AMIKO Amiko A3 Owners Thread

[Babadem]

For those who didn't have a chance to grab the "NA Amiko A3" recovery files before FridgeFTA closed it doors, I found a European dealer that provided a YouTube tutorial and NAND files. Since, we no longer have "NA support" for the A3, you can download the recovery files and then import your satellite settings. I used those files this last time around to recover my A3. To my surprise, it features video resolutions of up to 2160p. The download file contains a lot of stuff we don't need here. Most of all it wasn't altered to the so called "NA Version". Let me see how this behaves in the next few weeks. So far, I haven't had the constant strange behaviors from the A3. Keeping my fingers crossed.




FIRMWARE ONLY: https://mega.nz/#!c8dzhIbI!bpM9CLTfxK...

FIRMWARE AND INSTALLS:
https://mega.nz/#!UtVmxRjA!l10zZveUjU...

 

[gpflepsen]

Has anyone seen 2160p resolutions in the display settings at setup?

I can select the 2160p options but the output doesn't actually go there. The TV reports a 720p input.

 

[Jim S.]

Never saw a 2160p resolution, but I once saw a second tuner which didn't exist... Another symptom of colossally bad programming, I suspect...

 

[gpflepsen]

Never saw a 2160p resolution, but I once saw a second tuner which didn't exist... Another symptom of colossally bad programming, I suspect...

Yes!

I've seen two additional Sat tuners and two more terrestrial tuners in Advanced Setup, all at once.

 

[bigg t]

As of last night the regular upgrade in the receiver still works. I did the upgrade to 2.078

 

[Babadem]

Never saw a 2160p resolution, but I once saw a second tuner which didn't exist... Another symptom of colossally bad programming, I suspect...

See my post above yours, guys.

To my surprise, it features video resolutions of up to 2160p. .

 

[Jim S.]

I suspect that the file that supports 2160 and multiple tuners is really for the A3 Combo rather than the original A3. I wonder if it's different enough that it won't have the bugs that the A3 has. The problem is that we may not know right away -- sometimes my A3 would crash every few minutes, other times it would go for weeks with no problems!

Does anyone know whether the re-flash can be done from USB rather than memory card? And when the instructions in the zip file say "TF card", do they mean "CF card" or something completely different?

 

[Babadem]

I suspect that the file that supports 2160 and multiple tuners is really for the A3 Combo rather than the original A3. I wonder if it's different enough that it won't have the bugs that the A3 has. The problem is that we may not know right away -- sometimes my A3 would crash every few minutes, other times it would go for weeks with no problems!

Does anyone know whether the re-flash can be done from USB rather than memory card? And when the instructions in the zip file say "TF card", do they mean "CF card" or something completely different?

"TF" in this case is referring to "microSD card". I have been running it for about 2 weeks now, so far so good! If it doesn't crash by April, I would say we have a winner.

 

[Jim S.]

Is it still working? Did you upgrade to .78 or leave it at .72?

I finally got around to trying to reflash mine today and it was interesting, in a bad way. I put the files from the link you provided at the top of the page onto a card and held down the power button, and it loaded the update but then got stuck on the "wiping userdata" part. It didn't exactly hang because the spinner was still spinning, but it showed no signs of ending. I tried a few more times with the same result.

I then found the files on another forum to create a bootable card, which could be loaded with the back-panel "reset" button rather than the power button. This time it seemed to go as it was supposed to, it came up with the diagnostic screen at the end, I selected the factory reset option from that, and it rebooted with no issues and it's been working for a few hours now.

There are, however, two problems that I was having before that didn't go away. First, the SMB server reports that the recordings on the hard drive are negative filesizes. (I don't know why Windows even has a provision for reporting negative filesizes, but whatever...) Second, the FTP server disconnects me whenever I try to do anything. So in other words, there's no way to either play or copy recordings to a computer unless I would pull the drive and physically connect it. (I suppose I ought to do that sometime to make sure they aren't actually recorded that way, but I doubt it -- plus it wouldn't explain the FTP server flaking out.) So, is my system still hosed, or does every A3 have these two problems and nobody but me has ever tried to use these features? (You never know...)

 

[KE4EST]

Sounds like it is still flaky. I use winSCP all the time to move files back and forth to the internal SATA drive or the external drive.

 

[Jim S.]

Sounds like it is still flaky. I use winSCP all the time to move files back and forth to the internal SATA drive or the external drive.

Yeah, I really don't understand it, how can it NOT be flashing the memory when it claims it is?!

