Guitar Surgery and fixing Mum's TV

Guitar Surgery and fixing Mum’s TV

Duncan and I went out to Mum and Dad’s today - we had originally planned to go fishing with my sister and her kids, but they didn’t have their fishing rods so that went out the window. Instead the plan was Duncan could play with his cousins, while I worked on my guitar. I’m sick of dealing with the Floyd Rose tremolo that’s on it, so I wanted to block it into a “dive-only” tremolo, which involved cutting a correctly shaped piece of alloy plate and fixing it into place behind the springs, then tightening the springs and restringing the guitar.

It took longer than I expected, so we ended up staying for dinner - so it’s going to be a late night.

I also took the opportunity to fix Mum’s DVR - since a few months ago (I’m assuming when they shuffled the channels and service IDs around) she’s been unable to pick up a few channels. I assumed it just needed a rescan, so I did so, and we ended up with a whole mess of duplicate channels!

She found the USB wifi adaptor that came with it, so I set that up and performed a firmware upgrade. I don’t appear to have written about it before, but the DVR she bought (a Topfield TRF-2400, which had glowing reviews on Whirlpool) is an absolute piece of shit. If this is what constitutes a “decent” DVR device, then the industry is certainly in a sad state.

Last time I ran a cat5 cable out to the DVR so we could try out the Youtube functionality, and it played at about 5FPS - utterly unwatchable! The firmware upgrade seems to have fixed that, so I suppose that’s one positive in a sea of shit.

We performed another re-scan, and it had a seperate dialog box claiming to be detecting duplicate channels, which sounded promising. After a cursory check, it looks like we did indeed have “only” two of each channel - one for Bendigo and one for Ballarat - along with about 8 channels which had further duplicates in the 300s range. The Bendigo stations come in really poorly, presumably because the antenna isn’t oriented the correct direction (I’m surprised they come in at all, honestly) and since they’re almost all the same programming I wanted to just delete them so it was less confusing.

But how? I tried multiple times, going through all the settings and everything and looking to see if I could push anything in the EPG, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to edit the programmes or delete them.

A quick Google search turns up an FAQ on “IceTV” (an optional service with these DVRs), which gives the following instructions:

Exit all menus and turn it on to live TV (not timeshifted or recorded playback);
Press “OK” to bring up the programme menu;
Press the white “OPT” button on the remote;
Select “delete”.

This process is not intuitive whatsoever - the programme menu serves no purpose above that of the EPG, and it’s less functional so I’m not sure most people would bother to look in it. I didn’t even know it was there. The remote doesn’t have an “OPT” button, but there’s a white button on the remote called “APP” that does the same thing.

Long story short, we managed to delete all the extraneous programmes and everything acts like you’d expect it to. There should be no confusion with it recording the wrong channels (whereas previously there were, for example, multiple “channel 88s” and only one of them having a useful video signal).

At least until the next time they change the channels around and it needs rescanning. :|