Strangeness on ITV3

[aerialplug]

My Sky+ box pulled a wobbly on me last night and I still don't quite know what went wrong.

I noticed about half way through that Numb3rs wasn't recording - the box was blue screen telling me that there was a technical problem with the channel. I decied that the programme was way too late to start recording there and then so I set up a recording for ITV3+1.

About 5 minutes into the show I switched over and behold, the same thing had happened. Try as I might, keying in 213 kept giving me the error. Even stranger, going to channel 211 and pressing channel up took me to 101 - BBC One! The problem eventually went away by rebooting the Sky box, but this is the first time I've seen a channel specific problem like this.

I've previously seen the "technical problem with channel" box, which usually means "technical problem with Sky Box". I used to see this regularly on channels that had interactive content but it would usually last for just under 2 minutes and rectify itself.


As an aside, It was also interesting to see that ITV3+1 currently doesn't show any ads! Whenever the ads come on (on the prevous ITV3 showing), a red screen comes up saying that "for legal reasons we are unable to show this programme"! They'll show programme trailers though.

[ColinYounger]

I have a VirginMedia box, so it may not be relevant but...

Did your Sky+ box receive any software updates before the restart? I've seen the VM boxes acting odd when lineup changes have occurred or updates are due. Oh, as well as genuine problems of VM's own making.

For example, I 'adjusted' my lineup recently and before the box had the new lineup I saw a similar problem - ITV, Ch4 and Five would not work with direct channel numbers, and pressing up\down channel on the STB remote skipped those channels completely. A reboot cured.

Just a thought.

[katman]

My Sky+ box pulled a wobbly on me last night and I still don't quite know what went wrong.

Had to reboot my SKY+ yesterday as well. Went doolally when we tried to change to one of the kids channels. Reported various channels as no signal and channel up kept going to BBC1 as you report.

Has been OK since although it is the second reboot in a week :(

Last time my Tivo was rebooted was several months ago when I rearranged some cabling.

[aerialplug]

well, I have to put my hands in the air and say that I've had Sky+ for 5 months and this is the first time it's gone wrong - it's far more stable than my old Sky box.

Then, I don't really use it as a Sky+ box - I have both a TiVo (naturally) and a freeview PVR.

Incidentally,trhe Freeview PVR (Tevion) has some of the worst written firmware I've ever seen on a commercial product. Frequent failed recordings, fast forward/rewind is a joke, giving 1 frame ever 2-3 seconds, it suddenly starts showing every 4th frame during playback - and those are the repeatable ones - there are numerous other intermittent ones. We've been waiting for a software upgrade that's "just round the corner" for about 3 months now after a hastily released version to fix the bungled job they did with the previous release...

Still, you've got to laugh when you have a product like TiVo that's now 6-7 years ahead of its time here in the UK (and counting).

[bigmac]

Actually, I think there was more of a problem. I have a standard Sky box and apart from ITV3, there were several other chanels reporting this same fault.
A power cycle of the Sky box sorted out the problem. I suspect a botched Sky update....