[A-300] Firmware 05-01-111125-23-POP-421 (05-01-111007-23-POP-421) (7.12.2011)

[chris57]

(02-19-2012 12:13 AM)jasch Wrote:  Unfortunately I don't think a new firmware will not be available soon for the A300.

Since there's now a C300, first a firmware will be available for the C300. Once that firmware goes through beta, a release candidate, and finally public, it will be ported over the the A300.

This is the way it was at least with the 200's. The A200/A210 firmware was released around 3 weeks after the C200 firmware was released always.

No.

The firmware will be for the A300. then it'll be ported to the C300. There is NO beta program for the 300 series.

[scruby]

(02-19-2012 12:01 AM)chris57 Wrote:  

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(02-17-2012 07:40 PM)scruby Wrote:  lad's i bought a device of 235 euro and it cant even run stable. wat a bunch of crap. several months later and still no proper firmware.

Now i have a device worth of so much money put in a corner doing nothing while i have to play movies trough my macbook. kinda said aint it?

Put some effort into finding out why you are having problems. Also read about the product and how to use it as I see that you RMA'd just for a firmware recovery.

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Yeah because thats what they told me to do.
Ive spend hours and hours on the internet. i have all the proper settings.
Using a synology NAS to stream via SMB. sometimes i can watch a movie without reboots but mostly it reboots 3/4 times in a movie. so now ive putted this very expensive media player aside and use my macbook to watch video's. Before the media player even gets public those kinda bugs should be fixed. When you go to the store and get a product it should be working as advertised we should not become your beta testers.

And im not flaming at you Chris, your'e doing a great job here at the forum but its just very irritating for us customers.

[gax]

(02-19-2012 10:34 AM)scruby Wrote:  

(02-19-2012 12:01 AM)chris57 Wrote:  

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(02-17-2012 07:40 PM)scruby Wrote:  lad's i bought a device of 235 euro and it cant even run stable. wat a bunch of crap. several months later and still no proper firmware.

Now i have a device worth of so much money put in a corner doing nothing while i have to play movies trough my macbook. kinda said aint it?

Put some effort into finding out why you are having problems. Also read about the product and how to use it as I see that you RMA'd just for a firmware recovery.

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Yeah because thats what they told me to do.
Ive spend hours and hours on the internet. i have all the proper settings.
Using a synology NAS to stream via SMB. sometimes i can watch a movie without reboots but mostly it reboots 3/4 times in a movie. so now ive putted this very expensive media player aside and use my macbook to watch video's. Before the media player even gets public those kinda bugs should be fixed. When you go to the store and get a product it should be working as advertised we should not become your beta testers.

And im not flaming at you Chris, your'e doing a great job here at the forum but its just very irritating for us customers.

I totally agree it's unacceptable!

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(02-19-2012 12:01 AM)chris57 Wrote:  

(02-17-2012 11:03 PM)gax Wrote:  I agree, it's been 3 monthes my A300 keeps having playing issues. Totally unacceptable!

It has been TWO months during which time there has been xmas and the chinese new year! Dont be so easily led.

There is supposed to be a C200 firmware and then a A300.

Do you think I care about that? No I don't, I bought a product I expect to work. If it doesn't work, if the job wasn't properly done before selling the device, it's not my problem. Someone who would care about his customers, someone who would be a real professionnal, would work on the issues and release firmwares with fixes every day if needed until at least the device can be used without random reboots, unsynced subs, etc... I mean, it's the core features! How it is now, I'll say it plain : this device is unusable. If within a month it's still, I'll ask for a refund and will never buy buy any product from you ever again while encouraging all the people I know to do the same since you are not professionnals. PERIOD !

[minazza]

I've never experienced reboot during playback of any movie

[Willem53]

(02-19-2012 11:03 AM)gax Wrote:  I totally agree it's unacceptable!

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Then don't accept it...


OK.... now what?

maybe use this user forum to make the most of it?

