Pace Twin Update...

quote:The next new download will start broadcasting at 10am on Friday the 28th of
October and will continue broadcasting until 9am on Monday the 31st of
October



What if you were away and missed it. Is there anyway of getting it
 
Not unless/until they repeat it.
 
With regard to watching something that is still recording...

Richard46 said:
Hi jedi-jae

My Topfield can certainly do it.

Richard

Yes it can, but have you seen the daft way it goes about it?

Take the scenario, for example (and this actually happened to a 'Toppy' owner), where you are recording a big football match and want to start watching an hour after kick-off - while the match is still being recorded, maybe because you were putting the kids to bed.

You go into 'Play' and the first thing you have to do is 'Rewind' all the way back to the beginning of the recording. This you do with your hands over your eyes so as not to see the score. Once at the beginning you can start playing the match. Great. You settle down to what turns out to be a great game.

Then (and this is the icing on the cake) as the live match finishes, and the Topfield stops recording, you are thrown out of 'Play' mode and back to live TV, only to be confronted with the final score! I expect there was a promotion for the employee at Topfield Inc. who thought that one up.

So why not do it like the Pace Twin? As soon as a recording starts it is entered into the Library as normal. In the Library listing there is a small red dot and an increasing duration time, along side the programme title, to show it is a recording in progress. You can treat this entry just as any other. You can Play it (from the start, and at any speed), 'Resume' it from where you left off, FF or REW, create and delete bookmarks on it etc. etc. When the live recording ends, all you know about it is that the red LED on the front of the machine goes out.

One day, all PVRs will be made this way.


Spok.
 
Spok said:
So why not do it like the Pace Twin?
One day, all PVRs will be made this way.


Spok.

Hi Spok

Could not agree more; The Twin's implemetation of features; Interface design; etc are well nigh perfect in my opinion. I was just pointing out that it is not the only PVR that can play a current recording.

Richard
 
But why is it so difficult for these large companys to design a decent user interface? Just look at Panasonic, who I have always had great respect for. When buying a VHS recorder in the past, I would always go for Panasonic. But just take a look at their recent PVR. Its user interface is simply dreadful. Do they all have competitions to see who can annoy the punters the most?

Just wondering...


Spok.
 
Indeed. They even seem incapable of recognising and plagiarising a good UI (as in the Pace).

Sadly, as someone whose job it was to "help" IT staff produce good and intuitive UI's, this particular skill seems to be lacking in far too many programmers.
 
Spok said:
With regard to watching something that is still recording...



Yes it can, but have you seen the daft way it goes about it?

Take the scenario, for example (and this actually happened to a 'Toppy' owner), where you are recording a big football match and want to start watching an hour after kick-off - while the match is still being recorded, maybe because you were putting the kids to bed.

You go into 'Play' and the first thing you have to do is 'Rewind' all the way back to the beginning of the recording. This you do with your hands over your eyes so as not to see the score. Once at the beginning you can start playing the match. Great. You settle down to what turns out to be a great game.

Then (and this is the icing on the cake) as the live match finishes, and the Topfield stops recording, you are thrown out of 'Play' mode and back to live TV, only to be confronted with the final score! I expect there was a promotion for the employee at Topfield Inc. who thought that one up.

So why not do it like the Pace Twin? As soon as a recording starts it is entered into the Library as normal. In the Library listing there is a small red dot and an increasing duration time, along side the programme title, to show it is a recording in progress. You can treat this entry just as any other. You can Play it (from the start, and at any speed), 'Resume' it from where you left off, FF or REW, create and delete bookmarks on it etc. etc. When the live recording ends, all you know about it is that the red LED on the front of the machine goes out.

One day, all PVRs will be made this way.


Spok.

I agree. If ReplayTV and TiVo had these features 7 years ago I can't believe the Topfield engineer thought - 'hey they are really cool lets design a system that is really crap instead'.
They have a one button -skip to beginiing so you dont have to rewind either.
 
Cyril said:
I can't believe the Topfield engineer thought - 'hey they are really cool lets design a system that is really crap instead'.
But they did!


Cyril said:
They have a one button -skip to beginiing so you dont have to rewind either.

Even that is convoluted. When you select 'Play', why don't they just play from the beginning of the recording? Isn't that exactly what you would want to do? Why introduce an extra button press? Madness!


Spok.
 
Spok said:
But they did!
Spok.

Hi Spok

I seem to remember from somewhere on ToppyUK that this intensly frustrating behaviour has an histoical cause. I think it was introduced (before the Toppy came to the UK) to avoid some previous problem with the software. Sorry dont have details but point is it was not neccessarily introduced as a design decision but as a workround for something else. I believe the next Toppy firmware (Nov?) may possibly get rid of the problem but is involving an extensive sorfware re-write. That sort of explains why anything so daft was implemented although not why it was not properly sorted earlier. Pressure of need to release kit as early as possible I suppose.
Anyway this going off topic; Sorry.

