William R. Walsh wrote:
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.

We ordered a pair of the Tivax boxes. Our "problems" (to date) seem
mostly to be related to antenna choice and/or location. We are
approx 12 miles as the crow flies from the *cluster* of broadcast
towers (almost all of the stations transmit from this one complex).
And, it is *almost* line-of-sight from our house to those towers
(with the exception of a single tree).

Yet, the stations that we receive on one set are not the same
as on the other set. E.g., 9-1 comes in on one set but not
9-3 while 9-3 comes in on the *other* set but not 9-1 (!)

The box runs warm. I'm sure the components inside are quite
toasty! It is left on 24/7 since powering it off would mean having
to turn off *two* devices (silly that the remote didn't learn
how to talk to our TV!).

The remote is also a potential gripe as it is pretty crappy quality
*and* doesn't appear to be documented anyplace (i.e., using a
"universal remote" is problematic as none of these have "codes"
for "Tivax blahblahblah")

(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.

Most of the noticeable bugs in the Tivax have to do with the on-screen
display (program guide, etc. -- there are two different functions
that provide this information).

For example, you could be stepping through the list of upcoming
programs on a particular station and suddenly the list falls
back to "the current program" (i.e., at 10:12 it shows the 10:00
program followed by the 10:30, then 11:00, then 11:30... until
there ARE NO MORE DATA AVAILABLE. Yet, while you are stepping
through this list, you might find it redisplaying the data for
the 10:00 show instead of the 11:30 show that *was* next in the
list!)

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.

You'd have to trace foils to see where they go. JTAG only needs
a couple of pins...

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%.

For the program guide issues I have been seeing, it could simply
be a problem of trying to skimp on resources (in the STB) and simply
*expecting* to be able to grab the data AT ANY TIME off the air
(so why waste resourcces storing that internally?!)