Getting sick of skyQ

I've had a few freezes in the 6 months I've owned Q, mainly the minis but it's maybe once every 3-4 weeks at the most so nothing bad. Apart from that no issues at all and have never seen any sound or audio dropouts.

Can only think it's either certain makes of TV (Samsung was mentioned) or maybe the dish with an issue causing blank screens?

I made sure HDMI CEC was switched off and for people with screen going blank maybe as a test try changing it to 1080P if running at 4K to see if it's that causing the issue. DO these blank screens happen only on live TV or with recordings as well?


Maybe there's a load of duff boxes in circulation?
 
I had a raft of issues for 5+ months none of which were fixed but they eventually went away from October. Picture break ups on recording, clouds making system give up and networking related issues. As they were resolved by no action on my part I assume there were multiple firmware issues. Never had sound issues except for one movie.
 
im also getting the picture drop outs again, last year had issues with just sound but now its just the picture, sky told me the next firmware will sort the issue and there is nothing more they can do....poxy thing wish id stuck with SkyHD!
 
Or get them to fix it.
 
No dropouts or blackouts. Q has been reliable here.
Did see a recent Samsung firmware update on some models mucked up sky and virgin boxes a week or so back.
Worth checking your firmware is up to date.
Really see no point in just replacing q boxes that may not be the cause, have you or sky tried a very basic setup using non uhd for a while and see if that helps.
You should use the sky q cable, using any old hdmi cable will not help.
Think Lancia hdmi cec idea above is good to try.
 
Just had my first issue within 10 days of Sky Q being installed. Scheduled recording failed to take place. Also unable to pause live TV. Did a hard reboot and it started the recording once powered up.
 
I contacted sky they suggested a re-update the software, this didn't work so I have an engineer booked, im assuming ill end up with a new box
 
I contacted sky they suggested a re-update the software, this didn't work so I have an engineer booked, im assuming ill end up with a new box
So sky man came, went through the motions claimed it was a duff HDMI (even though I've tried swapping them before, he ended up replacing the HDMI and we got another box, haven't had an issue since. So it was one of the two causing the issue!
 
Both main and mini locked up the last two mornings.
 
My mini is always losing connection with the main box even though it's connected via Ethernet. Wonder if I should try wireless instead? The router is in the same room as the mini.

Sounds like a possible issue with that mini. Maybe try over wifi and if it's stable then it might be the router causing an issue. If it's the router then you could get a small desktop switch to connect both of them into and try that.

If all else fails I'd get Sky out to replace it.

EDIT - is you main Q box ethernet as well?
 
My mini is always losing connection with the main box even though it's connected via Ethernet. Wonder if I should try wireless instead? The router is in the same room as the mini.

Test it is actually communicating by Ethernet and not wifi by disconnecting.
 
My mini is always losing connection with the main box even though it's connected via Ethernet. Wonder if I should try wireless instead? The router is in the same room as the mini.
It's worth a try as I connected my mini to the main Sky Q box through an ethernet switch and had nothing but connection issues (despite testing the link with other hardware at 1Gbps with 0% packet loss), but since switching to Wifi it's been fine so it's either a hardware issue with the mini or a buggy firmware issue. From my understanding unless you have Sky Broadband then the main Q box and the mini communicate via their own Wifi network and not via the one provided by your router so the placement of both boxes can be an issue.
 
From my understanding unless you have Sky Broadband then the main Q box and the mini communicate via their own Wifi network and not via the one provided by your router so the placement of both boxes can be an issue.

Not true as I have Virgin and my Q and minis are ethernet and communicate over ethernet.
 
Not true as I have Virgin and my Q and minis are ethernet and communicate over ethernet.
Sorry if I wasn't clear but I was referring to the case where you opt for Wifi rather than ethernet between both boxes. Clearly if you opt for the ethernet option then you don't even need to have a router involved (i.e. it can be a direct cable or a switch instead).
 
Sorry if I wasn't clear but I was referring to the case where you opt for Wifi rather than ethernet between both boxes. Clearly if you opt for the ethernet option then you don't even need to have a router involved (i.e. it can be a direct cable or a switch instead).

