HDR-Fox T2 occasionally freezes - mains disconnect necessary.

[martinr]

My Fox T2 is powered on all the time, except for an hour in the small hours, when I power off for one hour, which I incorrectly thought might help solve a small glitch.

Occasionally, the box will freeze, with the blue light showing in the centre; pressing that central facia button has no effect. Similarly, the remote has no effect. (The box also no will longer show on a network scan.). The only solution is to switch off at the mains and then switch back on.

Because the snag is only occasional, I haven't been able to determine what causes it; I thought the latest event was down to a remote reboot after setting up a record event in the EPG, but repeating the procedure has not replicated the freeze.

Looking through the forum, I found that a long time ago something similar could happen due to the BBC red button if the box rebooted to a BBC channel, but that snag was fixed years ago.

Are there any known conditions that lead to this sort of lock-up, such that cutting mains power is the only way to free it?

Thanks.

 

[Black Hole]

It's "normal". How occasionally does it happen? I expect a couple of lockups a month.

 

[martinr]

Many thanks. In that case I'm doing well: it's less than a couple of times a month. So that the box could be rebooted remotely, I can see the usefulness of one of those wifi plugs recently discussed in Foxsat AVForum, except that finding a brand that doesn't have a considerable proportion of damning, poor reviews is proving very difficult.

 

[cdmackay]

Many thanks. In that case I'm doing well: it's less than a couple of times a month. So that the box could be rebooted remotely, I can see the usefulness of one of those wifi plugs recently discussed in Foxsat AVForum, except that finding a brand that doesn't have a considerable proportion of damning, poor reviews is proving very difficult.

Without going too far off-topic (hopefully) I've been very impressed with the Lightwave RF remote-control kit I have. They do a large range of items, including mains socket controllers and lighting & heating stuff. Was also sold under the Siemens brand at B&Q - not sure if it still is.

e.g: http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/lightwaverf-3-pack-remote-controlled-onoff-sockets-white-n53ll

I've had their sockets for a few years, and they work perfectly, every time. There's an Android app, and various other nice features. Recommended.

 

[TonyC]

My old Toppy would often crash when weather conditions meant particularly poor signal quality. Presumably some data packet was received that, due to interference, contained a very specific pattern that triggered some kind of overflow error or whatever.

You'd like to hope that designers of digital TV receivers would make sure they are immune to any possible corrupted data, but given how bad other software is at this, perhaps not...