On 10/17/2009 7:51 AM William R. Walsh spake thus:

[I wrote:]

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.

"Not very accurate" is one thing; off by a whole *hour* is something else.

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.

I'm sure this is the source of at least some of the problems, but not
all. F'rinstance, one bizarre thing that happens occasionally is that
the *channel* numbers on the Simple Guide are displayed wrong (e.g., Ch.
28-1 becomes Ch. 29-1, etc.). I don't think this is caused by erroneous
info being transmitted by the station, but by the firmware getting confused.

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?

I actually asked the guy specifically if they had any firmware updates
available, and he said no, so it really is totally unsupported (well,
aside from being able to ask the tech support guy questions).

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...

Nope. The only clock function that can be set through the on-screen menu
is whether daylight savings time is automatically set or not. No setting
of the clock time is possible. Turns out that toggling the "auto"
function on and off restores the proper time.


--
Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism