demand for the main channels.

kharris

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#566569 9-Jan-2012 16:42

ChristineNZL:
kharris:
In all fairness we have not had nearly as many problems as we used to *touch wood*. I'm just hoping it records everything when we go away.

I went away for just over a week and when I came back everything was fine. I must admit that I have never put mine in standby though.

We don't put ours on standby either. Last week though it powered off during a recording and didn't record the next programme and I had to reboot the next morning as it was frozen with the red record light on. Now if we had been away at the time it would not have recorded anything until we got home and rebooted. I think I will set the HDD DVD for some of the programmes just in case and their is always On Demand for the main channels.

Yeah that seems to be a big problem that they are aware of.... it has been promised that they will fix that in the next release but I will believe it when I see it. I don;t get that record light freeze anymore though. It can't be luck.... I have never been that lucky lol

Kirk

mwh

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#566690 9-Jan-2012 22:34

Ours has not been as bad as some, but definitely on the wrong side of "good enough". We still get intermittent crashes of the frozen-picture variety, and red-light lockups overnight, but they are usually weeks apart - just long enough that you forget about them. Crashing during playback when another recording starts or ends used to happen reasonably often in that circumstance, but is pretty rare now. They are usually fixed by power-cycling the box, although a few times it has locked up again during the restart. We also had "Not Subscribed" all over a few days ago, which had only happened once before. Another time, the live TV tuner gave out and wouldn't show a picture, even after the channel was changed, but the box was responsive to the remote and tuners 2 and 3 were working fine. I was able to start recording the programme I was watching and then watch the recording half a minute behind the broadcast. That's only happened once and is one of the less annoying ways it has failed.

Quite often there will be a crash two or three days on the trot after a gap of weeks. It makes you wonder about an external cause, although it's also about what you'd expect from genuinely random behaviour. It has obviously been restarted between those too, so I don't know that that really makes any difference.

When it's working - especially now that the interface isn't unusably unresponsive - it's nice enough that you can almost forget the problems or kid yourself that they're gone, but they always come back. I wouldn't trust it left recording things while I was on holiday unless somebody would be around to pull the plug. It has definitely improved since the beginning, but it's a way away yet.

Something I haven't seen mentioned but that seems to be deliberate - we can no longer get the alternative audio on Sky channels. Even on broadcasts that I know have it (and even say so on screen), the yellow-button option isn't even present now. I don't know when that started happening, but it has been months now, though it did work at one point. We do still have the menu on TV1.

mad01

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#566738 10-Jan-2012 08:38

Great - we lost ALL recordings and link - AGAIN.

Am I the only one that has that problem?

Anyway, now my challenge is to get through customer services to cancel and ask for credit...

lanceanz

127 posts

Master Geek

#566787 10-Jan-2012 10:36

mad01: Great - we lost ALL recordings and link - AGAIN.

Am I the only one that has that problem?

Anyway, now my challenge is to get through customer services to cancel and ask for credit...

Wow. I feel for you. Maybe you are. But then again, everyone I know with a T-Box has experienced problems - without ever posting on Geekzone. The one positive is that I'm sure you'll find the "upper tier" customer support-people understanding and will have no problem getting at least some credit (assuming you are not one of the many who late last year got the T-Box for free on a 2-year contract).

It's quite likely the recordings are still sitting on the hard-disk, but of course you've no way of getting to them.

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ChristineNZL

242 posts

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#566809 10-Jan-2012 11:09

mad01: Great - we lost ALL recordings and link - AGAIN.

Am I the only one that has that problem?

Anyway, now my challenge is to get through customer services to cancel and ask for credit...

Thankfully this is a problem we have never had and hope to never get as I would be furious!

RobertT

120 posts

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+1 received by user: 1

#567210 11-Jan-2012 08:46

I had an unusual crash yesterday evening. When I turned on the TV, the picture on the T-box was frozen, so I watched a recording. The menus were responsive though, so I watched a recording with the kids.
AFter watching their recording, I flicked back to the live TV picture which had changed, but was still frozen. Now, the recording light was on and the box unresponsive (the blue light wouln't flicker when I used the remote).
A reboot later, things were back to normal. I did though only get about 30 seconds recorded of the news though, despite this being on before I started watching the earlier recording with the kids. It seems the tuners on th ebox had frozen, but the menus were responsive as was play back until the entire box whigged out.

