LG 3200A / Sony HD-300 / Hughes HTL-HD - 2.0 Upgrade

And add in the "what the heck is the serial protocol" issues as well, since it's not standard DirecTV codes for some stuff and I need to know what they are.

Hey, that was my eleven thousand, one hundred and eleventh post. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I probably won't live to see the twenty two thousand two hundred and twenty second one, at least I hope not.

Good idea Chris. This thread should have lots more stuff on it next week, hopefully good

I got a message from one of those Sony tech specialists dealing with the hd300 issues. He has been up front with me since last December and has never given me any bad info.

I don't want this info to get lost in the shuffle but this sounds real. Direct TV has approved the date for the firmware download and the software has been approved also. On May 10 expect to have your box updated with version 2.0

Four days! I hope you're right!!! ....then we can all move on to complaining about the new bugs they have created

I'd already read that, but reading it again just now something struck me that I'd missed the first time. The devil is in the details. I'll check that and try again. Thanks.

I think May 15 at 2:00 a.m. (PT) is the latest tentative date. I hope I'm wrong and it's sooner. If you're watching at that time, look for a congratulatory note on getting a free upgrade and then a return to video.

Well, that extra info didn't help. Either my HD300 is hosed, or the documentation is incomplete, or I'm an idiot. I am often an idiot, but I have extensive experience in device control, so I don't think I'm missing anything obvious. It will not change channels no matter what I do, so clearly the documentation is incorrect on that particular command, or at least something is not being stated that would indicate why it shouldn't work in some circumstances.

I can get power on/off, remote keys, get date/time (though what that data means isn't clear),.

Get channel fails, not in a communciations sort of way, it just always puts out 0x20 0x00 0x00 0x01 F5, so it puts out 4 bytes, as expected, but they are junk and the F5 indicates the command failed.

Set channel just puts out an F0 (indicating it's waiting for something), no matter what I send it. If I subsequently send something else, that will get picked up as the rest of the message, and some huge channel number will get set. But if I put out anything else along with the message itself, any number of bytes, it will still just sit there and wait.

Ok, the response to the get channel occurs when it doesn't have a good lock on the channel, so that's figured out. But setting the channel still doesn't work.

And my other biggest issue is the DHCP compatibility thing. The HD300 and it's underlying LG design, evidentally don't play well with scalers. They work if you go straight to a display, else it would be worthless, but those of us taking HD into a scaler via DHCP have problems because it will encrypt the signal all the time (or at least periodically drop the signal causing the scaler to think it's encrypted.)

If this isn't going to get fixed in the theoretical upcoming firmware rollout, then I'll probably return mine because having that pure digital signal over to the scaler is very important.

And finally the channel change is working. It was lack of documentation so I had no idea I wasn't doing something I should have been doing.

Well, its nice to hear that you are not an idiot

Don't count my braincells before they die.

The "FA protocol" was apparently developed jointly by RCA and Sony for their lines of DirecTV receivers, and they consider it to be "proprietary" (i.e., they refuse to publish their own documentation for us "common folk", although they do provide protocol documentation under "non-disclosure agreements" to "industry partners" such as TiVo).

The protocol was "reverse engineered" years ago by hobbyists, and the code lists for the original ("MPG") and current ("APG") versions of the protocol are published on two Web sites. (I have posted those URLs previously.) Unfortunately, the hobbyist documentation is unclear about the fact that all commands involving parameters are done in a "two-part transaction".

The way I figured it out was, I wrote a "serial sniffer" in Java. This uses two serial ports, and it simply copies the input on one port as output to the other, and vice versa. But it logs all data flows to the console. Then, with the hobbyist documentation in hand, I connected a TiVo to a Sony DBS receiver (an early "MPG" model, initially) via my "sniffer"and examined the log!

OK, has anybody got the next upgrade message on their box yet? The suspense is killing me.

So Chris, the audio drops have hit you

Chris, were you watching CBS OTA or on DirecTV?

When is the update 'supposed' to happen?

Chris,

Without violating any confidences, where did you hear that this was coming Monday?

-S

Latest I heard was a "tentative" date of 05/15/04 at 2:00 a.m. (PT). That's from a well-placed, though not directly involved, D*TV source. We'll see.

Are you sure it wasn't 05/15/05?

ron

My guess is tonight at 4:01 EST. No reason. Just a guess

To my knowledge D has never sent updates on weekends.