In the last couple of weeks I've noticed we've started to experience the skip/jump problem at the 1 hour mark on our unit too. I upgraded from firmware 3.12 to 3.14 last night, and it didn't make any difference.
To anyone that has had their unit repaired/replaced by MagicTV under warranty (ours was only bought in August), did you keep or lose all your recordings in the process? We've got a fairly full hard drive at the moment, and I don't think my other half will be too pleased about us losing them all!! It'd be good if MagicTV are able to transfer the recordings to the new unit's hard drive, if they simply replace with a new machine, or even move the old hard drive to the new unit (assuming it's a main-board fault of some sort?).
Did you read the previous posts about what causes this and how to work around it?
It's a software problem, so getting a new machine won't help. If you do get a replacement machine you will lose all of your recorded material. It won't get transferred.
I hope the 6 / 4 minute behaviour is restored in 3.15 beta 1.
Tip: set the One-touch Channel Select to "Hybred".
When the MagicTV is set to automatically enter standby mode after finishing recording it says "System will be standby" instead of "System will enter standby".
Thanks for the prompt - I had read the previous posts, but not closely enough it would appear. My Instant Rewind was indeed set to On, and 1 hour. I've now actually turned it off completely.
It looks like making that change doesn't correct programs that are already recorded and skip on playback, but hopefully it'll fix future recordings so they don't skip. I'll keep an eye on it.
Can you explain exactly what the "Instant Rewind" feature is for, and how you think it's meant to work (and why it's there at all?!) - there's no reference to it at all in the manual that I can see.
As far as I can figure out, the Instant Rewind settings are for the Live Pause type feature. I couldn't find any documentation either so I'm guessing a bit, based on a bit of experimentation.
I think: -if Instant Rewind is On, the machine records the program that you're watching on "Live TV" from the start. You can then rewind back as far as the beginning of the program. You can also Live Pause and play from the pause point after a while and even fast forward to catch up to the live program. -if Instant Rewind is Auto, you can Live Pause but it doesn't record from the beginning of the program so you can't rewind to before the Live Pause point. -if Instant Rewind is Off, you can't do any of these, not even Live Pause. -The time setting appears to be the maximum time that the Instant Rewind will record before it pauses for a while and then starts recording again. -Once you stop watching Live TV the program is erased.
If that's correct, I'm not sure why it affects EPG recordings as well as Live TV. (No, changing the settings won't affect programs you've already recorded, just future ones.)
I disabled instant rewind the moment I worked out what it did. Couldn't see a great value in having the HDD being worked at all times that I'm watching tele.
As for the HDD being full, it's theoretically possible to buy a bigger HDD and transfer everything on to it yourself and/or do backups and keep them externally for viewing elsewhere. I vaguely intend to experiment with this idea soon myself.
Created a small partition from 4096B to 205MB and a second partition filling the remaining 1000GB. The first partition appears to contain all the TV config and programme details. Lots of tiny files, less than 10MB all up. Most of the used space will be wasted block rounding. Second partition contains the actually video files. Most are a few GB each.
First partition is ext3 and second partition is jfs. I'm using Ubuntu for my desktop so it doesn't have great tools built-in for partitioning so I made do with command-line parted and I had to install mkfs.jfs also. Half the reason for having to drop to the shell was to use sudo. All operations needed root access.
I copied the files with cp -arv. As far as I can see this did a good job of preserving relevant meta-data and informing me of progress during the hour long copy process.
Evan
PS: It's wise to delete all recordings from the Trash before removing the original HDD from the MTV. Otherwise you are going to be copying a completely full HDD.
Jees marketing is sickening at times. T'was just looking through that HDD datasheet and noticed, as one example, about half the drives are listed with a feature called Advanced Format.
Now I start to wonder if this is some M$ speak but then decided that nothing related to partitioning and filesystems has any baring on HDDs. Then I remember the "Don't be afraid of the 4K" banner I'd seen when I was buying the HDD. It was oh-no! surely AF is not the block size?! That would be truly pathetic. Adjustable block sizes have been with us since as long as I can remember (Which is 1980's).
All the tech talk, more marketing, there on Wikipedia is irrelevant underlying cacheing tricks to improve performance. The basic adjustable, in powers of 2, block was always available to SCSI from version 1 (And therefore SATA once the PC industry caught up).
So, the AF sticker says it has improved caching to handle small blocks. Personally, I'm surprised bulk read/write on the raw platters wasn't the norm long ago. Nice to know the tricks being employed but it's not really of any value in the specs.
Evan, nice work with the 1T disk replacement. Did you happen to try inserting the new disk first and see if the magic box could format it for you? I was thinking that might be easier and then once formatted, you could pull the disk and copy files across on the computer...
No I didn't but I'm confident it will work. The disc formating options in the MTV menus appear to be only for a USB drive so I'll assume a blank drive will be auto-formatted, after all, there is no boot data on the HDD. The MTV is functional without the internal HDD - just tested it.
I'm not keen on trying a format myself at the moment. I'm busy looking through all the old recordings on the 500GB.
That's the one really nice thing with the MTV - it is using common Linux formats and libraries. If it ever loses this level of openness I'll be gone for sure.
Just found something new: When changing the HDD size the way I've done it, the MTV doesn't rescale the usage meter on the front panel until a disc check has been done.
When starting a disc check it warns of possible long duration but it only took a couple of minutes for me. I guess it may take longer if errors are found.
PS: One reason why I didn't try the MTV to format the HDD originally was I wanted to keep the MTV turned off for the whole duration of all HDD removals. This removes one possible reason for the copying to have failed until proven to work.
fatjulio: The release notes for 3.14 are up in the downloads folder, not on the main support page yet. The changes are:
-improved fast forward/rewind
-improved channel adding/removing
-turn off digital optical on standby
-fixed time shift bug.
I remember what has changed now. The fast rewind would skip forward so much it would sometimes not go back at all. So they've made it jump backwards much further than it used to.
The instability of how far it'll go next is just as bad as ever but now at least it will rewind when you expect. There is something terribly flawed with how the MTV does it's ffwd/frwd. :(
And just to reiterate, frame stepping, both forward and reverse, is a seriously missing feature too!
Hmm, I just got hit pretty hard with a crash. Had a decent line up of programmes set for the weekend while I was getting ready for Christmas but, unbeknown to me, it decided to lock-up on Friday some time. Last recording is from Thursday night. So, that's three days lost. :(
That's not quite what I would expect from an appliance!
Crashes when abusing the controls is barely acceptable. Crashing all on it's own is pretty up there on the list of don't buy this product!
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