I don't know who programs these things and have been much happier since the response was improved in the last update (how many lines of code did they get rid of to get the performance gains, or was it settings that made the system pause during input -> display), but I would really like to see some improvements in reliability.

Iceni

109 posts

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#567344 11-Jan-2012 13:23

Turned on the television to-day to again find just a blank screen, went though the T-Box reboot shuffle and checked my recordings to find that the last recording was only part recorded.

The failed recording was set for 3.30am to 4.30am (approx) so the T-Box fault happened between these times.

This is the first time I've gone to the bother of noticing the failed recording times but in future I'll keep a note, maybe TelstraClear does maintenance around this time?

bmani

9 posts

Wannabe Geek

#568506 13-Jan-2012 16:30

On the phone with Telstra to cancel my T-Box and have been put on hold now for 15 min.

ChristineNZL

242 posts

Master Geek
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#568546 13-Jan-2012 18:06

Our T-Box froze up again last night so yet another "part recorded" programme. Thankfully there were no other recordings after that or we would have had a "failed". We are going away again tomorrow so I am less confident now of getting all our programmes recorded. I've set the HDD recorder as a back up and most programmes we can watch on the Internet "On Demand". Maybe Telstra could offer us a discount on our broadband to make up for extra usage to watch failed recordings. Actually it makes you wonder if we even need a TBox! It's a lot of money for an unreliable product.

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ThatGuy2004

19 posts

Geek

#569310 16-Jan-2012 08:41

New T-Box install done just over a week ago to replace existing one, and have only had one freeze thus far - Touch wood. Huge thanks to Gary for all his help and the Tech installer from Downers was great.

Looks like a new batch of T-Box's arrived in the New Year and according to the Install Tech they appear to be more reliable. We came back from a weeks Xmas holiday to continual freezing and multiple pages of failed recordings, despite some recording ok.

Looks like it may be a good time to ditch you current T-box and seek replacement if you are still having problems.

mwh

43 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 16

#569316 16-Jan-2012 08:53

"Not subscribed" has happened a couple more times now, but I did have a fun one - "Community" at 8.00 on Friday is "part recorded - box powered off during recording", even though I watched it live through the box, and another programme in the exact same timeslot was fully recorded. It does keep you guessing.

mad01

76 posts

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#569317 16-Jan-2012 08:59

bmani: On the phone with Telstra to cancel my T-Box and have been put on hold now for 15 min.

Good luck with that. They wanted me to pay early termination fee unless they could try to fix my issue (lost recordings).

Not fixed, and I couldn't send my box back with the tech (or exchange it for a normal decoder). So got another tbox which hopefully would fix my issue.

24 hour without issues, wow!

But then, it froze last night so again I've had it.

It seems I'll get back on the queue to cancel (again)...

lanceanz

127 posts

Master Geek

#569319 16-Jan-2012 09:07

ThatGuy2004: Looks like it may be a good time to ditch you current T-box and seek replacement if you are still having problems.

In the US where it is common to have replacement insurance on expensive smart-phones, the breakage-rate goes up markedly around the time of each new iPhone release. But I won't be encouraged. I'm trusting that the software updates will make my box much more reliable. If not, or they don't appear, then all bets are off :-)

My box was frozen yesterday morning with no recordings having been scheduled, so none lost.

Wish TCL would confirm that the manual recording option is coming in the next update or two (I was "promised" it over the phone many months ago). My old decoder had it, not to mention every VCR I've owned and my HDR, so it's not rocket science. When I want a bunch of Family Guy, South Park etc to watch it is *so* annoying to find they are almost all duplicates within the same day or over several days. It is a minimal requirement that I be able to schedule a recording for a particular time-range to be repeated daily, weekly, weekdays (and maybe weekends).

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