FreeviewHD’s leap year problem – check your timers!

There’s something funny going on with Freeview HD – at least from the Crystal Palace transmitter. I updated my DigitalStream recorder earlier today and in common with other users noticed the time was shown in the EPG as Saturday 3rd March.

So, I did a full factory reset, and still had that problem – and consequently my recording of Masterchef for this evening dropped, in favour of next week’s.

A little more digging, and it appears that it’s just the date on the HD multiplex that is incorrect. Tune to, say, BBC One, and go to the EPG on your box, and you’ll see the date appear on screen, 29th Feb. Now go to BBC One HD, wait a few seconds, and go into the EPG, and the date is shown as Saturday 3rd March. Similarly, the date on ITV 1 is ok, but go to the HD channel, and its back again, and the common factor is that when it’s wrong, you’re tuned to the HD mux.

Top right, the SD mux is transmitting the correct date

It’s not just a Digital Stream issue, either. I’ve dug out some of the FreeviewHD kit that I’ve tested, and reproduced this on each on – a IceCrypt, SagemCom, and Bush units (aka the Vestel T8300). Admittedly, most of these are running on their original firmware as they’ve been in the cupboard since I tested them, but even so, this does seem to indicate a problem.

If you’re using a different transmitter, please let me know if you see the same issue – remember to wait a little while after changing to an HD mux for the box to pick up the time signal.

And, if you have recording set, especially for HD channels, check carefully to make sure they happen, or consider swapping them to the SD alternative, and not tuning your box to an HD channel until the time signal is corrected.

The HD mux thinks it's Saturday, 3rd March

Updated: 1355. It looks like this is now resolved, and the time is displaying correctly, even when I’m on the HD mux once more, certainly on the Digital Stream. However, if you had timers set for days between today and Saturday, I’d advise checking them to make sure they are still there and haven’t been removed as past events.

Installing the iPlayer update on the DigitalStream FreeviewHD recorder

As I mentioned a little while ago, the Digital Stream Freeview HD recorders are being updated to enable iPlayer, via the Red button on BBC channels. The firmware update has been released today, and you’ll find it available for download from their support site at MIT London.

There are two versions, depending on whether or not you want a Dolby Digital output from the box, so do make sure you download the right one – 4.14r8683 for Dolby Digital, and 4.14r8684 for the PCM audio output.

Download the appropriate file, which is a ZIP. Unpack it and you’ll have a folder containing eight items; copy these to a USB memory stick; mine is formatted as FAT-16 and works fine with the Digital Stream. Turn on the recorder, then pull down the flap on the right hand side of the front panel, and plug in your USB stick.

Press the Menu key on the remote, select ‘Others’ and on the next screen, scroll down to Maintenance, press OK, and select Software Update, and press OK again, then enter your PIN.

Next, a pop-up will ask if you want Over Air Download or USB; choose USB and press OK. The display may briefly return to the menu and then show a message that things are being updated; don’t turn off your box during this process. Wait for it to restart on its own, which may take a few minutes.

Eventually the box will restart; when the TV picture appears, you’ll see a message explaining how to remove the USB memory. First, though, select Others from the main menu, press OK on Diagnostics, then select System Information and press OK again. About half way down the screen, the Application version should reflect the update you’ve just installed – 4.14r8683 for Dolby Digital or r8684 for PCM.

You’ll also see your net connection details below that; if all the numbers say 0.0.0.0, make sure you have the box connected to your home network. From the ‘Others’ menu, select Peripheral Devices, then Network. For most home networks, ensure that the option at the top of the screen says DHCP, then select Apply; you may need to turn off and on again after changing this setting.

When the connection’s up and running, you’ll be able to get BBC iPlayer by pressing the red button on a BBC channel, like BBC One – but not until the 2nd of March.

Update: I gather the service will now not be live on the DigitalStream boxes until 6th March, rather than the 2nd

Incidentally, I updated without any problems, and my scheduled recordings weren’t affected, but it’s probably worth checking just in case; you can also save settings using the Backup/Restore DB option under ‘Others’ / ‘Maintenance’, which will store your channel and schedule information to the USB stick.

