Hello Playon!DVR-HD owners!

We are happy to announce our new beta firmware.
Below you will find links to download this new firmware together with the change log and instructions on how to install this firmware. Please make sure you get the right firmware version for your product.

Firmware:

Asian
http://www.acryan.com/downloads/PV76120 ... _Asian.zip
European
http://www.acryan.com/downloads/PV76120 ... ropean.zip


Change log

Improved areas where requiring a password input, the entry does not show up under the virtual keyboard input field and not saved under Input History
Improved correct sorting of titles alphabetically when locating Jukebox index.htm over network
Improved various menu language translations and OSD errors
Improved displaying of music title in ID3 tag during playback instead of the file name
Improved USB keyboard workability in various environment
Improved Shortcast now shows the progress and total amount of items loading
Add Subtitle On/Off option under SETUP - MISC to set default action of displaying subtitles on playback
Add more zoom options, 0.9x > 0.7x > 0.5x after the last X:100% Y:100% selection
Fix incorrect Hebrew display in EPG
Fix Folder Protection bug of not unlocking when the default password '0000' is changed
Fix Clear History to remove records under Recently Added Music and Recently Added Movies instead of hiding them
Fix screensaver of not starting when a video playback is paused
Fix reboot when pressing enter key on an empty Mediafly search entry
Fix pressing Home button when playing any music will randomly stop playback
Fix Photo Slideshow not being able to pause when the Pause button is pressed. Works on with both Play and Pause button.
Fix YouTube XL not loading on the first entry
Fix Shoutcast when fetching large results will randomly freeze the unit
Fix time indicator mis-matched when doing a time skipping (pressing left/right button) after a GOTO operation
Fix incorrect YouTube view count
Fix during video zoomed condition, pressing 'audio', 'subtitles' or 'info' will reset zoom mode
Supports Underline and Italic parameters in SRT subtitles
Supports both ID3v2.4 UTF-8 and ID3v2.3 UTF-16 tags


Working on following things:
*AV-In Timeshift
*Permanent Timeshift
*Summer Time option

Known issues:
*Please use Setup>System>Screensaver>Options>Default (don’t use ‘Photo Album or ‘Flickr’ or system might crash!)
*Playback of .avi files with NFS protocol will not work.
*Web Management>Add Schedule>'Start time' is missing -> Then refresh the page by pressing 'F5'.

The flashing Procedures: We have 2x separate ways to flash your firmware. We strongly recommend you to use the ‘Safe-Mode method’ when it’s the first time you install this new firmware.

Safe-Mode method (*recommended!):
1. Download and extract the .zip file into the root folder of a USB-stick. Make sure the USB-stick is formatted to FAT32.
2. Insert the USB-stick to your player.
3. Shutdown the player.
4. Press and hold down the power button in front of the player for 15 seconds.
5. Your player will restart and install the new firmware.

System update method:
1. Download and extract the .zip file into the root folder of a USB-stick. Make sure the USB-stick is formatted to FAT32.
2. Insert the USB-stick to your player.
3. Go to Setup>Misc>USB Upgrade and press 'Enter' on your remote control to confirm.
4. Your player will restart and install the new firmware.

!!DO NOT POWER OFF THE UNIT WHILE FLASHING! THIS MIGHT CAUSE DAMAGE AND RESULT IN DEFECT HARDWARE!

Bug-tracking with: bugtracker@acryan.com

You can help us with findings issues/bugs by sending an email directly to our testing team. Use this email address, and with the help of the details you find below, fill in the steps or details needed to reproduce a certain occurrence that you think can be solved with a firmware update. When our testing team receives this, they will try to reproduce the issue you submitted in order to confirm the issue, so our development team can solve them.
Please use this email carefully and only send Bug-related emails. If you need technical support or have any other questions please still use the forum, or our email phone/support. You have details for this here: http://www.acryan.com/web/support/

The email address for sending in bugs is: bugtracker@acryan.com

To make it easier for us to pinpoint your issue, please provide us with the details below when submitting to us:

1. Player model: e.g. ACR-PV73700 for the Playon!HD Mini 2.
2. Firmware version: e.g. r3966 for the current Playon!HD Mini 2 firmware.
3. Reproducibility: always / sometimes / random etc
4. Setup: how are you connected? Via AV Receiver / TV / Router / Switch / Wireless / Wired etc.
5. Operating System (optional): Windows 7 / XP / 2000, Linux (distro)
6. Description of problem: please write an understandable description of the problem so that we can reproduce / confirm this.