Yes, sorry, didn't get the specifics, it does indeed use a Mesh network over wifi
 
I had intermittent wi-fi issues between my Silver and broadband connection to my non-Sky router. This would sometimes show up by mini box connection issues rather than any issues with the Silver as such. Seemed to screw up the whole network. Bought TP Link adapters and set up the Silver via an Ethernet connection to my router. Once set-up, had to reset both minis and re-establish connection from scratch and the whole set-up seems to have been rock solid ever since.

I am convinced that any type of network issue is the cause of a lot of symptoms with Q that on the surface do not seem to be network issues as such. Cure any network instability and the system should be fine.
 
The Sky Q networking is flaky in my experience - my Silver is wired to a 1Gbps ethernet switch and is fine, whereas if I wire the mini to the same switch it often goes through periods where is disconnects every couple of minutes. Yet if I swap out the mini and connect up another device to the same port on the switch with the same cables to stream TV from my Vu box I get zero issues - ditto if I connect my PS4/NAS to stream or download etc.

I work in IT and have a in-depth knowledge of networking yet I could find no reasonable explanation as to why the mini wouldn't work properly over ethernet so I have to assume that it's a potential hardware/firmware issue on the device itself. Fortunately the mini works okay over Wifi, although I noticed there seems to be slightly longer delay when changing channels or starting a recording than when I had it using ethernet.
 
Interesting. I also work in IT. Think the whole thing is set-up to work with Sky broadband equipment. For Internet connectivity, you can only connect via a 5ghz connection if you are with Sky......anything else is 2.4ghz. Since I've gone Ethernet (via TP Link main connection), I'm getting full speed downloads from my Fibre BB. So far as the minis go, they seem to need to speak to the router (not sure why). Going 5ghz via Mesh and then relying on the 2.4ghz wi-fi connection seems to be a cause of potential flakiness. Like you say, they seem to work ok on Mesh, but any other configuration seems to play havoc. I have the option to experiment with Ethernet connectivity for the minis......just not sure I want to experiment with something that's now working 100% ok.
 
The Sky Q networking is flaky in my experience - my Silver is wired to a 1Gbps ethernet switch and is fine, whereas if I wire the mini to the same switch it often goes through periods where is disconnects every couple of minutes. Yet if I swap out the mini and connect up another device to the same port on the switch with the same cables to stream TV from my Vu box I get zero issues - ditto if I connect my PS4/NAS to stream or download etc.

I work in IT and have a in-depth knowledge of networking yet I could find no reasonable explanation as to why the mini wouldn't work properly over ethernet so I have to assume that it's a potential hardware/firmware issue on the device itself. Fortunately the mini works okay over Wifi, although I noticed there seems to be slightly longer delay when changing channels or starting a recording than when I had it using ethernet.

I'm a systems and network engineer and agree that makes no sense. That sounds more like a fault with the mini itself over ethernet. I presume you checked your cables and any switches on the link?
My minis work perfectly over ethernet (and also over wifi when I have used them). Apart from the usual odd reboot which isn't out of the ordinary they've had no major problems.
 
I've tested all the cables and there's only one unmanaged switch involved which I've tested the ports on with much higher data loads than Sky Q without a single hitch (even tried static IPs on the boxes in case it was a weird DHCP lease problem). I'm guessing it's probably down to a faulty component on the NIC in the mini, however it's frustrating as I wired the entire house with cat6a to avoid having to rely on Wifi for anything other than my mobile but sadly the mini has had to become an exception too. A faulty hybrid LNB and mini, guess that's what happens when Sky opts for the lowest bidder to build their hardware.
 
What make is the switch? I've had issues previously with unmanaged switches and streaming video (mainly DLNA) even though there should be no issues.

Could be something to look at if interesting in fixing? I stick with zyxel and linksys which never have had issues where a similar netgears (read multiple versions as I had 2) did.
 
It's a Zxyel switch, it's rock solid and I've been using it for 5+ years for live mpeg TS streams from my Vu box and recorded shows from my NAS to the same room with the same port/cables without any problems. I've swapped the old equipment back and it still works fine - put the Q mini box back in, reset it, disable Wifi/Powerline and it's back to random 5 second blue screen connection problems. One time while connected to Ethernet it amusingly told me it couldn't connect to the main Q box while the audio for the current channel continued to play in the background.

I've basically spent a fair bit of time troubleshooting it and have come to the conclusion that the mini is at fault as none of my other devices on the same switch/network (PCs, PS3s, PS4, TVs, sat boxes) have ever had similar issues.
 

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