I was set up to record simultaneously from 3 different mux's last night and had no problems. I decided to watch the rugby live with a record cover in case I fell asleep. I was prompted to supply a priority preference for the overlap period and chose the rugby as the lowest. While watching I got a message to say that QI had finished recording on Prime and that my rugby recording was starting on MTV. (Meanwhile I was also recording TV3). I run 1min pre and 5 min post on my recordings as I find programs rarely start more than 30sec early though I admit I occasionally miss all the end credits on the end of a movie which doesn't bother me . If you miss the prompt for priority setting you can go to your "To Do" list and select a recording scenario where a conflict occurs to access this setup. You can also set an individual recording's pre/post record times without affecting your global defaults for these values. All my scheduled recordings were completed last night without errors, apart from the truncated start of the first rugby match. I hope this helps you achieve a better outcome. (NO, I didn't RTFM, I just explored.)
I think one of the things that might have caused the problem for me is that I have used Series Record for the games on MTV (Maori TV, not the music channel!). So I don't see the next one on the To Do list until the first one has at least started (I'm not sure exactly when the second one appears). That might be a clue - perhaps the next one in the series doesn't get on the To Do list until the first one is finished recording, which in the case of two (or more) consecutive games, is too late. Although I think two consecutive games have worked okay before.
I'll try Magic support and see if they can shed any light on it.
It's a known bug and, no, the MTV can't be trusted not to crash. Welcome to the world of minimal testing before release.
This is one reason why Apple has made such an impact. They've gone the extra distance to make a deep software stack work reliably to bring computing to the world of appliances.
Are you saying that MTV the Magic box (not to be confused with MTV the Maori channel) is subject to crashing? Under what circumstances? AFAIK that's the first time mine's done that in over a year.
From looking at the 50 minutes of the second programme that I got on the hard-drive, something happened at 12:15am, which is about the time the post- part of the first recording finished. The fact that REC and 2 hours 45 minutes was on the display panel the next morning and I had to recycle the power to get the Magic box to do anything indicates that the box crashed at that time.
Do you think recycling the power, say once a week, (effectively a reboot) would help reduce the possibility of freezing?
(Anyone had experience with the Play TV add-on to the PS3? My son in Brisbane has one and is very happy with it. It could be a relatively cheep and more reliable alternative to the Magic box.)
(Anyone had experience with the Play TV add-on to the PS3? My son in Brisbane has one and is very happy with it. It could be a relatively cheep and more reliable alternative to the Magic box.)
Interested how you come to think buying a PS3 and the Play TV add-on is relatively cheap alternative. I just bought my second MTV3600 for $400 on TM. Never had any crashes with eitehr machine. You may have had a power cut overnight - that might screw it up a bit if it is in the middle of recording etc.
Your description of behaviour and remedy are spot on. Although, I can't say I've noticed if it always cuts off at the tail of the recording like that.
It's pretty random when it happens. Regular power cycles may help, dunno. I've gone for six months with no lockups but I've also had two in a week before. Firmware upgrades have not had any impact, as far as I can tell ... just like the FFwd/FRwd jumpiness problem.
Has anyone else actually purchased the MTV4000 from Australia and tried using it here? As I understand it the MTV4000 is the same as the MTV3700 but with different firmware. (Crazy Stu A$299 with A$60 freight)
I have had one shipped over and it works well except there is no series record (just a record on the same time each week or day) and there is no NZ time zone option so the time zones are out of sycn. It still records ok but says it was the wrong time.
Now that the 3700 has been released here it would be great to get the firmware flashed on to this box. The NZ support team aren't being helpful presumably because they are the NZ distributor. They have advised that "each model has an loader ID and so will reject any attempt to load firmware that belongs to another model"
GraemeD: Now that the 3700 has been released here it would be great to get the firmware flashed on to this box. The NZ support team aren't being helpful presumably because they are the NZ distributor. They have advised that "each model has an loader ID and so will reject any attempt to load firmware that belongs to another model"
Any ideas?
In my modifying the firmware, I found the header in the upgrade file contains 3 checksums for various sections of the binary file. The MTV software running on the box, actually outputs a lot of debug messages that would normally go to the console but are redirected to /dev/null. This was valuable to me because when I modified the firmware it would tell me the checksum it was expecting and the checksum it got. That allowed me to search and replace on the binary file. Here's part of the console output during an upgrade with an incorrect checksum (the last one is incorrect):
@[upgfile_get_header_f] before return @[upgfile_header_get_item_num_f] after @[upgfile_header_get_item_num_f] return Start[upgfile_get_header_and_meta_f] @[upgfile_get_header_and_meta_f], getHeaderGeneric_f header magic = -549230192, header upg_item_num = 3 chksum 537572316, header->chksum 537572316 @[upgfile_get_header_and_meta_f], upgfile_sanity_check_f start check item checksum offset 114 size 1696768 end check item checksum de177b34, de177b34 start check item checksum offset 1696882 size 7315456 end check item checksum 4f0973df, 4f0973df start check item checksum offset 9012338 size 5505024 end check item checksum 1f143d1a, fef3cada Get Header from file:/mnt/ext/FlashDisk(956M)/mtv3600_3_16NZ.upg chksum 537572316, header->chksum 537572316 end of getHeaderGeneric res = 0
Depending if you can get to the serial console and get the root password... I would be pretty sure you would see debug information for an incorrect loader id. But it really depends how much more they have had to lock down this unit for the Australian market. Unfortunately I have no plans to buy another MTV unit at this stage.
As per my comments in the 3700 tread I have one of the Crazy Stu MTV4000 reflashed with AU firmware for the 3700, but still not able to get the NZ firmware. If someone out there has a solution I would be really keen to here how. The NZ 5.03 firmware doesn't load by USB
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