When you’re sure you’ve finished, go to the Media list, press Func+ and choose ‘Remove USB’ from the bottom of the menu before removing the USB stick from the front panel.

Roku 2XS review

My review of the Roku IPTV box is now live over at RegHardware. It’s a nice enough piece of kit, but I can’t help feeling that, given it costs £99, it just doesn’t do quite enough, and doesn’t provide access to enough top class content. The main things for the UK are Netflix and iPlayer, which are both great services.

But after that, you’re into the minority things, like US news, public domain movies, TV from Ghana, and Bollywood bits and pieces. All has an audience, but for mainstream success, I think it’s going to need more – start with the other terrestrial broadcasters’ catch-up services, for example. 4OD, in particular, has a big back catalogue of stuff which could really make quite a difference if it was available. And LoveFilm, of course, would be good to see.

As it stands, UK users are paying rather more than those in the US, even allowing for VAT, and receiving a rather lesser level of content, in my view.

Finding myself

I’ve been experimenting lately with a location tracking service for my mobile phone; the service I’m using is a free one, called LocationOf which is run by a very helpful chap in the Netherlands; if you have a compatible phone, it’s well worth a look. You can embed a map of your location in your own site very easily, and a quick tap will take you to a live update. It’s also possible to view historical track, so I can work out the tiresome predictability with which I take the same route to the office, for example.

The main client is for Symbian phones, though there’s an Android beta. If you do decide you like it, it’s one of those websites that’s well worth donating too – it’s run by just one person, not a company trying to sell you anything, or flog your data.

Embedding a graph of your location in a web page could be useful for lots of people, but there are other possibilities too; if you can get the latitude and longitude of someone’s position, then you can start to do more clever things. My ultimate aim will be linking this to the Heatmiser thermostat I’ve been playing with lately, so I can have the heating controlled by my movements. But first, I wanted to work out where I was, without looking at a map – for a lot of people, it’s more useful to have a page that says ‘Nigel is at home’ or ‘Nigel is at the office’ than a map. Quicker to read, less data, and tells you what you need to know.

Mapping a location

For this, you need two things. First, a service like LocationOf.com that you can call to get the latitude and longitude of your mobile device (or you can have a webpage request it, if you prefer, but I’m using an API that Jasper at LocationOf was kind enough to make available to me).

Then, you need a list of locations and their coordinates. I’ve always found Google Maps to be a pain for this, but Bing maps is straightforward. Find a place, click ‘My places’ and use the tools to add pins to the map, and then name them. Then, from the Actions menu, choose Export and GPX, and you’ll get a file with the names and co-ordinates that you save on your desktop. There’s no need to sign in or create an account.

I then saved these locations – there are only a few of them – in a MySQL database table that I’ve defined like this:

CREATE TABLE `BLlocations` (
  `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `locName` char(50) default NULL,
  `latitude` float default NULL,
  `longitude` float default NULL,
  `proximity` int(11) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
)

Most of those columns are obvious; the one that might not be immediately clear is ‘proximity,’ which I’ve used to overcome GPS inaccuracies and the size of some locations. Essentially, this will define the perimeter within which I’m happy for the system to say I’m actually in a particular place. So, for my home, it’s set to 25 metres; for Liverpool Street Station, I’ve set it 200 metres, and for the office, it’s set to 100 metres. I might fine tune those later.

When I want to try and find out where I am (or the device I’m tracking) I use the Haversine formula to calculate distances. As long as you don’t have tons and tons of locations in your database, you can do this in an SQL query. This is what it looks like using MySQLi and PHP (with a few line breaks for readability):

$locQ = $myDatabase->query(sprintf(
"SELECT BLlocations.*, 3956000 * 2 * ASIN(
            SQRT(POWER(SIN((%F - abs(BLlocations.latitude))
            * pi()/180 / 2),2) + COS(%F * pi()/180 )
            * COS(abs(BLlocations.latitude) * pi()/180)
            * POWER(SIN((%F - BLlocations.longitude)
            * pi()/180 / 2), 2) ))
         AS distance FROM BLlocations
         HAVING distance < 1000
         ORDER BY distance LIMIT 1",$lat,$lat,$lng))

I’ve limited that to one result, because I just want to know if I’m near one of the places I’ve defined in my list. $lat and $lng are, obviously, the locations determined from the phone via LocationOf.com, or however else you want to get them.

