Hopper S213 Feedback and Issues

I have 2 negative comments about S213/265 after 2 days of viewing:

1. The "custom favorites lists dropping local channels" has not been fixed, and in fact, may be worse than it was.
2. Closed Caption service is still unreliable. I had to restart a Hopper once to get it to work and it still drops out frequently after changing channels or fast forwarding a recording.
 
While I was playing the PS3 the HIC is disconnected so after I was done playing I checked and I didnt have b@home access on the Living room Hopper...my other hopper is connected by ethernet...no biggie I just thought I saw where every receicer should have access now to the internet (blockbuster@home) via one of the many ways to connect ...still love the hopper best out there
 
Ok I guess I can move this to the "regular" occurrence area, icon to choose which Hopper you want to watch recordings disappears, have to reset both hoppers :(

A new wrinkle to it, after I reset I also get the acquiring satellite signal message as well
 
I have the same configuration that you have. i disconnected one hopper from the network and rebooted all machines but it didn't work. let it go for the night and after the nightly reboot, all works as it should.

I just got the small picture bug after coming out of the guide. hit the cancel button, swapped tuners, tried PiP, nothing could get it to return. then i went into the HD settings menu and change the output from 1080i to 720p and the larger picture came back. didn't have to reboot the machine. hope they get this one fixed before i get a call from my father saying "why is the picture only 1/4 of the screen?" !! :D:D:D

I will try that this evening and see what happens tomorrow. Thanks for the advice.
 
karspur said:
I have had to "red button reboot" 4 times in the last 2 days since receiving 213 and had one freeze and it rebooted on it's own. The reasons for my rebooting are:
1. When I turn it on in the morning the screen saver stays on but I can hear audio of the channel. Pressing select does nothing. Red button fixes issue.
2. Everything will look fine but I am unable to change channels or bring up guide or menu. Red button fixes issue.
3. Small screen stays on screen after exiting guide (as reported by others) Red button fixes issue.

Having to do it again as I type this due to issue #2 happening again.

Love being able to access my second hopper recordings and have been very happy with them since I got them. First problems so far and as much as they have been on top of things with the hoppers I'm sure these problems won't last long.

Just to add 1 more from this morning:

4. Tryed to turn the hopper on this morning and no response. Red button fixes the issue.
 
Using Hopper 1 to watch a recording on Hopper 2. Closed captions don't work. Watching that same recording directly on Hopper 2 or Joeys, closed captions are there.
 
Got my upgrade to 213/265 last night. I have 1H/2J, no HIC. Hopper has ethernet and coax. One Joey is coax only, other Joey is ethernet only.

The Hopper is definitely bridging coax to ethernet now. Previously the ethernet and MOCA (coax) interfaces showed two different MAC addresses, the ethernet interface was getting an IP from my DHCP server on my home network, and the coax interface was taking an address out of 169.254.x.x as there was no DHCP server on the coax. This morning, both interfaces show the same MAC address and IP address (the one from my home network's DHCP server).

There was no issue with the one Joey that was already on ethernet. The Joey that is on coax was not connecting because it's MAC address was not allowed to get an IP from my DHCP server. This was not necessary before when the coax and the ethernet were separate on the Hopper. The coax Joey picked an IP out of 169.254.x.x (just like the coax interface of the Hopper used to) and was able to connect to the Hopper's coax side just fine. Now that the Hopper is bridging, it's coax is no longer in 169.254.x.x, so the coax Joey couldn't find it until I allowed the Joey to also get an IP from my home network.

So if you're running a simple network with an "open" DHCP server (will give an IP to any device that asks) this wouldn't be an issue. But if you're a paranoid SOB like me and have you're network locked down, the Hopper turning into a bridge overnight can cause some problems. As others have already noted, if you have more than one Hopper or you also have an HIC, enabling bridging on the Hopper also created layer 2 loops in your network overnight. Not the smartest move on Dish's part.