Note: Please don't use this bugtracker@acryan.com as technical support. Use it strictly to report reproduce able bugs or issues.


Best regards,

Thanks for the beta update. Having read the change log and noted that you're working on a few things I think I'll pass, though, until the EPG is functional - ie 7 days.
Some of the other bugs I reported on 9th June:



4 BUG: I have recorded several programmes from DTV. When I press the menu button and select to view recorded programmes it does not find them. It displays the Movies folder icon and an empty list. I have to browse to the REC folder manually to find and display my recorded programmes.

5 BUG: I have several DVDs stored as ISO files. When I display the files, the menus are displayed in 4:3 aspect ratio although the main movie chapters are correct at 16:9 ratio. The old firmware displayed both menus and main chapters in 16:9.

6 BUG: Standard Definition DTV programmes are displayed in a window which does not quite fill my plasma screen (unless I turn on overscan in the Panasonic menu). High Definition DTV ( and all SD movies on DVD ISO) fill the screen properly. I have the manual screen adjustment at maximum on the box - it seems to set a window of 1280x720 for some reason, with a black border. The behaviour is the same in the old firmware.

7 BUG: I have an extensive collection of CDs which have been converted to FLAC image files (one big file for each CD) and CUE sheets which indicate the index points for the start of each track. These CUE files work perfectly fine on FOOBAR2000 and on VLC player. The previous firmware would not work with these CUE sheets at all. The new firmware is much improved in that it will parse the CUE sheets and will select individual tracks. The problem is that it is not calculating the offset into the file correctly and is playing the last few seconds of the previous track instead of starting at the beginning of the selected track. This may be a calculation error in block location perhaps? The offsets are given in the format Minutes:Seconds:Frames (the frames are 1/75th seconds - not 1/100ths!) It may be an inter-track gap calculation problem also. Don't get me wrong - the facility is much improved, but needs tweaking!

8 BUG: Embedded ID3 tags are not recognised in my FLAC images. FLAC handles tags slightly differently than MP3, but almost none of my music collection is in MP3 format. Lack of tag support means that album, artist, genre indexing in the database is non-existent. I'd hate to have to re-encode my entire collection as MP3s! Anything you can do here would be appreciated!

OK - I downloaded it anyway!

EPG - yay! Back to 7 day EPG. Nw if you could get the programme info displaying (not just the programme name and time) it would be perfect! What was all the fuss about licences???

Folder names - yay! Now working properly on my machine for programmes recorded from various channels.

Before FTP was showing invalid folder names. Now it's ok!

HDMI - WTF! You've disabled passthrough on the HDMI sound menu = no more Dolby surround on HDMI!!!

Thank the stars I've got an SPDIF option to play Dolby 5.1 surround!

Movie menus still playing in 4:3 instead of 16:9, although main feature ok at 16:9

Subtitles - even though there is a option in the Setup/Misc menu to turn off subtitles, they are

still coming on in various titles!!!

Manual scan of DTV channels works ok, but does not survive re-boot! If you do an auto scan it seems to be ok???

Samba not working!

Music flac CUE files - Software not following indexes from the CUE sheet properly. Starts late in the track (different delay on each track but consistently starts a particular track at a particular point). It would seem to be a calculation error where the index in the cue file is not being translated correctly into an offset in the overall image file. This is an existing bug. Locked up while navigating entries in the flac CUE sheet. Had to pull the power lead!

Tony well done on mentioning the beta on the other thread.

You've been a great asset on this forum, provided huge amounts of feedback to ACR and, frankly, they OWE you.

Maybe the less said about the 7-day EPG/licence fiasco the better, we'll all just move on from there.

Having resolved to give it all this away and find another box, I am now feeling really quite different about ACR, quite fuzzy actually.

Yes, I didn't take it back and get a Boxee Box like Moirae did.

Maybe they ARE working on this. Maybe the FW will become something of a standard (for these Realtek chip boxes) and maybe even semi-open source - with cool developer guys working on hacks, like we have seen recently. All of this would have me stay with my POHD. I would even add some of my gripes to the buglist (which I have been holding back on out of exasperation).