Back on topic; I decided not to upgrade my Twin with the new S/W after reading about problems esp on DigitalSpy. My mother now has it and it would have involved me in a 90 mile drive to her flat (she is away) and anyway it has been behaving very well for the last year. If its not broke,,,
By the way its a credit to the Twin interface that my 80 year old mother (who can turn a tap the wrong way :) ) uses the twin regularly with only one or two tech support calls to me each month. :D
 
LV426 said:
Not unless/until they repeat it.

Pace have said they are repeating the update 17th Nov

Other way is to send the box to them for the update
 
Richard46 said:
I decided not to upgrade my Twin with the new S/W after reading about problems esp on DigitalSpy.

Can you be more specific about those problems, or provide a link to the thread(s) on Digital Spy?

We have had no problems at all since the upgrade. The annoying bug we had previously, where the machine would sometimes go into 'Pause' when starting replay of a recording, seems to have been fixed. Also we have not noticed any more of the little picture freezes, where the video would stop for about half a second while the audio carried on, then catch up again. This problem only happened occasionally so the jury is still out. And, as I said earlier in this thread, the picture quality has got even better.

Spok.
 
Spok said:
Can you be more specific about those problems, or provide a link to the thread(s) on Digital Spy?


Spok.

Thread here Spok. There are are few pages. Like you some people seem OK; some not. As my Mums Twin was behaving just thought not worth taking the risk.

Richard
 
Spok said:
But they did!




Even that is convoluted. When you select 'Play', why don't they just play from the beginning of the recording? Isn't that exactly what you would want to do? Why introduce an extra button press? Madness!


Spok.

If you are in the library menu of either TiVo or ReplayTV it automatically plays from the beginning, unless you have previously viewed it, in which case it plays from the point where you last left it. The FVRT150 doesn't remember but plays from the beginning, but you can jump to a scene. (I personally hate the FVRT150 as I expect remembering where you were to be a basic pvr feature -so the Pace Twin get a good thumbs up for having this!).

If you are watching live TV you need one or two button presses to get to the beginning of the buffer for TiVo, ReplayTV or FVRT150.
 
Not happy crashed yesterday when the screen went blank unplugged it lasted a few secounds crashed again third time put the guide on crashed again,
so I unplugged it for a hour and when I turned it on again it had wiped my hard drive:mad:
this is the first time in the two years I have had it that it has done that.
made it worse I had Enterprise on there and they don't repeat it :(
why can't they show it again on one of there other channels :rolleyes:

Dave.
 
Although no 0 sec recordings, on Sunday was recording Shoebox Zoo and when I looked later it had only recorded 12 minutes and said the power recovery thing. That is just as bad as 0 seconds.

The machine has also frozen, where no buttons work whatsoever and you have to unplug it, quite a few times.

RosemaryP
 
The new code is worse than ever!!! Pace have surely lost the plot entirely. I've had numerous "recovery files" - i.e.what were previously 0s recordings, but the machine has missed chunks of the programme - it's also completely failed to record several scheduled items - something it has never done before. Tonight I found that "Lost" from last Thursday, although apparently recorded OK, is unwatchable, jumps all over the place and the sound is completely out of sync - again, something it has never done before. Fortunately I also have a Thomson, which only seems to screw up when compressing recordings to LP . . .
 
I agree, there seems to be little improvement in the new software.
I am now thinking of giving up on the Pace and buying something else!
 
I have had no problems so far since loading the new software at the end of October.

IK
 
I've never had any problems with the previous updates and was going to give this one a miss. However the missus thought she was doing me a favour and now the machine has started playing up... Come on Pace, pull ya finger out and fix my freeview box!!!
 
It's a repeat of the 1.7.7 update - for anyone whose box hasn't already been screwed up :D
 
Our Twin has definitely improved since the update, with no recordings lost. There are still a few playback issues (sometimes jerky), but they are always fixed with a stop and restart (not even a re-boot).

One notable improvement is picture quality - sometimes hard to believe its not coming from DVD.

So far I'm very happy with the upgrade. I may even invest in a larger drive (I've already installed a 40Gb).

Chris
 
Barton1967 said:
Our Twin has definitely improved since the update, with no recordings lost. There are still a few playback issues (sometimes jerky), but they are always fixed with a stop and restart (not even a re-boot).

One notable improvement is picture quality - sometimes hard to believe its not coming from DVD.

So far I'm very happy with the upgrade. I may even invest in a larger drive (I've already installed a 40Gb).

Chris
----------------
So far i have had no problems at all, no lost recordings or play back problems. I am almost tempted to upgrade the hard drive to a 60Gb again but i am a little nervous as said so far its working perfectly.
 
Since the upgrade my PACE has been more unreliable. Especially ITV3 for some strange reason. The box gets stuck 1/2-3/4 of the way thru quite often.

Anyone else noticed recording certain channels are more unreliable than others?
 

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