BTW, I had never tried a graphical FTP client, just the command line. The command line client always returns a cryptic error as soon as I enter a command, and on the second command drops the connection. I did download WinSCP tonight to see if it behaved differently, and it did successfully log in and I could move around the directories. I started to download a file (at a snail's pace over wireless, but that's a different issue), but after several minutes it also started throwing errors and soon dropped the connection.

I'm sure that none of this is a Windows issue, because FTP behaves the same under Linux. I've tried SMB connections from Linux but have never been able to even connect, but this may just be me being SMB-stupid. (I'd rather use NFS or FTP, as either one on a properly-functioning system beat SMB for speed.)

 

[bigg t]

When I updated to .78 a couple of weeks ago I went through the receiver and did it the normal way. I didn't use the files that you download with a computer. I didn't have any trouble then but don't know if it still works. Like Ke4est I don't have any trouble using Winscp to move files around or edit.

 

[Babadem]

Is it still working? Did you upgrade to .78 or leave it at .72?

I finally got around to trying to reflash mine today and it was interesting, in a bad way. I put the files from the link you provided at the top of the page onto a card and held down the power button, and it loaded the update but then got stuck on the "wiping userdata" part. It didn't exactly hang because the spinner was still spinning, but it showed no signs of ending. I tried a few more times with the same result.

I then found the files on another forum to create a bootable card, which could be loaded with the back-panel "reset" button rather than the power button. This time it seemed to go as it was supposed to, it came up with the diagnostic screen at the end, I selected the factory reset option from that, and it rebooted with no issues and it's been working for a few hours now.

There are, however, two problems that I was having before that didn't go away. First, the SMB server reports that the recordings on the hard drive are negative filesizes. (I don't know why Windows even has a provision for reporting negative filesizes, but whatever...) Second, the FTP server disconnects me whenever I try to do anything. So in other words, there's no way to either play or copy recordings to a computer unless I would pull the drive and physically connect it. (I suppose I ought to do that sometime to make sure they aren't actually recorded that way, but I doubt it -- plus it wouldn't explain the FTP server flaking out.) So, is my system still hosed, or does every A3 have these two problems and nobody but me has ever tried to use these features? (You never know...)

Yes, still working and I upgraded to .78 using the updater without issues. No problems streaming my video files from "AZBOX Me" to Kodi using Samba. So far so good.

 

[Jim S.]

Oh, I don't have any problems getting the A3 to play files from other systems via SMB, it's playing or downloading files from the A3 that hasn't worked in a long time (if ever -- I can't remember at this point.)

 

[Jim S.]

Two weeks in and mine is still behaving itself, other than the crazy SMB and FTP issue. I've been leaving it in standby mode when not using it and it's always started right up without any of the hanging or Android errors I had been getting.

Did anybody ever figure out why neither the A2 nor the A3 could ever recognize that BISS channels were scrambled when scanning them? That's one of my two complaints about Spark when it's otherwise behaving properly. (The other one is that recent versions won't log a transponder during blind scan if the frequency has already been logged with a different symbol rate. Ironically, they broke that about the time they did start overwriting user-edited channel names...)

 

[Babadem]

"TF" in this case is referring to "microSD card". I have been running it for about 2 weeks now, so far so good! If it doesn't crash by April, I would say we have a winner.

Guess what? Still no problems and it's April 1st! We may have winner here!

 

[Jim S.]

Mine's still working too, other than the ever-popular audio sync slippage on Dolby channels that I had forgotten about since I had quit using the A3. (Switching to PCM output fixes it I think, and I'm not worried about losing multichannel output from other audio formats now that I longer use the A3 as a media player. [Got a cheap Kodi box and put LibreElec on it for that.])

 

[Babadem]

Guess what? Still no problems and it's April 1st! We may have winner here!

Spoke too soon! An hour or so after I posted the above......the usual happened. The system got stuck and when I rebooted the entire system was wiped clean!

 

[Jim S.]

Wow... I wonder if there's some sort of hardware issue causing all these problems? Android is a pretty poor operating system if it routinely destroys itself for no apparent reason -- although I've never heard of such a thing happening on other Android systems...

 

[Titanium]

I am 99.99% confident that the problem occurs because if there is a corruption of the app, it attemps to go online to restore from the latest available update. If not available online, it restores from the app installed on the unit, but does not restore the user data. Most receivers restore from a local file including user data during a reboot.

Currently providing some development advice on another set top box that was designed to update / restore from online data. Now it has been coded so the firmware and user data will be restored from a local file rather than online.