SO thanks to Tony, a big TU, and also thanks to the staff at ACR for staying in touch.

(I'll update my signature after checking out the beta FW in about a week or so )
EDIT July
yes went with the Beta 4585 and no worries! On the EPG issue, shows have a habit of starting early (relative to the EPG way of recording) or finishing late so it was not a great way to record*. I recommend TV-Browser with Dodger's python script - refer the HowTo

*That is, in TV-Browser, and add lead-in minutes and exit minutes under Recording/Devices/Configure Device/Settings/Time Settings

Als found a bug that the Samba module does not seems to work

*Edit*
I redownloaded the firmware reflashed it and now it works fine
*End edit*

Hi kraakie!
Has a fix for the beta (Samba problem) been released? Just re-downloading the same firmware would not fix a bug. If the original download was corrupt, then it would fail a checksum test, surely? I had already tried re-flashing the beta, but the Samba not working problem remained.

Ok - I re-downloaded the beta firmware and did a SHA-1 checksum compare of the file I downloaded on Friday and they are exactly the same.

*edit* - 16:50 re-flashed using re-downloaded firmware and, as expected, no difference - still no Samba working, It is loaded, though. See clipping from telnet:



...
371 root SW [kjournald]
381 root 28424 S DvdPlayer
462 root 1572 S N /tmp/package/samba/sbin/smbd -D
465 root 1008 S N /tmp/package/samba/sbin/nmbd -D
467 root 1560 S N /tmp/package/samba/sbin/smbd -D
829 root 324 S telnetd
830 root 516 S -sh
868 root 388 R ps
/ #



**** further edit 20:20

I changed my main PC workgroup name back to "WORKGROUP" and - voila! - the ACRyan appeared again! I never had this issue before. It always worked with my original workgroup name.
I've re-named my PC back to its original workgroup name and it seems to be working for the moment. I'll see again tomorrow morning!

Bad Czech diacritics in EPG doesn´t change code in UTF-8

Good work on getting the 7 day EPG up and running again, although now it only displays programs after 9am on every channel? The option to skip to the end of the day with an up arrow press of the remote has also been removed and you now have to cycle through the whole list!
Youtube XL now crashes my system every time I open it while the normal youtube works fine.
Channel sorting has improved but the option to remove channels from the list (delete) is made much harder and can now only be done one-by-one after password input every time!
But overall the firmware is a definite improvement on previous versions! It would be nice to be able to access the recently recorded items with across arrow press of the remote instead of having to cycle all the way to the bottom!

There has been a windows update couple of days ago and since then this strange problem is here.

I reflashed twice and suddenly it was working.

Could also be my router in combo with that windows update.

They are investigation as we speak to discover what the problem is.

I'm running XP SP3. I checked the update KB2547163, downloaded last Tuesday, but it seems to be concerned with SSL connections in Internet Explorer - nothing to do with Samba/local network apparently. That said, several people have reported local network issues after installing that patch. This morning Samba is still working for me even though I have re-named the workgroup on my PC. There are settings in IE which affect the way local network devices are displayed in Network Neighbourhood, even though you would not think you were actually using IE when browsing My Computer. So the patch may be causing some upset - I'll wait till the "gurus" in ACRyan investigate further! There was a patch to XP earlier in June which required Samba connections to support encrypted password handling, but this is set in smb.conf OK

I couldn't find the actual Samba log on the box to check if there was a problem. I've attached a copy of the config file smb.conf which is setting the log file to a directory which does not exist on the box, which might explain why there's no log!


[global]
security=user
log file=/usr/local/samba/var/log.%m
max log size=2000
domain logons=Yes
dns proxy=No
use sendfile=yes
guest account=root
encrypt passwords=yes
passdb backend=smbpasswd
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
read raw=yes
write raw=yes
oplocks=yes
max xmit=65535
dead time=15
getwd cache=yes
lpq cache=30
read prediction=yes
client NTLMv2 auth=yes
[HDD1]
path=/tmp/hdd/volumes/HDD1
hide dot files=yes
hide files=/.*/lost+found/
guest ok=no
writable=yes
force create mode=0775
force directory mode=0775