The last few weeks my Kiss DP-558 video recorder has told me that I should upgrade to the new firmware 1.1.6 (1.1.5 was apparently never released).
Since my previous experiences with Kiss has been so-so, I’ve been reluctant to do this upgrade. But after spending about an hour in the Hi-Jack forum and reviewing the worst bugs (makes you wonder what kind of release testing Kiss do on their firmwares…) I decided to go for it. I’ve been running it for a few days now and so far all seems well.
Most important Good and Bad with this new firmware:
The best thing I’ve found is that the recorder now updates the EPG Web interface (EPG = Electronic Program Guide) with scheduled recordings. This means you can not only schedule new recordings from the web or your cell phone but you can also view a listing of all future recordings. Another thing I found out by accident (not sure if this is new in this firmware or if it was always there) is that if you press the Store button on the remote, the player will immediately go out and do an EPG check (no recording data is pushed to the player, it normally goes out and pulls this every 15 minutes).
Bad thing is that fast forward and rewind is broken. It used to be that you pressed fast forward once and you fast forwarded at moderate speed, press twice it got a little faster etc. up to four different speeds. This worked well. Now however fast forward and rewind is always superfast – you press once and *swish* you’re half a minute or more ahead or back in the film you’re watching. So, no more “What did that guy say? I’ll rewind and listen again”. I hope this is not a feature but a bug so it will be fixed in a future firmware release…
According to the forum there are worse bugs but I have not encountered them in my Recorder-TV-Home System configuration.
By the way, it was a long time since I had any serious problems with recordings and I’ve figured out most of my Kiss recorders peculiarities so I’m actually liking this machine more and more each day! But I’m still not ready to revise my previous “warning” post 😉
Have you tried the “new” 1.1.7 firmware? Any comments to this upgrade?