The latest thing that my AC Ryan DVR-HD is doing is power up, get to main menu, reboot itself, get to main menu, reboot itself... This is all without any entry from the remote control.

I've tried reinstalling the software. (I have been using the latest 5440 version) I can't bring myself to try formatting the hard drive. It is too upsetting.

I guess I can say that now my AC Ryan is officially dead. Bit of a shame really, because I thought initially I had scored a bit of a gem.

If someone had an idea that could bring this baby back from the dead, it would be most welcome.

My AC Ryan has previously displayed some strange traits.

For example, when I'm randomly doing stuff like, play a track, go to another album, select another track, then press a button, it would reboot itself.

If you use INDEXING, you have to wait for an eternity at the home menu for the thing to let you do stuff. It doesn't even buffer your keystrokes. At least that way I wouldn't have to press the down button 50 times to work out when it is ready to do something.

So I turned off INDEXING (what turn off indexing!). For that, I didn't get any data for MOVIES, or MUSIC, and I couldn't have a my own photo album screen saver when music was playing. But at least I had the file browser.

My AC Ryan would regularly lockup. Nothing on the remote would work. Even the power button on the front of the unit. All you could do was switch the power off then on.

If you had searched around you would have seen that this re-boot loop is one of the commonest problems with this 5440 release candidate. Your box is not dead - just the victim of lousy software

The simplest way I and others have found to get out of this problem is to boot the box and when the Home screen starts to load, press the enter key every half second or so until the box enters DTV (or press the File Browser key in a similar way). Once you have the box off the Home screen, you can press the Setup key and go into the setup menu and go to the Delete History entry and press Yes. This will resolve the looping problem - for now!

The source of the issue seems to be the index held in the .Theater folder on the disk. This database seems to get corrupted after various events. For me it happens every time a DTV recording is stopped.

The other way of temporarily resolving the problem is by connecting the box to an external PC using the USB slave connection. This will cause the disk partition to be mounted as an external drive to the PC. Then you can delete the .Theater folder (it is re-created at boot time if it doesn't exist) and will cure the boot loop temporarily.

It's a real shame that poor firmware is spoiling what is otherwise quite a capable box. I'm looking around for a replacement, but it's difficult to find one with on-board DVB-T tuners.

Thanks Tony, that fixed it.

Yes, the box certainly has some features, it is a shame that seemingly simple stuff doesn't work when it does so much. I guess it's OK for me because I got people like you helping me.

Glad it got around the problem, but it still doesn't excuse the firmware corrupting the index database in the first place.
Let's hope the next release of firmware is MUCH more stable. ACRyan continually blame Realtek for firmware issues. I can understand this to some extent when it affects the core functionality of the hardware (video and audio codec support etc) and the underlying GUI - the menu system seems to be an integral part of the Realtek SDK. But the database indexing of the media files on disk should be capable of being implemented as a standalone feature - much like FTP or Samba. However, we will see what comes...

Great thread, sums it up well. Has anyone heard any news on firmware releases after 5440 ?

I'm getting this issue every time I stop recording on the latest firmware (ACR-PV76120 v8.5.x.r7317 Playon!DVR-HD)

Any update on the fix?

Hello, anybody home?

No. Roger said to use either r4585 (GUI2) or r4824 (GUI1), as anything later than r4585 was too unstable. So, by downgrading, you'll lose features to gain stability. It's your choice.