- Although deleting a channel in the Favourites system also deletes that channel from your main channel list, you sadly can't renumber/move any channel in the main list at all. All those lovely HD channels are on high double-digit channels i.e. 50 or higher with the second digit not matching the "expected" channel number either. BBC One HD has now launched, but on channel 50! Surely most Smartbox owners would want it as channel 1? If you could renumber/move/delete a main channel, then surely the Favourites system could be completely scrapped? This has been logged as a Fetch TV support ticket (and summarily closed, sadly).
- The single white LED on Smartbox front should behave differently. It should be: off (no power, maybe low power mode too), steady+dim (standby mode), throbbing from dim to bright (recording) and steady+bright (on mode, not recording). At the moment, the throbbing is for standby and there is no indicator at all for recording! I'm assuming the white colour can't be changed of course (if it can, then red for recording, green for on, yellow for standby and nothing for no power).
- No way to disable timeshifting permanently. Although the latest firmware has a "hidden" option to temporarily disable timeshifting (Menu -> Diagnostics Digital Recorder -> Stop [disable] or Play [enable] buttons), this is cancelled if a recording takes place or a timeshift key (e.g. pause) is pressed. I want a permanent disabling i.e. allow timeshifting temporarily but revert to disabled once that recording/pause live TV event is over.
- Allow easier extraction of recordings from the timeshift buffer. Although you can rewind live TV, press record and then choose Manual/Automatic (former requires you to FF to the end point and press record again, whereas the latter will do that for you to the end of the current programme), it's quite fiddly, especially if there's several programmes you want to do this with. Why not provide a page with all the recordings currently in the timeshift buffer and let you pick which ones to move to My Recordings?
- Remote Recordings Fetch TV web interface and the box's own recording schedule are not linked together. When the box checks for a Remote Recordings request, it should also upload its current recording schedule, which should populate the Fetch TV web interface. That interface should then act as if it was the box's EPG with all the same behaviour (red blob for scheduled recordings, clash alerts, ability to cancel a scheduled recording and so on).
- Auto-padding needs to be implemented, preferably with separate start and end padding intervals in steps of one minute. "Accurate Recording" isn't always (I'm seeing lost minutes at the end of shows quite often) and auto-padding is needed to compensate for this. This has been logged as a support ticket and you don't need to be a mind reader to work out that it was soon closed, although to their credit, Fetch TV have said they're looking at implementing auto-padding in a future firmware release.
- Need 2 schedules for when the box can go into standby. Each schedule should present the 7 days of the week as individually selectable and then a start of standby and (optional!) end of standby - optional because you may want to keep it in standby until manually taken out of it with the remote's red power button - time for the selected days. 2 are needed because you will want different hours for the early Sat and early Sun standby times. This scheme is much better than the "auto standby after a certain interval [of inactivity?]" setting currently used. For example, a typical user might set schedule 1 to be Mon-Fri start: 1.00am, end: 7.00am and schedule 2 to be Sat-Sun start: 2.00am, end: 8.00am (because you go to bed and get up later on those 2 days normally).
- The 8320HD shows all its recordings in a basic flat list with only date/name/expiry as sorting options. This seems ripe for some sort of folder system to group programmes on size (sub-folder = size range in 250MB chunks or something?), channel (sub-folder=programme name), programme name (no sub-folder needed), EPG category (which is displayed in the EPG when you highlight a programme, sub-folder=programme name), year (sub-folder=month), year+month (sub-folder=programme name) and so on. Inside a leaf folder, I think you should be able to sort on file size (which never gets displayed anywhere at the moment!), ascending name, ascending date or descending date. Obviously the system should remember the last top-level folder setting you used in the Recordings List (along with its sort order chosen), so you don't keep having to cursor to it or flip the sort order to your preferred method. Oh, and keep the current flat view as an option too (but add size sorting to it and - like all modes - display the filesize somewhere!) Thanks to Andrew for posting this feature wish on the blog
- If a new channel is added to the Freeview stable, the 8320HD should be looking for this and offer to add it (or do if a full re-tune if necessary) to the box's channel list and EPG. The recent BBC One HD launch was farcical for the 8320HD - it just kept showing the old BBC HD on channel 50 and never realised that it had been "replaced" by the new BBC One HD channel. With my TV Times magazine not even mentioning BBC One HD's launch, some people could be stuck for weeks or months without the new channel!
- The arrow keys should have their skip interval programmable (left/right = one value, up/down = another separate value) between 30 seconds and 1 hour. Thanks to clemenzina on AVForums.com for this suggestion
- The Info banner's progress bar shouldn't show the original start and end broadcast times (useless if you're playing it later on!), but the elapsed time (replacing the broadcast start time) and the total length (where the broadcast end time is now) in hours:minutes:seconds.
- The whole media centre experience needs improvements to these issues: no CD-style controls for audio playback, no elapsed time or progress bar during audio playback, networked audio/video files take a long time (10 seconds or more) to start playing when selected, Windows Media message appears if no DLNA server is on the network (very Windows-biased when Mac OS X and Linux can also provide DLNA services) and it can't even display plain text (.txt) files either!
- There's a free iPhone app for Remote Recording, but surely there should be an equivalent app for Android phones too?
Feature Wishlist
Here's my current feature wishlist - functionality that's either missing or implemented "wrongly" (IMHO of course). These will eventually all be raised as tickets in Fetch TV's ticketing system of course.
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