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Hello all. I have recently bought an HDR1100S to replace my Sky HD box.
I am having a few problems with various aspects of it and thought I would check with existing owners how much of it is maybe me not understanding how things work and how much are general bugs/shortcomings.
Bugs general:
Several times in my 10 days of ownership the box has either locked (no response to any input requiring power cycling to correct) or turned itself off and on again during menu navigation.
Bugs specific
If you try to delete more than about 10 channels at a time under edit channels menu the box locks every time and does not save the changes.
Under Help, the recording help video just gives a blank screen.
We had a failed recording which I think must have been due to me turning the box into standby as the recording was about to start. It was set for 22:30 and that is about the time I turned it off. It was the only program set to record at the time so there was no clash and I can think of no other reason for the fail. Surely the box can cope with being put into standby at any time without causing a recording to fail? If it can’t then that is a very serious fault.
Firmware shortcomings:
Favourites – If you select to use favourites with the guide, this only stays active for that single use of the guide. As soon as you exit guide, the channel +/- buttons still go through the whole range of channels and when you go back into guide, it is again showing All channels. This makes the use of favourites totally useless IMO and means that the only way to hide unwanted channels is to delete them which has its own bug (see above).
You seem to have to hit a lot more buttons on the Humax system to achieve the same thing as on the old Sky box. This appears to be mainly because they don’t make use of the 4 coloured remote buttons in the menu system. For example if you have just watched a recorded program and want to delete it, you have to select it then navigate up or down a sub menu of several options to highlight delete then hit OK. On Sky you simply hit the yellow button.
Freesat app integration
If (due to the shortcomings of the favourites option) channels are deleted from the box, this is not reflected when it syncs with the Freesat app. All channels still show in the guide even though they are not on the box. Why? This makes the app much less friendly to use as you still have all the unwanted channels to scroll through.
We have deleted all of the SD channels, apart from the local BBC channel for local news. When we set an ITV HD program to record via the app, it seems to also try to send the SD channel as well. Because we have deleted the channel on the box, this causes the recording to be constantly processing. There seems to be then no way to delete it. We had to put all of the channels back on the box just so that this would sync properly. Do people know if and why the app tries to record the SD channel when we selected HD?
We have also had messages in the app saying recording failed , yet the recording has still appeared on the box.
Any help on any of these points would be gratefully received
Geoff
Well apart from the on/off/on reboots that all sounds perfectly normal
. (Hopefully they will have a fix out for the reboots soon-ish, sometime in 2017) Attempting to get a favourite channels list from the main guide seems to have caused a lot of your problems, I would suggest that you forget about deleting channels and get your favourite channels up like I do by with a harmony remote and one button press.
OK, so all the others are “features” not bugs then by the sound of it? When you say program a universal remote,I presume you mean program a button with guide/list/up/select? It’s a good workaround for the Guide but I really wanted a way to have the list that comes up when you press the ok button or channel up/down to have my preferred list on way or another. There are a lot of channels that I will never watch and it seems daft to have them coming up as options. A properly working favourites selection, that can be defaulted to, would be the best solution as deleting channels is a pain, and apparently gets over ridden during any update anyway.
Geoff_T – 1 hour ago »
OK, so all the others are “features” not bugs then by the sound of it? When you say program a universal remote,I presume you mean program a button with guide/list/up/select? It’s a good workaround for the Guide but I really wanted a way to have the list that comes up when you press the ok button or channel up/down to have my preferred list on way or another. There are a lot of channels that I will never watch and it seems daft to have them coming up as options. A properly working favourites selection, that can be defaulted to, would be the best solution as deleting channels is a pain, and apparently gets over ridden during any update anyway.
If you have favourites programmed on a Harmony remote, if you press the favorite channel icon while in the epg it jumps to the correct epg line at the currently selected time. You can do this using the normal remote, eg tapping 111 jumps to ITV HD wherever you are in the epg.
Oh, OK, I get it. I do have a programmable remote, but not a Harmony and it doesn’t have a favourite’s channels option unfortunately.
I believe GLT is referring to programming a favourite channel into a remote so you can go directly to it and have a pretty channel icon to press on a touch screen. Hate touch screens myself on remotes, although I do have one on my Harmony One.
Directly entering channel numbers while in the main guide (programmed or not) will jump to the channels entered but won’t give a list of favourite channels, personally I’m not sure how useful that is. (Well it isn’t to me but each to their own.)
I’ve just programmed a spare tactile button to get to my favourite channels as you said guide/list/up/select (+right/right to get past now and next).
Works for me.
Reffub – 10 hours ago »
I believe GLT is referring to programming a favourite channel into a remote so you can go directly to it and have a pretty channel icon to press on a touch screen. Hate touch screens myself on remotes, although I do have one on my Harmony One.
