December update preview
A preview of the December firmware update is now available for download from www.toppy.org.uk, in advance of the planned Over The Air (OTA) update on 17th-19th December.
Stability
The main aim of the December update has been to improve stability, particularly when it comes to MHEG (interactive) services, and recording. In particular, a recent bug with dual recordings has been fixed, and the MHEG engine has been updated to the latest version of the standard, ensuring compatibility with new services due to be launched in 2006.
The Toppy now also sports an Interactive Services option on the system menu, allowing you to disable MHEG if you wish.
The firmware has been tested by a group of Toppy.org.uk beta testers, using a new test scheme designed to ensure that as many problems as possible are found, and over 700 test results have been recorded.
Now it’s your chance to give us more feedback, via the forums, before the update is broadcast OTA. You can download the update via the links at the right of this page and install it in the usual way.
Resume play
It’s not just bug fixes and stability in this update - there’s also one new feature, which is a resume play facility. On recordings made after installation of the new firmware, your Toppy will now automatically remember how much of a programme you’ve viewed, when you press Stop.
When you highlight a file in the archive list, pressing OK will play it back from the start, and pressing Play will now carry on playback from the last time.
Coming later ...
Behaviour of the built in Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) has been something many users want to see changed, and that should be happening in the new year. During testing, we saw an early version of an alternative EPG system that doesn’t change channel when you browse, and fills up with data much faster. It didn’t make it into this update, but will be coming soon.
Work is still going on to prevent the interruptions to playback when timers start and stop, and we hope to see those too altered in a forthcoming update - the amount of work needed was too substantial to get the fixes into this update.