Walmart US Digital STB Questions - Page 18

This thread is popular to me for 3 reasons.

1. I have one of these boxes and it would be nice to get a free OTA ASTC tuner with the impending digital change (not all my tvs are 1080p plasmas...or any for that matter)

2. Many of us got screwed by either USDTV or on Ebay and it is a support group to help us out of our screwed situation

3. The Hisense receiver is a nice simple tuner that has component, composite and s-video outputs that has a nice user interface (now), great aspect ratio options, and was relatively cheap even in retail.

Plus linux is sweet

Not much more than the tuner in your set will do. Except for maybe having a built-in program guide.

It's special to the people who have it because they don't have a built-in OTA tuner in their set, like you do.

so this has no value to me if i already have a tuner and get local HD channels?

You dont need the box then.

I use mine with a front projector and also with an HD ready HDTV that doesnt have a built in tuner.

Our TV is Standard Def., however it would be nice to pick up HD broadcasts on it. In many areas, it's easier to pick up a good HD signal than to try to pull in the standard broadcasts. Not to mention the additional channels (PBS here has two or three seperate channels with different content). It won't work magic of course, but it'll look as nice as something can look on Standard Def. which is an improvement .

If someone who gets ahold of one of the Ebay keys feels up to making a dd image of it like I specified in an earlier post, I'm sure that you'd be everyone's hero here.

It was the flash key. It cost $30. I hope it comes in today's mail. He called me and said I can pay with credit card or buy it from him on ebay. I paid via credit card and he said he would mail it to me.

I asked how he got my phone number. He said that he was a local USDTV distributer before they went under. USDTV passed him a list (early this week) of phone numbers that he could call if he wanted to. He said it was a way for him to recoup some of the money he invested by purchasing the Hisense boxes and antennas. He said I was one of the first because I was in red -- meaning I had called Cable Comm many times asking for the upgrade

He said he didn't want to drive all over the place to upgrade people because he has his own business to run (but he wanted to help people and recoup money), so he would mail them a key. I thought this was great because now people outside his local area could get a key too -- because technically I live outside their service area but I have a 30ft tower so I could pull the signal and I doubt he would drive 70 miles one way to upgrade me.

I hope it works. I will post if/when I get it. If it does, I will be more than happy with USDTV b/c they let us keep the boxes and I will basically have two HDTV tuners for pretty cheap. The box is perfect for me since I live so far from the signal b/c the analog signal for me has some snow but the digital signal is perfect.

Did you happen to ask him if it will work on more than one STB? If it does couldn't you potentially resell it and recoup your expenses?

I did get the USB stick today and gave it a try. It worked! It took about 5-7 minutes, but it worked.

You unplug the box, put in the stick and plug the box back into the electrical outlet. Up comes a yellow screen that says something like "Installing upgrade. Do not unplug.". Then it has a status bar across the screen and says things like Erasing kernel, Writing kernel and other things I can't remember.

When it was done, it said to unplug the box and remove the stick. Then when you plug it back in you go into the scan for channels. It finds them and then asks about the timezone and sets the time.

Someone earlier mentioned about the serial number going away once upgraded as a way to tell. Mine serial number was there before the upgrade but is gone after. Another thing I notice is that the USDtv symbol (swirl) is not on any of the menu pages.

One tip - my program guide was not working after the upgrade. This was becuase the box defaulted to get the time from the first channel it found. It so happens that it pulls the program guide from the time channel. My first channel is a local program and it doesn't put out the program guide. So I went back into the menu and chose to get the time from NBC and poof, my program guide works!

I am really happy about this. I did try to read the drive in my computer after I upgraded. It said the media was not formatted so I don't know what is on there.

In any case, it worked! So thank you USDTV for the box and thank you to the ebay dude named marsman5d4h for the upgrade.

Just in time for NCAA basketball tonight in HD -- go Tar Heels! Again THANK YOU USDTV for letting us keep these.

It looks like the current version of winimage (at a website of the same name) will backup a USB flash drive. It's not very space friendly... even though the update might only be 10MB, it made a file that was 128MB, the same size as the drive. I was able to zip it, but it only shrunk to 90+ MB. Perhaps starting with a 32MB flash drive would result in a file size that could be e-mailed.