After sorting out the network issue this morning, everything seems to be working fine for me. I still see two problems in 213/265 that were also present in 212/264:
1) Live video sometimes gets stuck in the little box in the upper left when exiting the guide or other menus (same as others have already mentioned)
2) Skip forward/back are sometimes unpredictable. Sometimes one press on skip back jumps back 5 minutes or so. I have also been noticing that when fast forwarding through something and then I hit play it sometimes jumps ahead about 5 minutes and starts playing from there instead of where it was when I hit play.
 
I had another instance of the freeze/lost recording while watching a PTAT event. Was watching the olympic trials on NBC and there was a picture freeze followed by the pop up box stating a portion of my recording has been lost, followed by watching a program on CBS. PTAT was still recording these events while we were watching so it was a bit odd. I just joined the tuner to watch the trials in progress, but it would not let me watch the PTAT recording without the loss of program / switching to CBS midway.

The wife was not happy with the small picture guide bug and I had to show her how to switch the resolution to fix when I got home from work.

The Joey we have now does have an IP address on my network through MoCA which is the only positive I have seen to date on this release. The bells and whistles are great for people with more then one Hopper but a release should not screw up the ONE and only job that this box has which is watching/recording TV.
 
I had another instance of the freeze/lost recording while watching a PTAT event. Was watching the olympic trials on NBC and there was a picture freeze followed by the pop up box stating a portion of my recording has been lost, followed by watching a program on CBS. PTAT was still recording these events while we were watching so it was a bit odd. I just joined the tuner to watch the trials in progress, but it would not let me watch the PTAT recording without the loss of program / switching to CBS midway.

The wife was not happy with the small picture guide bug and I had to show her how to switch the resolution to fix when I got home from work.

The Joey we have now does have an IP address on my network through MoCA which is the only positive I have seen to date on this release. The bells and whistles are great for people with more then one Hopper but a release should not screw up the ONE and only job that this box has which is watching/recording TV.

I had the exact same problem using PTAT and the Olympic Trials. All 4 PTAT recordings were recording CBS. I have S213 as well.
 
This update made some major changes to the networking/MoCA code. My main hopper took the update fine, as did the joey connected to it. 2 days later, my second hopper got the update. Both hoppers are ethernet connected directly to my network. Noticed the second hopper was all of a sudden being given MAC addressing by MoCA which had never worked prior, and the ethernet connection was reading as "Fail", but no problems with any IRDs. Everything worked normally - could see programming from both hoppers on each. Next day, after the nightly reset, IP/MAC addressing worked normally for the second hopper and was green for both ethernet and MoCA.

Next day, Joey has no connection - only searching for hopper. Hoppers are fine. Reset network connections, reset Joey MoCA connections in proper order, then red button reset on Hopper, which finally brings the Joey back, but slow channel changes, the PTAT readings are wrong (same channel on all, not network programming, although in reality, it was actually the proper channels, just not reading properly in the display), and if I selected the PTAT channels directly, sometimes it would be black screen...if I selected a channel number, it would go to that channel, but not always. After an hour of tweaking, traced the issues to the network connections, and ended up pulling all ethernet, all MoCA and restarting the 3 IRDs in order of where I wanted it to pull the internet connection from (the second hopper) which would then distribute the connection, which worked to get all the IRD's working smoothly, but NO IP connection being passed through. It's like the network connection was locked to one hopper from prior to the 213 update, and it only wanted to get the internet connection from that box. Once I finally only hooked up ethernet to that hopper and that hopper only, then restarted everything again, everything worked smoothly, except for the PTAT readings on the Joey, which would not fix no matter what I did - took until the nightly reset to resolve.

Really frustrating considering I wanted the ethernet connection to be from the upstairs hopper, and no matter what I did, the system just would not cooperate. Also frustrating in like what was said above: there is one thing these boxes should do no matter what, and that's allow you to watch tv, which wasn't possible when the Joey was all bent out of shape. Dish: hire better coding teams, and start from scratch to get these issues under control, please.

