Here is a list of bugs and errors I have found with the NorthQ 7000/7100 DVD Player/Harddrive Recorder.
These are with the firmware v1.06 released on the 1 October 2003. I cannot guarantee that these are problems that everyone have, but at least I
have them on my NorthQ 7100. Hopefully they will be fixed with new releases of
the firmware for the player.
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The most serious bug I have found has to do
with manual recording. This is when you watch TV and decides to start
recording on the spot. You then press "REC" on the remote control, and the
NorthQ begins to record what you are watching.
The problem is that when you press "STOP" to end the recording, the NorthQ
sometimes seem to have problem to save the correct recording.
Once I made a six minutes long manual recording. When I pressed "STOP", I got a
recording that was 01h 35m 52s. The content of the saved recording was
something that I had watched live several hours earlier!
So it seems that the NorthQ in this case lost track of which recording to
keep, and decided to keep what was in the timeslip buffer.
A VERY serious bug in my opinion! This
makes the manual recording function useless as you cannot trust it. |
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Sometimes when I watch a manual recording (I
have not seen this yet in a timer-recording), the playing of the recorded
material stops before it comes to the end of the recording.
I had made a manual recording that was 12 minutes long. When I started to
watch it, the NorthQ stopped playing it after just 2 minutes and 7 seconds!
When I looked at the "Properties" for the recording, it said that it was 12
minutes long.
Also a VERY serious bug in my opinion! |
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I had some problems when I had recorded a
number of TV programs, deleted some and recorded some more. Then I could not
watch live TV on the NorthQ at all! When I tried, it just gave me short
glimpses of what was on the TV, and a lot of MPEG2 artifacts. It looked like
the unit could not keep up with both recording onto hard-disk and playing of
it at the same time. It may have been a fragmentation problem, but if the
NorthQ starts to have problems with fragmentation this fast, I won't be able
to use it! I don't know if it would have worked better with a 7200 RPM
hard-disk than the 5400 RPM I was using. I'll get back with more information
about this problem when I have tested some more. |
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The length of a recording in "Properties"
shows a too short time. If you record 6 minutes it will tell you that it is
only 5 minutes long! If you record 30 minutes, it tells you 25 minutes. So
you always have to add 20% to the time displayed to get the correct length
of the timer-recording. |
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You can mark a channel to be "invisible" (it
is done in the "Channel Setup" menu). This means that you don't want it to
appear when using the "Up/Down" buttons on the remote control to change TV
channels. However, when the player have been in standby mode, all these
"invisible" marks are gone! |
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If you insert an NTFS formatted disk, the
NorthQ hangs! |
Before updating my NorthQ 7100 with the latest firmware (released 1 October
2003) AND reformat my hard-disk, I had a lot of problems with the
timer-recordings on the NorthQ. I had problems with practically all my
timer-recordings, they got recorded on the wrong time and sometimes from the
wrong channels. Some timer-recordings just disappeared too! But since the
update/format, the timer-recordings seems to work a lot better!
Other strange problems I have found (click the link to read more about the
problem):
At the moment, these are all problems I have found. I'll update this page if
I find anything more.