Can't get the OSD to work - stilllllllll

[pfft2001]

If you're up for it (all it takes is some time), I would suggest you revert back to Torfu (the older firmware) and try that too. I mean, unless there was an as-yet-unknown manufacturing error (wrong component placed or somesuch), it's not logical for one OSD to work fine and another not...

Good luck!


Rick.

Au contraire!

There was a known problem where a certain batch (set of serial numbers) of units had a bad USB port.  I had one such unit - confirmed here via the serial # that is was from that production run - and Neuros kindly replaced it for me.   The point is this could very well be the problem here for the OP - since he was recording to USB.

Unfortunately, as we've seen from the recent adventures over in the world of Pi (*), these sorts of things do happen - and they do seem to happen often when things are manufactured in China on small budgets.

(*) For those of you not familiar, they had a batch of boards (10K units) manufactured, but the idiots put the wrong kind of ethernet jack on the board.   The problem was caught after the boards were shipped back to the UK for inspection, after which they had to be shipped back to China, un-soldered, re-soldered, and shipped back to the UK again.  And that's not even mentioning the fun of lining up a source for the new jacks (qty: 10K).  All under extreme time pressure from a lot of people who were watching a late project get later.

[ChadV]

(*) For those of you not familiar, they had a batch of boards (10K units) manufactured, but the idiots put the wrong kind of ethernet jack on the board.   The problem was caught after the boards were shipped back to the UK for inspection, after which they had to be shipped back to China, un-soldered, re-soldered, and shipped back to the UK again.  And that's not even mentioning the fun of lining up a source for the new jacks (qty: 10K).  All under extreme time pressure from a lot of people who were watching a late project get later.

Funnily enough, that's part of the reason why the OSD2 never went anywhere...  All the dev boards had disconnected HDMI audio pins.

And yeah, I forgot about that earlier USB batch.  We did implement some fixes in firmware, but there was only so much we could do.  Since even the good units still could bottleneck pretty easily, we just suggested SD over USB where possible, and fixed any units where the owner was not okay with that solution.  (Back when we had units.)

[ima999]

Rick - Thanks for the suggestion.
Here's my dilema.

I purchased the unit a few years ago with hopes to replace my original 2/2 unit.
I couldn't get it to work correctly originally, and I assumed it was because I was trying to use an attached hard drive.
I then set it aside for a long time and retried it later with other drive options -- this never really worked so I set it aside for another long time
Now I decided to either get it working or toss it (it mocks me every time I see it in the cabinet)
And wouldn't you know it - I haven't gotten any smarter and the firmware updates didn't make the unit any smarter (to cover for my inabilities).

So all told I've spent WAY too many hours trying to get the unit to work.
I'm willing to give the SD card a try but that's about it - why, because sometimes you just gotta stop to get ahead. 
I know I've spent good money on this product - but if it can't work with features that it offers then I guess it's not for me.
I really liked the original 2/2 product and wanted to "upgrade" to use some of the new features and add some simplicity to my life..... I haven't found that yet.
If only the world would produce products that marketing sold.

[heyrick]

There was a known problem where a certain batch (set of serial numbers) of units had a bad USB port.  I had one such unit - confirmed here via the serial # that is was from that production run

Well...that's a new one on me! Do you (or ChadV?) happen to know the serial numbers? That would say whether we're on a losing track or not with the unit in question.
Do you know what the problem was? I just figured USB problems were down to a rather slapdash driver implementation.


RaspberryPi - I really hope they did not demand the boards be manually corrected. The assembly is automated for God's sake - it would be cheaper and quicker to set up and bash out another 10k boards (and some Hong Kong vendor drop the originals on unsuspecting punters via eBay) than to actually unsolder the bad part and fit a good one, then test it, one by one by hand...


Best wishes,

Rick.

[heyrick]

ima999 - fair point. I guess it's the programmer in me coming out that I'd want to get to the bottom of things.
I hope SD works for you.

