ICETV Tests you can do to help us help you

Some of us have had some problems of late, trying to get a reliable connection to ICETV. To try to establish where the problem may be, you can do some tests yourself and come back with the results. That may help us to help you.

To confirm all is working as it should, carry out the following set of tests:


1. Do a factory reset followed by a Restore (if applicable - or do a complete re-enter of all user settings - doesn't matter)

2. Go the the IceLink page and set/activate your ICETV account.

3. Now look at your ICETV Accounts web page for your EPG fetches (light blue text near top left hand corner - don't mistake your Widget fetches for the Toppy's!!). It should be almost the same time as you made the ICETV connection, i.e. no waiting for an hour business provided you have not had a fetch for the past hour.

If you have, then the first fetch should be around one hour after you did your factory reset/Icelink connection. If your connection is flaky, you won't get past this point. Wait for at least an hour and repeat steps 2 and 3.

4. Now follow the EPG fetch times on the web. They should occur every hour continuously. Do that for at least 3 hours, i.e. 3 EPG fetches.

5. Next wait until you have just received a successful fetch as indicated on the ICETV page. Only now turn the Toppy OFF. Wait for about 5 min and turn it back ON.

6. Now look again at your ICETV Accounts web page for your EPG fetches. For me, on the public May 12 FW, no further EPG fetches are made from the Toppy - for ever. Only a visit to the IceLink page on the Toppy will restore the link.

7. Now set up a reservation on ICETV. Set one to occur say within the next 2 hours. That should give up to 4 chances that the Toppy will ask for reservation updates (half hour between reservation fetches).

8. Look at the Reservations on the Toppy. Did they come through? If all is working as it should, if you set the reservation on ICETV as soon as you turned the Toppy ON, it should appear even before you get the next EPG fetch.

9. Continue to monitor the EPG fetches on ICETV web. They should continue to occur every hour.

10. If no fetches are received for say the next 3 hours or more, my experience is that it's never going to happen.

11. Try power cycling the Toppy to see if you can get another fetch through. Some users find that they sometimes get a connection, after having been cut off for several days. That's not too bad for EPG updates, but deadly for new Reservations.

If you fail this test, there is a chance that your ICETV account is to blame. (See Note 1 below).

To establish this do the following:

1. Set up a new trial Account with ICETV. This is good for 30 days - plenty long enough for the testing and it's free.

Go to the subscriber TAB on the ICETV website and follow the steps. Note that you will need a separate email address from your normal ICETV account. You must also give a new user name, but you can use the same password. For convenience, use your current user name with a t at the end. That way you need only make minimal changes to your ICETV Icelink page on the Toppy.

2. Do all the steps above 1-11 again. Terribly boring I know, but it's what I've been doing for the last week with each successive FW release (inc betas) to try to nail this one down.



Note 1.

I'm currently testing my standard account with ICETV. Daniel has set up some flags so that he can monitor all of the activities on my account.

The issue is that with this account (and NOT my new trial account), once reservations have been made, they continue to show on the ICTV member page as either errors (yellow triangles) or queued (red doughnuts).

This happens to all my reservations and the icons cycle between these two states every half hour, i.e. at every half hour reservation fetch that the Toppy makes to ICETV. What is very odd of course, is that apart from the cycling, I get the queued icons back after the error icons have been set. So, somehow ICETV is made to think, or is thinking to itself, that the reservations haven't been sent yet.

Now, if you just happen to view your ICETV at the wrong time, you might think that your timers are still being queued up - but come back half an hour later, and they're showing errors.

Now, I repeat, my new ICETV trial account, using the same hardware all along, same FW and same testing procedure, does NOT show this behaviour. So, somehow the account has gone awry.

Update on this, 31st May 2010

I think this cycling can be attributed to multiple queued up resends. The test I did was to delete all the timers everytime they came through and eventually the doughnuts turned into full cicrcles. It took about 3 goes at deleting the timers before the system caught up.

Edited by jpp - 31/May/2010 at 3:51pm

Looks a bit like an aborted EPG fetch Vincent. Now that at least a couple of hours have past since you did a factory reset, have you received any more EPg fetches?

If so, did these fill in the gaps?

Can you telnet into the Toppy (by using the new telnet TAP by Kemistry - listed under TAPs in the 2400 Toppy forum) and look at the size of the EPG ICETV_EIT.DAT file. Tap available here.

It's typically around the 20-33MB in size. It should be smaller than that if the missing EPG data is due to an aborted/truncated EPG download.

Edited by jpp - 27/May/2010 at 10:26pm

Just check that they don't change from error icons to queued ones in half hour intervals - this is what I'm seeing even for new timers that haven't been resent on my old ICETV account.

I am getting the same result as beefa, I use wollongong epg which I also get the sydney stations. I have given up on ice for the time being & using FTA epg with jag's epg tap, seems to be fine with my 2400