Hi!

Please note that I'm posting this simply out of frustration; I don't
expect any solutions to these problems.

Well, how about some interesting comments? Would you be interested in
those?

I'm one of the zillions of analog TV owners who ended up with
one of these DTV converter boxes. For the most part, it's worked
well. Picture and sound are fine, and it has decent software to
navigate and choose channels.

I've had good luck with both of mine. (One is an Insignia--Best Buy--
variant.) I've stopped using all of the ones I have, primarily because
digital TV has been a fiasco around these parts, and it culminated in
the coaxial cable breaking off of my antenna about a foot away from
the top of the tower.

I tried very basic analog cable for a while after that, but I finally
said "forget it" when I realized that I hadn't turned the TV on for
more than a month. If I need to watch something, I've got an old 13"
Zenith set with rabbit ears and a converter.

But there are definitely some flaky aspects to its behavior.
Most obvious lately has been the way that it "forgets" what
time it is, or at least what the correct hour is.

There's no hardware real-time clock in this unit. The clock runs as a
process on the system CPU, and so it's probably not very accurate
anyway.

(The CPU is, in case you were wondering, an ARM926EJS clocked at
200MHz.)

However, the firmware resets the clock *every time* you change
channels. And when I was watching over the air digital broadcast TV, I
discovered that most of the stations in this area don't even bother to
broadcast the correct time. Only the PBS affiliate had it right.
Others were off by minutes or hours. This would cause the program
guide to be messed up.

(Why did I explore the Zenith converter so? I think Sam Goldwasser
said it best on the SER FAQ: "It wasn't long before the workings of
the TV were of more interest to me than the mostly stupid shows.")

I actually called Zenith today about this problem. Of course,
it wasn't long into the call that I was told "By the way, we
don't support this product anymore".

I don't know. I find it surprising...but I've been inside mine and
found that it has a flash ROM in place. It stands alone as the only
converter box I've seen with one. I'm not sure how you'd deliver
updated code to it, but they could fix the problem if they really
wanted to. Maybe they'd do it over the air?

The software seems pretty badly designed. Anyone else
noticed these problems?

Yes, but they are definitely caused by stations broadcasting
inaccurate time information. This messes up the program guide. If it
bothers you, I think the only real fix is to complain to the stations
that are broadcasting improper time data.

If I remember things right, there is a manual clock set function on
the DTT-900/DTT-901. You could always try it and see...

After auditioning a lot of converter boxes, I found things that I
didn't like about each one. In the end, I thought the Magnavox CECB
was probably the best of any of them, although its feature set was a
bit thin. The Zenith/LG unit came in second.

I actually drew up some crude designs for one of my own that solved
all the shortcomings I saw in each unit. Of course, given how
perfection is a secondary goal any more (if it even makes the list!),
and how practically everything comes in from overseas, I'd expect that
it wouldn't stand a chance if marketed on quality of experience
alone...and there's so much I don't know how to do anyway.

William