Then, if no results are returned, I know I’m not with 1km of any of my defined places. So, I then use Geonames.org to lookup to name of the locality, using their ‘findNearbyPlaceName’ function. This will give something like ‘Upper Clapton’ for the part of town where I live, and I can display that on the website, so it would say

Nigel is in Upper Clapton at 1350

The LocationOf api gives me the time of the last location saved too, so I can use that to let people know how stale the information is – at the moment I just check and say “is in X at Y” if the data is less five minutes old, or “is in X since Y” if it’s more than that; I could add “was in…” if it’s very stale.

What if I do get a location from my database? That’s simple, too. The results of the query will give me two figures – both in metres. One is “distance” which tells me how far I am, and “proximity” is the boundary of the location. I check these and if the distance is less than the proximity value, it will say

Nigel is at home

otherwise, it will say

Nigel is near home

together with the time stamp, in the same way as above.

What’s the point?

You might be wondering what the point of all this is. There are various possibilities here; you don’t have to show the information on a web page, of course, not least because there are security implications to doing that on the open web. You could store it in a database and make decisions based on it – such as the heating control that’s going to be one of my next projects.

And you could  use it for other things, like call controls; work out where someone is, and have a click to call button on your website – something else I’m playing with, using the 3CX phone system – which calls an office number, a home number, or their mobile, depending on the location that you’ve determined them to be in.

Who gives a damn about small businesses?

Somewhat off topic for the blog, but an angry rant is needed, I feel. The background – I work from home, but I have a PO Box for my address, as I’d rather not tell people exactly where I live unless they actually need to know. And not so long ago, that used to be a pretty cost-effective option….

Competitiveness and regulation are brilliant, apparently. It’s what enables the regulator to tell Royal Mail that some of its services cost more to provide than they’re charging, and this isn’t fair on the private companies that want to come in and wreck the postal system. And so Royal Mail has to put their prices up, lest the greedy shareholders of other companies get upset.

And that means that my PO Box, which used to cost £60.15 in 2009, then £62.85 in 2010, went up to £95 last year (a mere 51% increase), and this year’s bill for exactly the same service – a shelf in the local sorting office, to which I walk and collect the mail – is £170. That’s a charming “we’re all in it together” rise of 78%.

And yes, I could cancel it, and then I could spend hours contacting everyone who might have my address for business, and money on reprinting business cards, and hope that I can tell everyone a new address in the 30 days between receiving an invoice and having to pay it.

When I rang to check the bill wasn’t an error, they told me it’ll probably go up again in April – because clearly it’s not nearly expensive enough – and it’s very probably going to become subject to VAT too.

Because, when it comes to looking after business in this country, it seems that it’s only the big ones that government cares about, and helping them shit on essential services to cream off profits.

The little guys, clearly, are just here to get milked.

iRiver Story HD – the eReader that missed its chance

When I saw the iRiver Story HD at last year’s London Book Fair, it looked like a pretty nice bit of kit; lightweight, with one of the latest eInk screens, sporting good contrast, and a very fast processor. It was, at the time, one of the fastest readers around, and it still appears to be. Like most ‘unshackled’ readers, it supports ePub and Adobe Digital Editions.

There’s 2GB of on board memory, a qwerty keyboard, plus SD card expansion, and there’s also a version with WiFi available.

The unit that I received is the standard one, aka the EB07; and boy, did it take a long time. That’s because, while it was launched in the US with Google Books on board, and everyone expected last year that the same would happen here, in the end Google launched their UK store without a dedicated reader, at the start of October.

By then, Amazon had launched the latest version of their Kindle in the UK, and WH Smith was days away from announcing their tie-up with Kobo and a matching WiFi reader. So, the Story HD that I received was a very different proposition to what I’d anticipated six months previously.

With no built in network, and no linked book store to help subsidise the cost, the Story HD will set you back around £130; that’s the same price as the Sony PRS-T1, and some forty pounds more than you’ll pay for either a Kobo or Kindle with WiFi and a matching book store.