Symantec Ghost 8.0 produced a very nice 7MB file. Perhaps someone with one of these new drives has access to Ghost.

Or... perhaps someone with one of the drives has access to a friend with linux... and then we could get a tar.gz file.

Great to hear that your key from marsman5d4h worked and you are now able to use your DB2010 the way it way meant to be. I also have a key coming from marsman5d4h and a DB2010 new unit. Hope my upgrade works as well as yours, wondering if you had the Menu up before for upgrade which showed the serial number. I lost my menu when I did a "Factory Reset" from USBTV and do not now have access to my serial number, so hoping my key for the upgrade works as well as yours. Really excited to maybe have it working!! When you put the key in your computer, are you using Microsoft or Lennex OS?, to have it show it needed to be formatted. Hope you enjoy the games!!!

Hi everyone.
Well, after owning one of these OTA Wal-mart specials for a while now and even upgrading to the newer firmware 2.7.11 (a crash course in Linux) there's something still not quite right. It has to do with ABC' s HD programming. It will stay on for about a minute and then freezes the whole box up. Can still access menus but can't channel up or down after that. Tells me the Channel "is currently of the air". BS! Only thing that fixes it is a reboot (unplug and replug) or a reset (guide, aspect, exit, etc...) and that's no good either if you go back to the ABC channel when HD programming is on because it screws up again. I have read a few posts about this but no clues as to why. So the qestion I have is this:
Anyone have the same problem and could there be some sort of 'broadcast flag' embedded in ABC HD content that makes the DB-2010 choke when it receives it or could it just be getting more data than the 2010 can resolve at one time and cause it to freeze?
If anyone could venture an idea, an opinion, or even a 'wild a' guess it might help bring some more understanding of this little silver box we all love to hate.
Thanks to all that have helped to keep this 2010 project going.

Well, here's a guess. Since these boxes have problems with audio from time to time, try this. When you get to the ABC station in question, press the audio button on the remote and see if there are are other audio streams available. It may be choking on the audio stream (e.g. 5.1).

If that does not work, try going into the menu and changing the video from 1080i to 720p or vice versa and see if that helps. Also experiment with 480p and 480i and see if you get the same freeze up.

If neither of those work, then I'm stumped. So good luck!

Does anyone know how long it takes to get one of these firmware sticks for the DB2010
and also do you have to live in the area where they had service to get local Channels ?

You just have to live in an area where they are broadcasting digital signals. I doubt that there are many places left that have only analog.
Check antennaweb org
to get an idea of what channels you might get.

wow! don't go on ebay asking a specific question on a db-2010 some of the power sellers will rip you a new one.... ouch! it still stings

GOD I AM SO SORRY, I JUST GOT MY FIRST NEGATIVE IN 6 MONTHS 5 MIN BEFORE YOU ASKED ME YOUR QUESTION. SO UNFIAR, I NEEDED 3 DAYS TO SEND BUYER THE RIGHT ITEM, LONG STORY, HAD 2 IDENTICAL EXCEPT FOR A MODEL # DIFFERENCE. ANYWAY, BUYER DID NOT WAIT AND SLAMMED ME, YOU ASKED ME A QUESTION IN THE SAME 15 MIN PERIOD AND I ATTACKED. I AM SO SORRY, I APOLOGIZE IN PUBLIC.. BIG HUGGS, JERRY AKA FRINGE

OK! COOL! Somedays just suck more than others

ok, quick noob question:

If I use the DB2010 on my HD-Ready TV, but have basic cable plugged in , will I see any HD channels, or do I need to get a new antenna as well?

I'm looking to ditch my Comcast digital cable, and would like basic TV + some HD stuff if possible. I was looking to buy the DB2010 from marsman5d4h.

No. This unit does not receive QAM signals (digital cable), or NTSC signals (analog cable or OTA). It receives only ATSC signals (digital OTA).

