I loaded up beta firmware v1.8.2 last night and tried a few of the new features. All the changes I've tried work quite well with a few exceptions that I'll mention below. And there's one change that's absolutely terrific, also mentioned below. Overall, this is a very good upgrade except for one complaint - they changed the yellow-orange highlight color to red. Red is harder to see and doesn't look as good as the previous yellow-orange color. If anyone who can do something about it is reading this, please change it back, or make it selectable by the user.
Since I haven't used all the functions yet, I'll only give my impressions of the functions I have used:
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2. Add the FAVORITE CHANNEL function.
- At the GO-TO channel list pop-up, you can add or delete the channel by ADD/DELETE button on remote.
- You can edit the channel order in the FAVORITE CHANNEL LIST by CH +/- button on remote
- To change between registered favorite channels : “REPEAT” button
- To change between all scanned channels : “CH +/-“ button
I had no problem using this and creating a favorite channel list. It works a little backwards from how I had hoped, though. In Phoenix we have about 38 digital channels of which I'm only interested in about 17. I put the 17 channels in my favorites list and I can cycle through them with the Repeat button. However, all 38 channels are still accessed with the CH +/- rocker and are listed in the program guide. I'd prefer if only my favorites were in the guide and available with the CH +/- rocker. In other words, make the default controls work just on the favorites and make it so you have to do something special to see all the scanned channels.
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5. Speed up the channel zapping speed with information window.
Nice improvement. In the previous firmware, you had to wait for each channel to tune in before you could skip to the next. This same thing works in the program guide - I can now skip between channels in the guide without waiting for each channel to tune in. I also like the wider info banner at the top of the screen when you change a channel.
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6. Channel list pop-up window will appear according to numbers, when you press numeric key on the remote.
If I press "1" on the remote, I get a popup list with all the channels that start with "1", e.g. 10-1, 12-1, 12-2, 15-1, then I can select one of those.
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9. Improve the EPG update window when selecting the channel in the EPG pop-up.
I mentioned this under item 5. I can now skip between channels in the guide without waiting for each channel to tune in.
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[Multimedia Player/ Others]
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1. Add PREVIEW WINDOW at the file browser.
- You can enable this function by SETUP -> SYSTEM -> PREVIEW
I tried it, but it's not too useful for me. Most of my movies are in VIDEO_TS folders and in order to see the preview, you have to navigate down to the video_ts.ifo file. It's actually faster to just play the movie. Also, the box locked up a few minutes into playing a preview. Everything froze, except I could still power it off using the remote. I powered it back up and it worked fine.
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5. Add the current time display on the upper-right corner.
Nice. I had it get the time from over the air. One minor nit: The times displayed after midnight show the hour as "00" instead of "12". For example 12:05 AM shows as 00:05 AM. I think this is normal in many parts of the world, but in the US, we show it as 12:xx.
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15. Support image wall-paper function at file browser.
- Make sure that image should be 1280x720 resolution and rename it tvix.jpg, then place that file at the folder you want.
- This function will be disabled when PREVIEW window is activated
This is GREAT! Now I'm able to use
Guy Kuo's Movie GUI Builder and have the polished look of a graphical background including the DVD artwork and movie synopsis for each movie. This is very slick. However, I've had the box lock up a couple times upon bringing up some of these images.
Functionally, this beta is a big improvement and I'm going to keep using it unless the lockups I mentioned become too frequent.
-Rob