YouView / Humax

I have had a DTR-1010 for a month or so now. It is one switch away from my Virgin Media Superhub thingy. Messurements show 20-30Mb/s down and 1.5-2 Mb/s up as it should be.

Good points

Generally works
Records stuff with little junk at the beginning
Straightforward intuitive user interface
Various players including iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4, Dave, S4C ...
Remembers where you stopped watching in your recordings

Poor

Startup time. Yes I know I could change the Eco settings and lose the 0.5W standby quiescent but they've clearly got things very wrong to make something that takes two minutes. It's even worse than my telly and that's bad. Now I've worked on products based on a similar set of open source software and if care is not taken it does lead to excruciatingly bloated inefficient bits of software. I guess that's what's happened here. The big difference is by comparison YouView and Humax have or should have vast resources to do this properly.
YVM105 quite easy to get by watching something on a player (ITV or 4oD), then watching another programme on the same player. Given that these players usually work with no trouble at all (yes really) this is obviously down to lack of testing.

What were they thinking ?

Clearly they have decided to create a rod for their own backs here. Online program details, rather than being stored locally like for every other PVR out there are always fetched. Any problem with connectivity or their (or Akamai's) servers and you get YVM104. I have captured some attempts to fetch this and from the pattern of several failed attempts then several successful ones I would point the finger at connectivity between Akamai and YouView/Humax and too-short cache times based on the 900s evident in the HTTP response. To dispel questions of how I TAP this the very same kit is probably used by your ISP, mobile operator and bank.
Why not compromise by (briefly) attempting to fetch updates to this sort of information but always using local copies in a way that doesn't annoy users ?

PCAPs relating to YVM104 here at some point.

Since writing the above the firmware has changed (a number of times) and the YVM104 problems have gone. Phew. But I also suffered it getting into a state where it absolutely would not record anything. Eventually only a complete factory reset sorted it. Most annoying as I lost my recordings of the Commonwealth Games among other things.
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