50x: P166 now spooling

[Mark Holtz]

At 8:30 AM today, my 501 receiver received a firmware upgrade to P166. It is probably some bug fixes. No new apps on DishHome. Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to see if any other changes were made. I know I encountered a bug in the Timers -> Name sort, but that was fixed by switching back to date sort.

[DarrellP]

Anyone figured out the bug fixes/enhancements with this yet?

[Steve Mehs]

I'm still on 165, I hope this release fixes some stabiliy problems in OpenTV and speeds up the OpenTV apps.

[jeffr]

Still on 165 here with my 508. How long does it usually take to spool to everyone?

[John Corn]

Jeff, seems to me it usually takes 2 to 3 weeks before everyone has the upgrade.

[DmitriA]

Amen to the OpenTV speedup. I don't understand why they can't just store most of these apps on the harddrive instead of redownloading them everytime

[VinDoGG]

I've just been upgraded. Didn't even have to turn off my reciever this time to be upgraded.

[WalterG]

Maybe a bit of a speedup on dish home weather. Weather does a save when you leave now so it remembers my home city. Didn't under 165.

[Nancy Galliano]

I lost everything recorded on my 501 (including a PPV that I hadn't watched yet) during the upgrade. I called Dish and they said I should have "protected" my recordings. It seems that protecting recordings should be the default. Just my 2 cents.

[MrAkai]

Protected or not you shouldn't looks programs in an upgrade. Call dish back and give them a health does of whoopass, and send an email to ceo@echostar.com

You should at least get credit for your PPV, and an apology.

[DarrellP]

Originally posted by Nancy Galliano
I lost everything recorded on my 501 (including a PPV that I hadn't watched yet) during the upgrade. I called Dish and they said I should have "protected" my recordings. It seems that protecting recordings should be the default. Just my 2 cents.
Nancy, you need to get your 501 exchanged. I went through Hell the first 6 months with mine, losing 30+ hours of recordings 4 different times.

You need to call Dish and be firm but polite and demand a new unit. If it is fairly new, refuse to pay shipping on it. They will cry foul but be firm and the fee will be waived.

[Steve Mehs]

166 arrived for me early this morning, nothing different noticed here.

[Chris Blount]

I received 166 earlier today. No problems so far.

[Unthinkable]

I have yet to see anything that stands out as "new" in this software release. Probably just a bunch of minor bug fixes as slow motion is still not enabled and Dish Home has all the same active applications on it now that it had previously. I was thinking this upgrade would add a few more applications like zap2it, and news, but it doesn't look to be the case just yet.

[jeffr]

I also received it this morning. Seems to me that Dish Home is faster. Also haven't had the reboot problem in my playing with Dish Home and Weather so far. This is GREAT news for me. I hope this upgrade solved that one and I wasn't just lucky this morning.

I just noticed that Dish Home is an option on the menu bar in Weather. Was that always there or is that new? I don't recall having seen it there before, but I could be mistaken.

[Randy_B]

The upgrade wiped out our recordings. My wife lost a weeks worth of her shows, she is not happy!

[DarrellP]

If this software upgrade is any indication of the past upgrades, be it known that it is best to do a power button reset after receiving any upgrade from Dish. Past experience has shown that if you don't reset the receiver after receiving an upgrade, all hell can break loose. Better to be on the safe side than play with fire.

[DmitriA]

Randy_B and everyone else that lost recordings - please call Dish and let the know about this problem, so that at least they'll stop spooling it, fix it, and make it safe for the rest of us :)

[DmitriA]

Actually, too late. I've already got it - all recordings are intact.

[TerryC]

A few weeks ago I posted that Dish Home crashes for me more often than not. I've only had P166 for a day or so and have only used DH three times, but it hasn't crashed on me yet. This is significant since it would have crashed once or twice by now. This S/W upgrade must be for people like me. I guess if you didn't have these frequent crashes the upgrade wouldn't affect you.

I do notice DH being a little faster, too.

[HTguy]

I got 166 the other night in my showroom.

It didn't cause any prerecorded events to disappear but it evidently caused a timer for that morning to misfire. It was the Retailer Chat.

[jeffr]

My recordings, both Protected and Unprotected, remained intact after the upgrade.

[Filip1]

There is one small, but nice improvement in 166. I saw this posted in another site. When you are in recorded events screen,and chose name sort, it now sorts by date within the individual groupings. This isn't a big deal but a definite upgrade.

[DarrellP]

I got mine and did it ever cause some weird problems. I had recorded the premiere of Enterprise and prior to getting 166 the show duration showed 1 hour. After 166 it showed 0 time remaining at the beginnig but it played back ok.

I did the power button reset and the smartcard yank, pulled the power, and rebooted. Still said 0. Playback was ok so I continued watching Enterprise and a weird thing happened: Only for this one recording, everytime I hit the 10 second skip back button, it would skip FORWARD 10 seconds, I sh*t you not! It only happened on this one recording, nothing else.

I didn't realize that I had recevied 166 but figured I must have since my PVR was acting weird. I had trouble setting timers and was getting kicked back to live while doing things in the Menu structure so I knew it was time for a reset (I had just done one a few days ago, so this was odd behaviour). I was also losing timers and the clock was not showing up in the EPG for timers that had been set.

All appears OK now.

[Unthinkable]

I managed last night to crash one of my two pvr 501's w/software rev P166 when checking instant weather from the Dish Home menu so that can't be completely fixed just yet. It does seem to load up applications faster though and manages to allow you to back out of the Dish Baseball menus with far more ease then before.

[jeffr]

Unfortunately I must report the same problem as The Unthinkable. I thought it was licked with 166 but last night I had the same old problem pop up.
Fired up Instant Weather, got the loading screen, and then the 508 appeared to turn off. I say appeared because the results on my TV looked just like the unit turned off however the green power light was still on....at least for 10-15 seconds. Then it too turned off. Every 30 seconds or so I would get a brief flash of the green and red LED's. You could not turn power back on so a reset by holding the power button in for 30 seconds solved that particular problem.
It's unfortunate that this problem still exists because I do like the convenience of checking the instant weather. Fortunately I do have two other 301's that I can check it on, just not as conveniently.

[rbonzer]

Something like this happened to me last night. Went to "instant" weather, and it appeared to turn off. Black screen, green light went out. Then the green light came back on, black screen. Then the green light went out. Then came back on, still black screen.

I was very patient. Didn't do anything (for fear of messing things up), and eventually, maybe 30 seconds later, the loading screen came back up, then I got "instant" weather.

Try being patient like I was, maybe things will fix itself up.

[DarrellP]

It would be nice if they could cache the "Instant Weather" since there is nothing "Instant" about it.

[andrzejpw]

lol, I was just going to say that.

[poeppe]

It would be even better if there was a way to turn that stuff off (instant weather & all the Dish home stuff). It is to slow to be useful and causes to many craches. I would like to turn it off so bumping the button on the remote won't accidentily jump to it.

[DarrellP]

poeppe, take it out of your Favorites list.

[poeppe]

I have but that doesn't take care of the DISH button on the remote which still goes straight to the dish home menu(after a long pause of course).