Hi!

The Tivax has an externally accessible port (serial?)
to update the flash it has.

That's an interesting idea. I've heard mostly good things about the Tivax
converter. I've never happened to get one and try it out. For various
reasons, I stuck to what the retail stores around here were carrying. I
tried all of the readily available Apex Digital, Digital Stream, Insignia,
GE/RCA, Magnavox, and Zenith converters. I finally arrived at the conclusion
that the only real contenders were the Magnavox, Insignia/Zenith and (I
forgot!) Digital Stream units.

(There was very little cost for this. I ordered coupons on the behalf of
family members and got a different converter each time. And I bought one at
list price.)

The GE/RCA unit, built around a Broadcom IC, was very slow to do anything
and the firmware felt stupidly designed at best. Like "we don't care let's
just see if can get this thing to the market". Two different Apex (Zoran
powered) units worked fine for the most part, but I noticed a lot of noise
on the RF output and both units had their remotes go stupid in the same way.
The Zoran IC also gets *hot* in operation.

I never had any expectation that the manufacturer would
provide new flash images. However, I had hoped that the
presence of the connector might entice someone to hack the
box (since hardware accessibility seems to be the thing
that inhibits most would-be hackers)

The DTT-901 has a populated set of header pins on the board. I don't know
what they are for, maybe a JTAG? They sure *could* be.

I suspect there is fault on both sides. I look at the
design of the user interface in most of the converter
boxes I evaluated and found they all seemed to have been
"designed on the back of a napkin". And, often seem like they
*assume* the broadcasts would be perfect, available 100%
of the time, etc.

Agreed 100%.

William