[pras1011]

I am having annoying fast forward/reverse and chapter skip problems. I can only fast forward at 2x speed. Anything else and the film freezes. Chapter skip takes ages to skip!! This is very very poor!!!

[jasch]

(02-19-2012 12:14 AM)chris57 Wrote:  The firmware will be for the A300. then it'll be ported to the C300. There is NO beta program for the 300 series.

Hmm. Then, how come there's a newer firmware for the C300 right now that has not been released to the A300?

05-01-120116-23-POP-420-000 was released for the C300 on Jan 19, with lots of bug fixes that the A300 not yet has.

Hope this does not become a pattern. Since both platforms are nearly identical, I don't see why they cannot release both at the same time.

[Willem53]

Did you compare release notes? Who got what first? and what was C300 hardware exclusive?

[jasch]

Yes I did. For example, this is on the release notes of the C300 firmware:

Code:

File Browser
- added an option to delete all the NFO, Cover Art, Fan Art and Subtitle files corresponding to this file

And this was from a bug report I made on December, after the latest public firmware for the A300.

I also notices several other fixes, which leads me to the conclusion that firmwares are going to be release first on the C300.

[chris57]

Jasch - its like the A200 currently has a newer firmware than the C200. There will be occasions when between the releases a fix comes in the the lead model didn't have when the release was first done on the player. Think Auto colorspace, on A200 but not on C200, which is the beta produce in the 200 series.

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(02-19-2012 10:34 AM)scruby Wrote:  Yeah because thats what they told me to do.
Ive spend hours and hours on the internet. i have all the proper settings.
Using a synology NAS to stream via SMB. sometimes i can watch a movie without reboots but mostly it reboots 3/4 times in a movie. so now ive putted this very expensive media player aside and use my macbook to watch video's. Before the media player even gets public those kinda bugs should be fixed. When you go to the store and get a product it should be working as advertised we should not become your beta testers.

And im not flaming at you Chris, your'e doing a great job here at the forum but its just very irritating for us customers.

I have a Synology NAS via SMB sharing and can stream movies from it without any problems at all. MKV/AVI/BDMV/Etc.

So the fact you cannot may be nothing to do with the player it may be for some other reason. You need to investigate why some can and you cannot. You can't do that through sitting there and expecting someone somehow at Syabas to fix things for you.

We are all beta testers in the media player sector. If you want a product that is nigh on 100% perfect on launch then go get an AppleTV or similar. You wont be able to play anything other than Apple supported formats though.

[AdamW]

"ALL Media Players have to develop. Hopping around from one to another will get you no where unless you pick an old media player that has had time to develop. Good luck with your demanding behavior."

Chris: I'm sorry, that's just flat out garbage. You do not describe a paying customer asking for the product they paid for to work correctly as 'demanding behavior'. That's absurd. I realize you don't work for Syabas and you're doing the forums on a voluntary basis, and I know that can be a difficult position, but if you're placed in a position like this, might I suggest it's better not to say anything at all than to attack someone who is merely asking for the product they paid an awful lot of money for to work as described and advertised.

I paid over $200 for a video streamer. Not to be a video streamer beta tester. It was not advertised as being barely usable at release time, it was advertised as the best thing since sliced bread. May I direct you to http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/i...nItemId=45 , where you will note the tagline "The Perfect Networked Media Jukebox". Not "This Thing Might Be The Perfect Networked Media Jukebox When We Get Around To Fixing The Bugs Next Year". There's two pages of bumpf about how this is basically the best product ever. What is notable by its absence is a note saying "When you get the thing it will be riddled with bugs and we'll expect you to sit tight and wait months for a firmware update without complaining". Edit: I might note also that as soon as Syabas made the A-300 available for order, they removed the option to order an A-200. Does de-listing your old product as soon as the new one is available send out the message 'hey, this new one might be kind of buggy, if you just want something that works maybe you should buy something older'?

