Tiviar Alpha Plus Combo STB

hs5424 wrote: »

Listen lads that are having problems with your Tiviar.
I have setup about 30 of these boxes to date. I have advised customers to buy them from sat world in Dublin as they are local so if you have a problem you don't have to send back to China. By the way, I don't know or have any business connection with sat world. Load your box with the latest Vix image. I never bother with add-ons such as picons etc as they can load the system no mater what anyone tells you. If you don't want to manually tune in the terrestrial channels then Vix comes pre-loaded with all the RTE transmitters including their transposer sites also. I have never seen this in any box having been in the business for the last 38 years. Select your local transmitter and away you go. Download crossEpg and setup it to update epg guide every night for what ever time suits you using OpenTV providers . It NEVER fails. Download any skin of your choice. I like the Vix blue HD as its almost identical to the one that's used on the Sky HD box so people changing from Sky to FTA will love it.

Any enigma2 box will have similar capabilities. For many people it comes down to best value. €277 from Satworld, with a 1TB drive fitted, is a bit steep. I would suggest the newer Zgemma H7S, at €190 from World of Satellite, is a far better buy. They are UK based, so no problems with returns.

You could use some of the money saved to fit a modern Unicable LNB. This requires only one satellite cable to your box and avoids the need for a cable farm. If using an installer to fit your system check with them the combination of Unicable LNB and dish they use.

I haven't seen any loading effect with picons, when stored to an internal HDD. However, they are a pain to keep updated and are purely eye candy. I no longer use them.

There have been problems with CrossEPG with some builds of OpenATV. However, I agree that it is the best option, at the moment. I also use EPGRefresh to ensure that the terrestrial channels are refreshed, as I am sometimes away for long periods. I use Freesat for the radio EPG, which I use a lot.

I consider ABM to be an essential plugin/add-on for keeping channels up to date, automatically. It works seamlessly with satellite and terrestrial channels. A favorites list can still be used, giving the best of all worlds.

Usb wont spin up like a hdd does.

I have purchased some Zgemma H7's from World of Sat in the UK also as they were my source for the Tiviar before they ran out of stocks. I could not see any difference between the Tiviar and Zgemma with Vix installed. The remote on the Tiviar just feels better but that's just me personally. One customer that I fitted 3 X H7's for has commented that he occasionally has to power cycle the H7's when it acts up. I haven't yet had any complaints from customers with the Tiviar units. That said both boxes are great compared to the VU+ duo I had a few years back. I replaced a smd chip on one occasion and some cap's on the main board also. It seemed to work great after it was first flashed and get progressively sluggish after a few month's. I think it cost 480 euro at the time and had two sat tuners.

greasepalm wrote: »

Yes had the duo but red light of death it finally ended it

My red light was a smd regulator chip. I managed to repair it but 6 months later having carried out another repair I lost all faith in the box. If I wasn't a bench technician I would have been really pissed.

hs5424 wrote: »

My red light was a smd regulator chip. I managed to repair it but 6 months later having carried out another repair I lost all faith in the box. If I wasn't a bench technician I would have been really pissed.

Yeah, working with SMT is tricky. (I did a small amount of work with them, many years ago, in a production environment.) What kind of rework station do you use?

Gerry Wicklow wrote: »

These days SSDs are so cheap I see no reason to use a HDD or USB unless you had a spare knocking about already. IMO

It depends on how you are configuring your stb. If you don't want "Instant Rewind", I agree with you. If you do want instant rewind there is is a continuous write/read cycle in operation, while the box is active. This will reduce the lifespan of SSD's which are still not optimal for this Use Case. In this scenario a proper video-optimised hard drive is a better option.

However, the durability of SSD's, particularly the more expensive ones, is increasing. This will likely make SSD's more suitable for all Use Cases.

If your on Maghera you need to see ch's 46 & 48.
Manually scan both these and see what you get.

I use 120Gb SSDs which cost less than €25 delivered. IMO 120Gb (30 hours HD) is more than enough for a sat box, anything more than that will probably never be watched.:) I have a NAS for long term storage. Being silent an SSD also suits a bedroom box.
At the end of the day each user will have their own wants/needs. For me SSDs are the way to go YMMV

MayoForSam wrote: »

Evening all, my Tiviar Alpha Plus has been chugging along nicely for the past 2 years or so running one of THHB's or Clareman's Enigma2 images (can't remember which one exactly) without any major issues (except for Channel 4 EPG data not being shown).

The other evening however, it developed a problem - we had a brief power cut and the box lost power - when it re-booted, all the Saorview channels had disappeared (the UK sat channels are working fine off the other 2 tuners).

I checked the Signal Finder in the System menu and it's showing no signal at all coming through on DVB-T2, Channel is set at 21 (not sure if this is the default) and normally I would be pointed towards Maghera. The aerial is fine as I am running a pass-through to a TV out in the kitchen from the Tiviar and Saorview is working fine there.

Do I need to change the channel or should the signal bar be showing something?

I doubt that you're using one of my images as they should populate the CH4 EPG. If you are just do an update within ABM, rather than a manual tune.

There is a small chance that the power cut caused a power surge that cooked your terrestrial tuner. If you are unlucky all is not lost - you can buy a usb one that works with this box for a few euro. Another possibility is that you have a short between the core cable and braid in the coax cable. If you have a multimeter you can check with that, otherwise carefully check for a "whisker".

Good luck ��

@MayoForSam: This dongle on Amazon Uk is only £9.75, and is fine for Saorview.

If you look on the thread on leaving Sky there's a link to my images in the first post. Hope this helps ��

hs5424 wrote: »

To be sure you need to confirm with a signal meter what level you have on the coax. If you have over 45dbuV plus then the tuner should see it. If signal is there then something happened to the tuner when the power cut. Do you have a masthead or distribution amplifier on your system. If so check this out before you start messing with the box.

He knows the signal is there, he is using pass through to the kitchen.

In any case most users on this forum would not have access to specialised signal meters. If he wasn't using pass through I would have suggested that he bypass the box by plugging the lead directly into the tv.

PM sent

Sometimes they dont see the usb and it just boots up,try another and is there any button needed to press to start the flash process.

No other usb devices plugged in.

greasepalm wrote: »

Sometimes they dont see the usb and it just boots up,try another and is there any button needed to press to start the flash process.

No other usb devices plugged in.

It should prompt me to press the Power button. I've noticed there are only 3 files in the 'tiviara' folder on the USB stick - imageversion, kernel.bin and rootfs.bin.

However, when I checked another image, I noticed a 4th file called 'noforce'.

Do I need to also copy 'noforce' into the folder on the USB stick?