Oh, and one other thought. If you have pulled the USB stick out without ejecting (ie if the OSD crashes), it might be worthwhile giving it a format before you use it again, as we can't say in what state the disc "structure" would be. I'm sure your Mac has something similar to "scandisk", the things that that is supposed to fix are the sorts of things that incorrectly managed discs can develop...


Best wishes,

Rick.

[pfft2001]

Rick - as far as I know (based only on reading the Rpi forum) - that is what they did (fixed them, rather than just do it all over).  I have to admit that my first reaction was the same as yours - i.e., just do it over - but presumably, they know best.

[ChadV]

Well...that's a new one on me! Do you (or ChadV?) happen to know the serial numbers? That would say whether we're on a losing track or not with the unit in question.
Do you know what the problem was? I just figured USB problems were down to a rather slapdash driver implementation.

I don't have an S/N range.  The problem, I believe, was a change in RAM used...  The manufacturing line made a substitution that spec'd in, but between the USB controller and the slapdash drivers, it ended up causing a timing problem under heavy load...

I'm sure your Mac has something similar to "scandisk", the things that that is supposed to fix are the sorts of things that incorrectly managed discs can develop...

Disk Utility

Rick - as far as I know (based only on reading the Rpi forum) - that is what they did (fixed them, rather than just do it all over).  I have to admit that my first reaction was the same as yours - i.e., just do it over - but presumably, they know best.

Or just remove the port on that run and sell it as a slightly cheaper ($2?) ethernet-less model.

[heyrick]

The problem, I believe, was a change in RAM used...  The manufacturing line made a substitution that spec'd in, but between the USB controller and the slapdash drivers, it ended up causing a timing problem under heavy load...

Ah. The sort of tiny quirky thing that makes you want to bang your head on the wall and cry. Yeah, I know from programming interrupt handlers that things that seem very clear in the spec sheet can behave quite differently when flying under load. One that used to give me nighmares was high-speed interfacing to parallel ports. The SPP+, EPP, ECP, and so on were essentially due to none of them being capable of devising a decent spec. One idle moment, I looked at the USB spec. USB 1.1 isn't bad, seems to have a few things in common with IIC. USB2 is... well, I can't express my feelings in a PG-13 way. Not that I really followed USB, I was looking out of interest to see why so many implementations are poor. I've a USB key here that crashes my DVD player the moment I insert it. Hard crash too, I have to reconfigure it again. The USB in the OSD is lacklustre. My older PVR (DM320 based too) would work well with some devices and fail with others. Hmm...

Disk Utility

Well, there's an inspired name for you!

Or just remove the port on that run and sell it as a slightly cheaper ($2?) ethernet-less model.

That would be then a Model A+, no? (the real 'A' has half as much RAM)

Shame this happened, but I'm glad they're going for a run of Model Bs. Given the small price difference, I wonder how many people would actually buy the Model A? I would like to run a server, so I'll be going for the model B. I plan to buy a cheap ethernet cable, strip it down to two plugs with about ten centimetres of wire between. I will then mount the RPi inside my Livebox. There's loads of room, and as the RPi is light on power requirements, I ought to be able to piggyback the router's power supply without crisis. Set up a VNC server on the thing, then I can do all the setup and such from here.


What I'd really really like to do, and don't know if such software exists - is to have something that can receive AnimeNFO (192kbps MP3) or other streaming radio stations, and spit it out as a stream as 24kbps AAC+. I would then connect in (from work) on my mobile phone. The reason for this is that I have a monthly allocation of 500MiB, and 192kbps runs to around 84MiB/hour! 24kbps runs to around 10MiB/hour. Quite a difference. Work is noisy, so the quality loss is no big deal. Not worried about copyright issues, it's a downconvertor for my own private use.


Best wishes,

Rick.

[ima999]

OK - here is what I've done.