That's fine, as I was already shopping for an antenna. One thing I'm concerned about is the distance from most stations. Looking at antennaweb, it looks like I'm ~41miles away. I also only have the option of an indoor antenna, and have no windows facing towards the stations.

gelgod325,

Would you be willing to plug your USB key into a PC running Linux, and extract and post the files from the key? If so, we should be able to use the instructions from this thread to build our own keys. These files need to be freed, for the good of anyone who owns a DB2010.

After looking at it a bit, it looks like Winimage may be able to create the same sort of an image file of a USB drive as using the dd method I posted earlier. As I described earlier, a bit-for-bit image with dd or Winimage would allow for some of us who have the technical knowledge, but not the drive, to verify what is needed to make the drive work: filesystem type, permissions on each file, etc.

The image could likely even be written to another drive directly with dd, or from within Windows using Winimage or the Windows version of dd. This would almost certainly work for 32 meg drives, and perhaps larger.

Looks like all of marsman5d4h's USB keys have been removed from eBay.

Also, Cable Communications now has a web site and is selling box conversion for $30 and USDTV boxes for $75. Whether Cable Communications is now selling USB keys is unknown.

http://www.cablecomsvc.com/

The "I wanna be a real business" scam continues.

The cheezy one-page website for "cable communications" was oh so professionally made in Microsoft Word (document author Kelly Knight) on March 8th. Clicking either Buy Now link dumps you directly into PayPal, feeding money to the account knightridercom@gmail.com. No instructions, no explanations, not even a "Click here to see if you're in the area for a local visit," or "If you click this here button I will send you a Cool USB key!!11!"

Again, I'm pretty sure my teenage kids can create a more professional website and a better business facade.

PS. I always trust people who use sophisticated language like "CALL FOR TODAY DETAILS!!!"

Some one must have the usb key? use winimage or dd to make an image for the rest of us. If you need instructions pmsg me and i will post the image.

I e-mailed marsman5d4h, and he said the following about USB keys.

"They are still available through our website, but you have to have been a USDTV subscriber in order to get one. We need proof of that by a copy of an old bill emailed to marsman@prodigy.net"

ProServ's Web Site/Contact Info

If you click on the "Purchase a Key" link, it says "Due to copyright laws you are only allowed to purchase one of these keys if you have proof of being a current or previous subscriber to USDTV."

The question becomes, who really owns the copyrights? If it's all based on Linux, as stated at http://elinux.org/wiki/HiSense, the Free Software Foundation owns the source code. How can USDTV retain and transfer copyrights to Cable Communications and ProServ for software it really does not own?

I've read nearly all of the posts on this topic and haven't really seen this issue addressed. But if I missed it, just let me know. Anyway I purchase one of the Walmart 2010's a couple of years ago (from Walmart). Oddly enough the unit functioned quite well untill nearly the same day as when USDTV went out of business. Since then all I get are two rapidly blinking LED's on the front panel.

What I don't understand is how my set (presumably) could have affected, since I never subscribed to USDTV. The only thing odd was that beginning several weeks prior I started getting messages while viewing TV shows that software needed to be updated and I was supposed to click cancel - or some such thing. Could it have been that somehow the firmware got updated over the air, such that it stopped functioning just as though it was a subscription-based unit? I live in Pittsburgh after all.

Any ideas?

I had a box that just had the firmware get corrupted all by itself. When you first plug the box in, do you get a USD logo on the screen, and then it goes away, and then back... and endless loop?

Either way, the USD tech guys told me that the USB thumbdrive would usually fix the problem. I assume you need a subscription drive for a subscription box and a FTA drive for a Free to air box.

I was unable to test this, because when they went bankrupt the first time, they stopped sending out drives.

I assume ONE of the updates everyone is talking about here will fix you up. Being that you got the device from Wal-Mart, I assume the files that everyone already has would get you going again.

Actually I do not get a logo when plugging the unit in - just the same flashing LED's. I tried the one update previously provided, but to no avail. Though, I didn't realize there were two different ones floating around. I'll double back on this thread and make sure that I got the correct one. That aside, is there any type of hard reset that I can try?

RobJMan, there aren't two on the list just yet. Just the one you have. We are hoping someone will present the other one soon.

The update you have, have you used it before? Are you sure that it works properly? It needs to be a linux partition on the USB drive, and the files need to be set executable.