Talk:Thomson DTI 6300-16

Version 6.54

Firmware Version 6.54 is now out but, no info has been added yet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.125.149.76 (talk) 23:38, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

thompedia wealth of information about upgrading and fixing dti6300 boxes

http://kafkasworld.com/phpBB2/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.168.43.55 (talk) 01:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Sadly the above is either an incorrect / vandalised link, or the board it goes to has been taken over / hacked / transferred to someone else. Whatever the case is, it certainly doesn't have the information any more, just loads of evangelist Christian preaching presented (bizarrely) as forum posts.

Does anyone have a replacement that could be used? I've tried resurrecting one of these boxes recently, both to extract the stuff already on it and to use it for work purposes, and it's driving me to distraction. The hardware may well be fine but the firmware that runs on it is truly awful - even though it's reporting a relatively recent v5.08, it's still full of glaring reliability bugs that should never have got past QC (crashing hard if you delete something whilst recording ... or try to fastforward/rewind through some other programme too much whilst recording... or try to wind to the point of playing "live" when having started a catchup-play recorded programme in "play from start" mode... or sometimes just playing something whilst recording... or deleting something regardless of what else is going on... etc). Very simple stuff, things that you think would have been dealt with before the thing got to the stage of having a case design drawn up let alone being put into production. It has two jobs - recording and playing back TV programmes and allowing you to manage the temporary library of such - and it can't really do either of them right and completely loses the plot if you try to do both at once. Oh, and there's no skip-to-time / skip back/forth 5 minutes / etc functionality, which along with the manual timer settings only letting you search back/forth through the clock minute-by-minute (no 1-hour jumps, no typing in the the time) is an amazing oversight when you can have programmes that run for 3 hours or more (so 3+ minutes at maximum search speed if you want to look at something at the very end - even VHS doesn't take that long to wind) or may be many many hours away from the current time of day...

I'm kind of hoping there's some way to force the newest (2011) firmwares into it (put them on a USB stick and insert in the service port, maybe?) as there don't appear to be any OTAs for it any more, but am reaching a bit of a dead end. Anyone able to help? It'll be useful info for the page after all. Going by the experience so far it probably won't actually fix the thing's main problems, but we can dream at least.

I do intend to replace it with a better device if possible, but it looks like they're quite expensive now and some of them are actually even less fully featured or reliable. Quite why it seems so hard to make a twin tuner freeview recorder (which quite literally just requires the ability to copying a pair of low-bandwidth datastreams from the bog-standard tuner units to a bog standard hard disk, then replay them one at a time through a bog-standard DVB decoder...) with all the normal functions you'd expect from an established-tech DVD recorder, and have it work correctly ... when you can get dirt cheap plug-in PC cards that do the same thing with no drama at all (sadly, I don't have a desktop PC any more) ... total mystery.

And once it's replaced, it won't be going back in the cupboard ... won't be going on ebay ... It's going to get thrown off the top of a very high building onto a concrete surface. Then the remains hit with a sledgehammer and set on fire. Horrible, hateful thing.

It didn't have to be this way, Thomson. You could actually have tested it before releasing it, and, on realising that the prototype firmware was absolutely shocking, completely canned the existing codebase and started over from scratch. You could probably have made something better by folding a ZX Spectrum into the case and writing the menu and control routines using BASIC...80.189.203.69 (talk) 20:16, 18 October 2014 (UTC)