Just What Is The Problem With Freeview?
With the UK`s digital switchover looming like the Hindenburg it`s likely to turn into (when has anything ever gone right in the UK?), just why are Freeview receivers so flakey?
For the PC I have a little Hauppage WinTV USB box – not a bad little device, but a flakey blob of Freeview data and the device can freeze, occasionally with the software just bombing out, requiring a reset of the PC as the USB controller just gives up and cries. I haven`t used it much since I moved house from about 10 miles away. The girlfriend has had to return a couple of Bush boxes as they`ve frozen to the point of being useless. She lives about 12 miles away. And now my Humax has started acting up.
From oldest to newest, these receivers have around 4 years between them, so it`s hard to believe they could all contain the same chipsets or whatever else is required to decode the signal. So the question is – why are these things so flakey? Both of us, independently, have gone out or gone to bed, and come back to find a frozen box on several occasions. These are different models manufactured at different times, located in different properties, with different environmental conditions.
Anyway – some useful information I picked up this morning for a “dead” Humax Freeview box. You must power down, remove the aerial, and power up again if you want to get “in” and reset bits and pieces. Seems an odd approach, but it worked for me. The PVR was resetting constantly (you could hear the hard disk being reinitialised) and no buttons on the remote control or device itself helped. This worked for a Humax 9150T but is apparently a common “fix”.