What’s the story?

Had it launched six months earlier, it would undoubtedly have been quite an attractive product – though I have to say that the initial version of firmware was pretty ropey.

The latest version on the website, 1.28, improves things considerably and apparently aligns the look and feel more with the US Google Books version; the home screen shows a list of titles, with a thumbnail of the cover of your current reading above, and a list that can show by recent, favourite, title, author or image – but unlike, say, the Sony Reader, there are no ‘collections’ so you can’t organise your books by tags; with 23 pages of titles on there, it’s a bit annoying having to scroll through. You can view by ‘folder’ but that just shows all the files in the memory.

Even in the normal view though, things are still not entirely glitch-free; until an ePub has actually been opened, what’s actually shown in the list is the name of the file, less the extension. So, the supplied “Aesop – Aseops Fables” by “Unknown” turns into “Aesop’s Fables” by “Aesop” once it’s been opened. That’s going to be annoying for people with a big list of books.

I’d also advise setting the auto power off setting to quite a long period, though you’ll lose some battery life. In sleep mode – from 15 minutes to 3 hours of inactivity – there’s a screensaver image which changes periodically. Power off will happen after 3, six, 12, 24 hours, 3 days or 1 week. That’s a great battery saver, but starting up from power off takes around 45 seconds; I got into the habit of turning the reader on when I started cleaning my teeth so that it would be ready to read in bed.

Another annoyance I found was that when you try to jump to a page – press Option, then Enter, then a page number, then Enter – it’s hard to enter a number correctly. The top row of the keypad is used for numbers, Q= 1, W = 2 and so on. But often, a key will enter two numbers – pressing 2 produces 28, for example. You can delete the second number, but it makes some pages impossible to reach; press 7 and 17 appears, so you won’t be able to get to page 27 this way. It’s an astonishing bug, frankly.

It’s not all niggles; the eInk display is nice and crisp, contrast is much better than the older PRS-505 that I’m used to, and page turns are very swift too, using the large navigation key. You can press it down or right to move on a page, and up or left to move back. It falls nicely under the thumb and is pretty responsive, as too are the other keys.

There are things that I miss from my Sony; the page number appears only briefly as you turn pages, and there’s no on-screen clock either, though those are hardly likely to be deal breakers for most people.

I’m aware that this is sounding fairly negative; I really wanted to like this reader a lot more. I am quite fond of it, and I’ve been using it a lot – I don’t tend to jump round by page number that often, so I can live with that bug. And I like the screen, and the light weight.

But there are those niggles, and above all there’s the price. I can’t help thinking that this is a product that could have done fairly well, if it had come out six months earlier, and had a bit more work done on the firmware. It might have shifted enough units to have had its price cut, too, and remain competitive.

But as St Joan said, if ifs and ans were pots and pans, there’d be no need of tinkers. Ultimately the Story HD hitched up to the wrong wagon, and ended up late to the party.

Digital Stream FreeviewHD PVR to get iPlayer March 2nd

The Digital Stream Freeview HD recorders, one of the less shouted about but nevertheless solid units, is to get the BBC’s iPlayer application starting on the 2nd of March.

A new version of firmware for the unit is scheduled for later this month, and it’s apparently passed the BBC’s testing for the MHEG (red button) version of iPlayer, so the service will be enabled in March. Obviously you’ll need to update the firmware when it’s made available on their website; I imagine the firmware will appear on the same site as the previous update, MIT London. It’s a simple process – just unzip the files, copy them onto a USB drive, pop it in the unit, and select the firmware update from the menus.

If you’re not familiar with the Digital Stream, you might want to take a look at the review that I did for RegHardware when it first came out. It’s worth noting that since that review, there has been an update that means you do get surround via the HDMI output as well as the Optical, so with the addition of iPlayer, it ticks most boxes, in my view.

The recorder might not be from a well known name, but it’s a decent performer, and is the unit that’s found a more or less permanent home in my AV system, with the addition of iPlayer being a very welcome extra. It’s also not too badly priced, with the 500GB version available from John Lewis for £199.