There's a lot of complexity involved in building a media streamer that plays any format imaginable properly, sure. I can live with, say, two videos out of all of mine failing to play because of encoding issues until a fixed firmware is shipped, or something. That's the kind of problem you need widespread usage to catch.

There is, however, not a whole damn lot of complexity involved in building a product which does not turn itself off when you try and quit the screensaver. There is not a lot of complexity involved in building a product which can scroll through a directory listing without pausing every page. There can't be that much complexity involved in building a video streamer which keeps its subtitles in sync with its video when you fast-forward - that's not an issue limited to some specific odd encoding, or something, it affects every damn video with subtitles.

I work in software QA. I know the difference between the type of bug which is almost impossible to discover and fix before you get widespread usage, and the kind of bug you damn well should have fixed at alpha. The product I work on is given away for free, and I would never dream of signing off on a release with the kinds of bugs this thing has, never mind then not fixing them for three months.

I know everyone thinks their bug is special and they're a perfect little flower, but in my particular use case, these 'small' bugs really do make the player virtually unfit for purpose - I use it almost exclusively for watching subtitled videos and listening to music, and the directory browse issue means it takes me up to two minutes to actually be able to find the video or song I want to play, the subtitle fast-forward issue means I can't skip the opening credits of anything because the subtitles will then be out of sync, and the screensaver issue plays havoc with my attempts to listen to a full album with a pause here and there.

I now own two other media streamers, both of which cost less than half of the price of the A-300 (one cost around 1/4 as much). Each has its own bugs - I got the PCH in the first place because the first seems incapable of playing a few very large video files I own - but neither has remotely as many problems as the A-300 seems to, and I'm actually better off using either of them than using the A-300 with the A-300 in its present state.

Sigma breaking stuff with new kernels and yadda yadda - that's inside baseball. Syabas cares about that. We shouldn't have to. It's their problem, not ours. We're customers: we paid a lot of money for a product, advertised as a finished product, with the expectation that it would work properly. That's the bottom line. We are not interested in the reasons why we didn't get it. Those are not our problem.

Chinese New Year - I have co-workers in China. They took a week off. Christmas is maybe, if I'm being very generous, another week's vacation for everyone. That covers two weeks. I'm afraid it's not two months or three months: it's over three months and nearly four months since the first batch of A-300s shipped, according to http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=55641 (Oct 28th). So if we give Syabas two weeks for vacations, that's still _three months_ of 'active' time the product has been released with these basic bugs unfixed.

Again, I know you're a volunteer moderator and this isn't an attack on you. But please: it does not do you, me, Syabas or anyone else any good to paint this as a situation where we customers are being unreasonably demanding, because we are not. I am not asking for the moon on a stick here. I am asking for an expensive product to work as advertised.

[Xrushkin]

Sorry folks I have 16 Tb of 1080p video in various container (iso,mkv,b-ray and so on) and don't have Real BIG problem with it - you are too noisy - just relax ;-)

[paulo3030]

(02-19-2012 09:02 PM)Xrushkin Wrote:  Sorry folks I have 16 Tb of 1080p video in various container (iso,mkv,b-ray and so on) and don't have Real BIG problem with it - you are too noisy - just relax ;-)

did you use Subtitles to watch your movies? i think not, thats why you are so relaxed...

[halfelite]

(02-19-2012 01:37 PM)pras1011 Wrote:  I am having annoying fast forward/reverse and chapter skip problems. I can only fast forward at 2x speed. Anything else and the film freezes. Chapter skip takes ages to skip!! This is very very poor!!!

Sounds like a network problem having trouble reading ahead.

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And lets all agree to disagree there are some bugs that effect people but not others the subtitle bug being one of them that if you do watch subtitles with 90% of your media would be bad.

[goAMinD]

Please bear in mind that most of you (myself included) english speaking users don't need subs (hearing impaired excluded), hence no sub issues, but most international users outside english speaking countries actually need subs (rest of family anyway are very used to subs).