Using an SD card (8gb class6) I retested

* formatted the sd card on my windows 7 machine
* played a movie via a dvd player
* Began recording the movie --- I was able to watch and hear the movie as expected
* about 30min into the movie I stopped the recording and ejected the sd card
* placed the card into my mac and copied the file (270mb) to my computer
* Played the movie ---- Video (poor quality) and Audio (NONE)
* I copied the movie into iTunes with the same results.

I think I'm done
I'm sure there is something simple that just isn't being "done" prior to recording in some setting's panel.
But I don't know if I care anymore.

I'm typically a person that would continue to dig deeper into a problem to solve it but I am exhausted with this unit.
EVEN if I could get it to work I don't know if I would trust it.  I can only imagine that I would be worried that it wasn't working correctly each and every time.

So as a parting act - I could get some enjoyment out of crushing / destroying this unit --- but, I'm not going to do that ---
I'd like to know if one of the friendly people offering me suggestions would like me to ship this unit to you for free.
The people I'm speaking of are:
Heyrick or ChadV or pfft2001 or anyone that's provided me direction when I needed it.
So here is my thought ---
Please respond to this message and let me know if you would like it.
I will take all the names and put them in a hat and randomly select one and coordinate with that person to ship the unit to them --- free and clear to the recipient.
Please respond by 5pm PST Wednesday april 11 2012.

Again - thank you for all your help.

[pfft2001]

1) I'm interested.  Count me in.

2) But before you do, did you try recording to the network?

I really think you ought to try, simply because of this: I have recently tried recording to SD card (see my other thread on the subject) and although I was able to deal with the issues raised in that thread, I could never actually get it to successfully record more than about 5 minutes on the card.  Small tests (less than 5 minutes) worked, but whenever I tried something longer, the OSD would at some point during the process hard crash (non-responsive to the remote and also to the shell prompt) and need to be power-cycled.

Switched back to network recording and everything is fine once again.

[heyrick]

Hi,

Sorry to hear it still is causing problems. As a last gesture, could you please record one minute (doesn't matter what) and drop the file somewhere like www.4shared.com ? I will take a look at the file and see if the OSD is acting up, or if it is your computer not being capable.

As for the OSD, I would like it (for a dev box), however pfft2001 has already made the suggestion (message of 6th April), so I guess he gets first dibs...

Oh, and for what it is worth, destroying it doesn't give satisfaction. Been there, done that. The only time I felt better afterwards was the incident involving four lighter refuel cans, forty quid (about $60?) of fireworks, and some petrol.......and a verbal police caution.
[but, hell yeah, it was an E.P.I.C. send off for a Sinclair piece of <beep> that never worked correctly, bloody think even had a knack of freezing at switch-on, the built in tape deck chewed more tapes than it played...I'm so glad I'm an Acorn guy at heart as rubbish like this would be enough to put a generation off the idea of computer science]


Best wishes,

Rick.

PS: The above incident was some twenty years ago. I've moved on, if not necessarily become any wiser...

[ima999]

And the results are..........
I randomly pulled pfft2001's name from the hat.
So your the lucky winner of a barely used OSD.

Some answers to questions provided recently:
* I did not try to use a network - even if that works I do not have that availability in the home
* I did not try and copy / record a short 1 min version --- I've been busy with other things and didn't get around to it.  I'm going to let pfft2001 do that if he chooses to.
--- that's how disappointed I am with the unit - I wont even spend time to try and resolve the problem - this turned out to be a very expensive nonworking unit.

SO - pfft2001 can you provide me your direct email and I will coordinate shipping of the unit.
Assume it will take me a bit (about 1week) to get it in the mail (I hope to move this along quicker but I want you be prepared for my slowness).

Thanks again for everyones help
I really do wish I had gotten it to work.

[pfft2001]

Thanks.  My email is in my profile on this board.  It is unhidden and valid.

[heyrick]

A hat? You have a hat? I'm impressed.

As I sait, pfft2001 had first dibs. Any other outcome would have been wrong...

Over to you pfft! Let us know when you fire it up.


Best wishes,

Rick.