Freeview programme guide won't appear

[Penners]

I posted a questions about problems with our Freeview boxes, a couple of weeks ago. Mostly they seem to have been associated with the digital switchover which took place in our area (Tacolneston transmitter) on the 23rd November, and these have now settled down.

But suddenly, for the last three days, neither of our Freeview boxes has been able to bring up the electronic programme guide. If you press the "Guide" button, you see the empty Guide screen appear for a second or two, then it disappears again. All channels appear to be normal, and can be watched by scrolling up or down with the P+ and P- buttons. But the lack of an EPG is a nuisance.

I've tried a full "first time installation" several times on both boxes, but this has made no difference.

The two boxes are different brands (both cheap). But they do have identical remote controls, which leads me to suspect that the innards may be the same, just packed into different badged boxes.

Has anyone else suffered this problem? Any ideas how to get the guide back, please?

 

[2cvbloke]

I've had the odd blank programme guide on my Humax boxes, and all I do is switch them off for about 2 minutes and power it back up, then the thing reboots and everything works again...

If that doesn't work, then it may be that the boxes, despite being sold as such, are not compatible with the newer standards they're using post-switchover, and the boxes are unable to cope, which seems about right for cheap boxes...

 

[Penners]

Thanks for your reply 2cvbloke.

Do you think it's feasible that the boxes coped with the new standards for a couple of weeks, but then fell over? Or has something else about the EPG transmission been modified in the last few days?

 

[2cvbloke]

To be honest, I don't really know, I usually just put it down to the OS on the box getting "choked up" and needing to be rebooted, but you never know, something might have changed recently at the transmitter and it wasn't publicly documented...

 

[Penners]

OK, well I'll certainly try your reboot idea tonight. Many thanks.

 

[Topper]

I would also try a complete re-scan as though first time it was switched on as it may be a simple change made to the data stream that only affects older freeview stb's, I have experienced this with my Wharfdale when Winter Hill switched over many moons ago.

EDIT
Ah sorry I see you have tried that, but did you re-boot afterwards

 

[Penners]

Well, having tried a first-time installation several times in the last couple of days, I tried a full reboot of the box, last night. After the reboot, I got the usual update of the programme guide (which takes several minutes).

Once that EPG update had completed, I found that pressing the Menu button successfully called up the full programme guide... once! After that, it reverted to its previous behaviour: press the Guide button and the empty guide page appears for a second or two then disappears again.

Any other ideas please?

 

[2cvbloke]

It sounds as though the software's just not handling the data properly, though the symptoms being on two separate boxes, even with similar internal hard & software, would not point to software corruption...

Just a thought, do you have any transmitters of any sort (such as WiFi, DECT telephone base, FM transmitter, etc.) nearby? Or have you replaced any bulbs recently with different ones (E.G. Incandescent to Energy saving CFL, or CFL to LED)? If so, it might be worth shutting those off temporarily to see if they're interfering, some fluorescent and LED lights can occasionally work on the same frequencies as some remote controls and thus cause odd behaviour, or block the remotes from operating correctly...

After that, all I can think of is substituting the boxes for known working ones to make sure it's not an environmental issue, if the fault leaves with the boxes, then it's the receivers themselves with a fault that would probably not be worthwhile repairing...

What make & model are both of the receivers? There may be more info lying somewhere on the web about them that could help solve the issue...

 

[Penners]

2cvbloke - thanks for your continued help. We do have wi-fi, DECT phones and low energy lamps in the house, but none of these has been changed or moved for months. I can't think of any "electronic" event in the house that in any way coincides with the start of this Freeview EPG problem.

The boxes are branded Digihome and Digilogic respectively. They are completely different in their box design but, as I said above, they have identical remote controls. This makes me wonder whether they might be the same circuitry, just boxed and badged differently. They both came from supermarkets very cheaply (about £17 if I remember correctly) and were bought over 5 years ago. I've tried searching the web for information on them, without success.

 

[2cvbloke]

Given the age of the boxes, it might be a simpler idea to replace them with something a bit newer, especially being Digihome type boxes (I've seen those before, cheap devices that were okay originally, but not these days), they're just meant to be cheap & cheerful stopgap devices really...

I've got a pair of similar aged Oggle-branded boxes (sold at asda I think in 2005 or thereabouts) which are unable to cope with the recent transmission standards changes which was screwing up their EPG listings, I replaced those with a pair of Humax F2 Fox-T boxes which may be a couple of years old now, but work superbly...

 

[Topper]

My mum had an older humax freeview TV and it was not capable of continued use after the upgrade to digital (again Winter Hill), there was a solution to this which involved deleting all the existing data before re-scanning however, initially there were so many changes to the systems this became an almost daily event and for ease we changed her TV

 

[Penners]

OK, thanks to you both. I think you're probably right that I need to buy new boxes. But it'll have to wait until after Christmas, given the cost of everything else at this time of year!

I'm very grateful for your advice.

 

[Penners]

In case anyone is interested, I've discovered a sort of "work-around" solution to this problem.

In the Freeview box main menu I selected Configuration. One of the settings listed showed that I was using the Teletext electronic programme guide - but there are others. I've discovered that the Now & Next guide works. It's a rather more limited guide than the Teletext one, but it's enough for my needs. And of course it saves having to junk an otherwise operational box.

Once again, many thanks to 2cvbloke and Topper for your help with this problem.