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Hang while navigating media

N

newmikeman

New Member
I’ve had a Humax HDR Fox T2 since 2012 but it’s a bit like Trigger’s broom (4 new handles and 6 new heads).

For many months now I have been struggling with unpredictable hangs while browsing the Media using the handset. Typically I’ll press the Media button and then scroll down and up the list of titles to find the item that I want to watch and/or the folder it would be in. This works fine at first but then after a minute or two it will hand – the current broadcast program or recording being played-back continues normally including sound except that the display of the media list is shown over the top of it. None of the buttons on the remote operate at all. The only way out is to turn the Humax off using the little switch behind the unit.

I can power on the Humax and use it to show TV programs for as long as I like, but within 1 and 2 minutes of pressing the Media button it will hang. It has also happened when browsing the Guide but not as consistently. Also it once hung (hanged?) when I had put a USB device into the socket on the Humax and then whilst browsing the Media I used the Storage option and got stuck with the choice of HDD or USB on-screen.

I got hold of a replacement handset but that had exactly the same behaviour. Lately I discovered the ir package and I tried that but with exactly the same behaviour too. So it seems it has nothing to do with the actual remote at all.

Obviously I have searched the annals of this forum for all possible combinations (actually the forum Search function is completely useless at this) - actually using Google really prefixing the search with indicative words like Humax and HDR-Fox T2.

Many posts and reports associated with similar symptoms seemed to recommend actions around the disk. I’ve applied fixdisk including the long test and usually got a clean bill of health. I’m not sure if there might be some relevant fixdisk -options I might try?

Originally I had a 500GB disk but after several years I upgraded to a 1TB Seagate Pipeline disk, using the excellent instructions provided in this forum (thanks to Black Hole, AF123 and several others). More years went by and I had outgrown that disk and upgraded to a 2TB version, Seagate again. The hanging symptoms’ appearance did not seem to be associated with any particular disk upgrade in terms of timing.

I saw posts that talked about overheating, whereupon I replaced the Humax unit’s fan and verified that it was blowing air. No change. I tried rearranging the units under the TV where the Humax lives so as to improve ventilation. No change.

I wondered whether the Humax HDR Fox T2 itself might be at fault, and now I’ve got 3 of them and I still get just the same hang.

I tried rebuilding the Humax by starting with a fresh new 500GB disk, installing the CFW, then copying across a few dozen recorded programmes via USB so that I’d have a list to go browsing up & down; the disk is about half full. It still hangs. Same whether I started with MBR or GPT partition table.

So I suppose it has to be due to software, firmware, custom firmware, some package, the phase of the moon or the temperature of the sea in Papeete harbour the Christmas before last at 7am. Or some glaring instruction in "Things Every HD-FOX T2/HDR-FOX T2 Owner Should Know" (even though I've read this dozens of times!).

I have posted about this here before but I don’t think I can have made the symptoms clear enough.

Please, have you (collectively) come across such a problem and can you please describe for me the appropriate silver bullet?

Kind regards, Mike
 
newmikeman said:
So I suppose it has to be due to software, firmware, custom firmware, some package, the phase of the moon or the temperature of the sea in Papeete harbour the Christmas before last at 7am
Click to expand...
Amazingly you haven't considered the actual media files on the disk. If you have them backed up elsewhere, then start deleting stuff until the problem goes away (or at least moving it elsewhere on the disk if you have the skills to do so, so it's outside of the Humax software's view).
 
Thanks for speedy responses.
Yes I installed the fan package and have it set at 50C minimum, as I understand it.
I agree that a corrupt file seems a likely culprit but how to identify it? Is there any software that will check the files?
If it's a corrupt file then it's within the 20% of my total files backed-up that I restored to the present small disk. I could identify half these and delete them leaving haldf behind. If the problem has gone away then I delete the remaining half and restore the half I had deleted.
I wish I knew how to copy files speedily, using linux copy but I don't know the syntax to use. Is that possible, just at the Linux prompt or in Maintenance Mode? To/from USB? How to create a new partition that Humax won't look at but Linux can use?
 
newmikeman said:
50C
Click to expand...
50%

As for identifying a corrupt file, all you have to do is move candidate files out of My Video. That's easy on the command line (webshell): "mv" (and will be very quick so long as you don't move files outside their own file system).

cd into /mnt/hd2/My\ Video

Identify your recordings (ls)

mv recording to /mnt/hd2/My\ Photo
 
Thanks for your suggestions and I've been busy following them.
I had a couple of suspect folders that were fairly old and contain quite a number of recordings each, with Ben Fogle having 2 more levels of folders and several recordings in each folder. I moved them out to My Photo.
Tried the Media and up/down which is fine at first but once left part way down some folder for a couple of minutes the system hangs. I moved these folders into My Photo.
I have set up 3 directories under My Photo (Folders, Singles and Fails) and tried various changes.
I moved all the non-folder recordings, ie standalone ones, into Singles.
Tried again but it hung browsing inside one of the folders.
I moved all the folders over into the Folders subdirectory, so now My Video is empty.
I moved "The Dog House" back from Folders to My Video. It hung browsing among the 46 recordings in that folder. I moved that folder into My Photo/Fails.
I moved 2 folders of "Kirstie" back from Folders to My Video. It hung just with the first folder highlighted, before even opening it. I moved that folder into My Photo/Fails.
With only the other "Kirstie" folder I tried again and opened the folder. It hung again so I moved that folder into My Photo/Fails.

It has been very frustrating doing this when the command line is so unreliable. It fails to respond for many seconds or even minutes. It drops characters so you can't just type something and expect it to catch up because you'll have a command like "v" having typed "mv", for example, or there will be bits of file name or path missing. I've tried via Putty and vie webshell and both are the same. It may be worth putting up with it for just the odd command but as I expect you'll realise this exercise requires a lot of interaction!
I'm looking into the network being possibly unreliable, but it seems to work OK in other respects such as accessing the Internet. I've wiggled the connectors and it made no difference.
Apart from the difficulty using the CLI could this conceivably have anything to do with the original problem of hangings?

Thanks
 
Well I've installed a major trip hazard in the form of a cat5 cable trailing from the Humax across the Lounge, across the Hall, across the Study and into the main Ethernet switch under my desk.
Immediately the responsiveness of the Humax is massively improved both using the remote control and via the PC in the Study, via webif and via webshell/telnet CLI. I'll be reviewing possible alternatives to homeplug for the Humax.

I've moved all the recordings from MyPhoto/Fails back into MyVideo and initial tests indicate that there haven't been any hangs. I'll see how it goes over the next few days as I restore backups and perhaps restore the 2TB disk to its job.

Thanks @prpr for the response this time as well as the one back in May which I missed, I don't know why!

It seems the issue was not actually a corrupt recording but that got me onto a track where I discovered the very poor quality of this bit of my homeplug network.

Touch wood ...
 
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