Directly entering channel numbers while in the main guide (programmed or not) will jump to the channels entered but won’t give a list of favourite channels, personally I’m not sure how useful that is. (Well it isn’t to me but each to their own.)
I’ve just programmed a spare tactile button to get to my favourite channels as you said guide/list/up/select (+right/right to get past now and next).
Works for me.
I find this very handy. If you need to rebuild a recording schedule after a reset. If you move to a time slot you can rapidly jump to all the channels with reservations around the same time, move on to the next time slot and repeat. I normally just enter the channel number as I tend to remember the few I use regularly.
How much better though if Humax had just let Favourites be a selectable permanent option? It makes zero sense to have it revert back to the full listing every time. The more firmware I use on various gadgets the more I wonder who, if anyone, tests it for user friendliness.
grahamlthompson – 1 hour ago »
Reffub – 10 hours ago »
I believe GLT is referring to programming a favourite channel into a remote so you can go directly to it and have a pretty channel icon to press on a touch screen. Hate touch screens myself on remotes, although I do have one on my Harmony One.
Directly entering channel numbers while in the main guide (programmed or not) will jump to the channels entered but won’t give a list of favourite channels, personally I’m not sure how useful that is. (Well it isn’t to me but each to their own.)
I’ve just programmed a spare tactile button to get to my favourite channels as you said guide/list/up/select (+right/right to get past now and next).
Works for me.
I find this very handy. If you need to rebuild a recording schedule after a reset. If you move to a time slot you can rapidly jump to all the channels with reservations around the same time, move on to the next time slot and repeat. I normally just enter the channel number as I tend to remember the few I use regularly.
I don’t have a problem with direct entry of a channel number (like 101 to get to the top of the EPG) but I rarely need to do that as I tend to watch recordings 99% of the time. Also 99% of the time they are from HD channels, so it is easier for me to set those recordings from my favourite channels list or occasionally even from showcase. 😯
As the OP and many other users have pointed out the UI isn’t that user friendly, why press one button when you can press four or more.
I already had a Harmony so it wasn’t a problem for me programming it to bring the favourites list up. I’m sure other users happy to press all the buttons manually.
I remember one user that insisted on highlighting a recording, pressing OK and then selecting resume to resume a recording, I told them they could just highlight the recording and press play but they weren’t interested and we’re going to continue using the ‘correct’ method.
Geoff_T – 1 hour ago »
How much better though if Humax had just let Favourites be a selectable permanent option? It makes zero sense to have it revert back to the full listing every time. The more firmware I use on various gadgets the more I wonder who, if anyone, tests it for user friendliness.
They’ve been asked to make the selection ‘Sticky’ many times.
BTW the UI is Freesat’s
A I’ve just spoken to Humax. The basic attitude to the favourites issue was “the box has always worked that way” and that they haven’t had “that many” complaints about it. No amount of arguing could even convince the guy it was a stupid way to implement favourites. As he also reckons my box is probably faulty and needs to be returned, I reckon my Humax ownership experience is going to be a short one.
No point in asking Humax about your/my favourite channel problem as they didn’t come up with the UI and I don’t think your box is faulty.
💡 Possibly Freesat want to give all the channels that pay to be on their EPG a fair shot at being watched. So when you press guide you get the EPG with all the paying channels on it starting from the channel number you are currently tuned in to its then up to you to decide where to go and what type of channels interest you.
If every Freesat customer could just limit the EPG to only ever showing the main channels (like most Sky subscribers) then would that be fair on those smaller TV channels that are paying and helping to keep the Freesat EPG going ?
Well the guy at Humax certainly defended their stance on favourites as if it was under their control. On other issues he said you need to take that up with Freesat but not the favourites problem.
I can see what you are saying about the smaller channels, but in that case why offer favourites at all?
I have just done a reset on my box so I will see how it performs now.
After the reset obviously all my scheduled recordings disappeared from the box. It was very frustrating though when I opened up my Freesat app to see all of the recordings still there, presumably because it hadn’t re-synced yet, but have no way to either back them up or re-sent them to the box. Surely it can’t be that hard to set up something to do that? It would certainly take the annoyance out of having to do a factory reset in the first place.
Geoff_T – 3 hours ago »
I can see what you are saying about the smaller channels, but in that case why offer favourites at all?
Surely the same could be said for any of the guides list category’s.
It probably can but I think the other categories are more transient depending on what program you are currently looking for. Favourite channels are unlikely to change on a regular basis and are the total set of channels you want to look in with the other categories sub-sets of that. I have just checked on my Samsung TV and the way the favourites work on that is exactly what you would want. You can even have more than one named group of favourites for different users. Once selected you only see your favourites in guide and channel up and down takes you through them in your preferred order. That is in Freesat mode so it’s not a Freesat restraint.
My impression so far is that the 1100s is potentially a great bit of kit let down badly by ill thought out and buggy firmware.
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