TiVo Freezing

[DavidH]

My Sony Svr-2000 has been behaving beautifully since I got it a couple of months back but since the EPG upgrade, things have gone weird.
It "freezes" for no reason. The picture is ok but the remote control and tivoweb access refuse to work (can't change channel, stop playing etc). Doing a reboot solves the problem (for a couple of days) until the next time the problem occurs.

Has anyone had similar problems?

[thomson]

It "freezes" for no reason. The picture is ok but the remote control and tivoweb access refuse to work (can't change channel, stop playing etc). Doing a reboot solves the problem (for a couple of days) until the next time the problem occurs.

Under version 3.0 of the software there is an issue where the system will stop processing remote events. This seems to be caused by a process that hooks into the event system and later stops responding or is unable to process waiting events. It is commonly known as the '3.0 event bug'. To help reduce the risk you may wish to watch what TivoWeb modules and utilities you run. Modules such as 'Phone' hook into the event handler to perform various tasks. It also seems to happen more often after heavy use of a remote control (not necessarily the TiVo remote)... which also implies that a process is not able to clear its queue before hanging.

[DavidH]

Sounds like the same thing except this happens at random. Tivoweb or a lot of remote usage doesn't need to have been "used". The unit is not overheating but I think the daily phone call is linked to what is going wrong. The unit "froze again tonight while doing nothing more than passing the standard Foxtel transmission through but after the daily call was due. Does this still sound like the same issue?

[thomson]

Sounds like the same thing except this happens at random. Tivoweb or a lot of remote usage doesn't need to have been "used". The unit is not overheating but I think the daily phone call is linked to what is going wrong. The unit "froze again tonight while doing nothing more than passing the standard Foxtel transmission through but after the daily call was due. Does this still sound like the same issue?

Yes it does... you should find that you can still telnet to the system... and if you have an strace binary you could try and trace some of the processes on the system to see if you can stumble across the cause. Fom memory, I don't think anything is written in the logs... but I could be wrong.
My feelings are that each process that hooks into the eventhandler gets a queue of a particular size... and if this queue fills up without them clearing it, then the system will enter this state until some of the events in the queue have been processed... so if the application hangs, or is very slow in processing events then you get this situation.
It should also be noted that this is one of the reasons some people with UK units prefer the v2.5.5 image.

[Darren King]

Hi Guys

I can concur with the above. I recently took one of my Philips USA TiVo's from the older V3.0 non Guided Setup image to one of the latest OzTiVo images and it suffers from lockups at least twice a week after almost 15 months on the older image with no problems.

For me it is usually while simply navigating with the remote that does it. Like Thompson says I can still telnet in to issue a "reboot" command but I have not had much success trying to track down what it is that causes the problem however

[mnorman]

I'm thinking I'll get a TiVo and hook it up, but this doesn't sound real great.

Is it possible to go back to the older "image" that has proven to be stable if I buy a new unit from the US?