I did trace one of the PTAT display issues to when it's recording PTAT and the recording is interrupted - when it came back, the PTAT was not correct on both Joey and Hopper.
 
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Today I experienced desync.

Watching CNN the audio began to lag the video by at least a full second. Amusingly, if I hit [pause] the audio would keep playing for a second or so after the video stopped. Hit [play], the audio would wait a second or more before resuming. The pauses seemed to perfectly match the desync....

My first thought was to blame my sound system but 1) I've never had more than a milliseconds lag on my sound system 2) I tested it anyways using a secondary source and my sound system is as prompt as ever 3) switching the Hopper to DVR'ed content resynchronized things.
 
This update made some major changes to the networking/MoCA code. My main hopper took the update fine, as did the joey connected to it. 2 days later, my second hopper got the update. Both hoppers are ethernet connected directly to my network. Noticed the second hopper was all of a sudden being given MAC addressing by MoCA which had never worked prior, and the ethernet connection was reading as "Fail", but no problems with any IRDs. Everything worked normally - could see programming from both hoppers on each. Next day, after the nightly reset, IP/MAC addressing worked normally for the second hopper and was green for both ethernet and MoCA.

Next day, Joey has no connection - only searching for hopper. Hoppers are fine. Reset network connections, reset Joey MoCA connections in proper order, then red button reset on Hopper, which finally brings the Joey back, but slow channel changes, the PTAT readings are wrong (same channel on all, not network programming, although in reality, it was actually the proper channels, just not reading properly in the display), and if I selected the PTAT channels directly, sometimes it would be black screen...if I selected a channel number, it would go to that channel, but not always. After an hour of tweaking, traced the issues to the network connections, and ended up pulling all ethernet, all MoCA and restarting the 3 IRDs in order of where I wanted it to pull the internet connection from (the second hopper) which would then distribute the connection, which worked to get all the IRD's working smoothly, but NO IP connection being passed through. It's like the network connection was locked to one hopper from prior to the 213 update, and it only wanted to get the internet connection from that box. Once I finally only hooked up ethernet to that hopper and that hopper only, then restarted everything again, everything worked smoothly, except for the PTAT readings on the Joey, which would not fix no matter what I did - took until the nightly reset to resolve.

Really frustrating considering I wanted the ethernet connection to be from the upstairs hopper, and no matter what I did, the system just would not cooperate. Also frustrating in like what was said above: there is one thing these boxes should do no matter what, and that's allow you to watch tv, which wasn't possible when the Joey was all bent out of shape. Dish: hire better coding teams, and start from scratch to get these issues under control, please.

I did trace one of the PTAT display issues to when it's recording PTAT and the recording is interrupted - when it came back, the PTAT was not correct on both Joey and Hopper.


Same issue trying to change the hopper with the incoming ethernet. After several hours of messing with it I was unable to get it to switch.
 
Got 213/265 on my Hoppers and Joeys last night. One positive thing to report - Caller ID now works on the Joeys.

I had one hopper hooked up to ethernet (wired) and one hooked up via HIC. This morning the network was only "seeing" the HIC, so I disconnected the other hopper. No problems so far!
 
My hoppers just got 213 last night. We have been using them all day and watching stuff from both the hoppers and the joeys. Everything seems to be working right for me. No problems so far.
 
I just unhookedthe ethernet from both hoppers and now the internet is only hooked to the network by using the HIC.

Everything seems to be working.
 
So far the Hopper that was hanging 3 times night hasn't done it again... Crossing my fingers!

EDIT: By the way, the Weather Channel app is terrible on the 265 Joeys. It has been this way since day 1 but the app only works correctly on the Joeys about 10% of the time. The app works a lot better on the 213 Hoppers however occasionally there are reliability problems with the app.
 
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Now hopper 1 does not have the menu to select which hopper you want to view from and the hopper 2 does but it just goes to live tv when you try to view something from hopper 1. I assume because hopper 1 does not recognize hopper 2. This is becoming very irritating.
 

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Hopper/Joey Upgrade

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