Beta firmwares available (0.5.2.1) - Beta testers needed!

[mad_ady]

So, for now, having WDTVEXT=OFF set explicitly in your config should result in a stable firmware boot.
No need to stress-test the boot procedure because I'm already doing it. What I need from my beta testers (and thank you greatly for your help by the way!), is to test the regular features they use. I plan on releasing a newer beta soon with a new rtorrent and some fixes so you might want to wait for that instead.

Regarding my stability tests, I did a new one over the night. I restored my regular config (the one I used when merging and testing features) and I set WDTVEXT=ON and I rebooted and checked the box in a loop. Out of 186 reboots I had 186 times the OSD started correctly and 0 failures. So what the fuck?!?! It works correctly each time with my config, and only starts 8-15% of the time on the default config.

Now I need to devise a plan to see how to isolate the difference in my config (compared to the default config). The problem is I have about 450 settings in my config (a lot of UMSP stuff, also some older settings), so it would take about two days of continuous test to try each setting. And it wouldn't be conclusive, as we've seen in previous tests (there's a chance the box starts with wrong config).

I'll need to put my best people on it pronto, but I could use a different config where WDTVEXT is somewhat stable (@DjArty can you PM me your config as well?) to see what we have in common and eliminate the differences...

[mad_ady]

[DJArty]

Full config may have some private information (login/pass on some services) , so may be just I try newest version f/w you have and see no freese finally

[mad_ady]

Feel free to remove any private information from your config
As for "no freeze", sorry, I'm not a magician. It will eventually crash, but my hope is you will have at least a couple of hours of usage before it crashes. Also, I added a "Restart OSD" option in the webend to restart just the OSD to sweeten the problem.

[mad_ady]

[DJArty]

"B" for Plus?

P.S. ohh yes see

[mad_ady]

[kroetkroet]

Just a crazy idea: what if you "unset" a config variable, would the next reboot not "re-initialize" that variable? Switching back to your original config (and thus rolling back to you crashing values)?

[kroetkroet]

Sow, I finalized my tests of today (unfortunately before your last update). Hereby my findings:

- booted firmware with WDTVExt="ON"
- linux came up fine
- OSD came up fine (remarkable fact: my video_output was again reset to composite, however HDMI (luckily for me) gave image
- WDTVExt menu came up, pressed "create .wdtvext-plugin on USBx" 100 times, did not do what it supposed to do
- created manually the dir on USB1
- rebooted
- was able to "download" MediaMark (extsheet was already there for an unknown reason)
- browsed through video catalog, saw movie listing and then screen blacked out
- unit still reachable through ssh & webend, tried the OSD reboot function (why does the end user need to click so many times? The last message is confusing: did it stopped or restarted? Was not clear for me, but it worked )
- browsed again, saw an interesting (new?) feature under the options menu in Video (upload to facebook?!)
- but before being able to start a movie, it crashed again.
- hard booted the device, came up again like a charm.

So tell me, is this the way it should behave
KK

[mad_ady]

Well, yes It behaves as expected...

* Not sure why it didn't create the .wdtvext-plugin folder - never tested it, but I'll try to have a look.
* MediaMark and ExtSheet should work fine (ExtSheet is already part of the firmware)
* When the OSD crashes, it either displays a black screen or the last image. Remote doesn't work, but ssh/webend should still work.
* The OSD Reboot feature in the webend calls /etc/init.d/S70dmaosd stop (to cleanly stop the OSD if possible) and then calls /etc/init.d/S70dmaosd start > /dev/null. The redirect to /dev/null is needed, because when you start dmaosd you get a lot of debugging output that is undesirable. I will add a manual echo to tell you that the OSD is starting to alleviate confusion.
* Upload to Facebook must be an official feature, I don't even have a facebook account (proud to be anti-social!)

What I can reccomend if you want to use WDTVEXT in a quasi-reliable fashion is:
* submit relevant prayers to your $deity
* when navigating the OSD, do it gently - don't move too fast through the menu entries
* once you have a video playing enjoy and try to reboot the box once you reach the end

Sorry, WDTVEXT is unstable and I can't fix that (I tried, but it seems it didn't help much). When 1.06 is ready, I'll try to plea with pibos to return or at least to give us the code.

Thanks for testing
I'm glad I have your config - now that I know WDTVEXT works for you I can start to compare stuff.