No 4x fast forward = deal breaker

I have had the Hopper3 for nearly a month, and yesterday I called Dish and told them to take it back and give me the older Hopper instead. They will be here Thursday afternoon to do the switch.


I have been aggravated beyond belief using the 15x fast forward, and refuse to have that ruin my enjoyment of watching programs.


If anyone has information that Dish IS working on putting 4x on the H3, please let me know that. I haven’t found any indication that they are working, or planning on working, on this issue though.


The 4x issue was my sole reason for requesting the switch, but I surely won’t miss all the little bugs and poorly conceived “features”. They surely could have used more time with testing before marketing; or perhaps that is what they ARE doing with us.


One thing about Dish: they are not at all responsive to customers. You can not talk to anyone that can speak with authority on these types of concerns, If they see enough people refusing to accept it with no 4x, then maybe they will see the light.
jr

Kind of hard to understand why 4x is so important. How much more effective is it than 30 sec skip? I know people have different use cases. I'm really just curious. Is it that people really want to see what they are fast forwarding past. I pretty much only use 30 sec skip to get through the commercial breaks. This may actually be a question for a completely different kind of forum.
 
For American football, the FF buttons are huge time-savers in cases where you DVR a game. You can usually watch the 'event' that takes, what 2-1/2 hours, to broadcast, in less then 30 minutes ! There's 3x more standing around, timeouts, commercials, etc, etc than "football".

I think we may have a WINNER here! Removing 4X makes it harder to watch "just" the game.
 
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Hall: It is mentioned a lot in your posts that the older Hopper will eventually get the "newer" software, and then the 4x feature will disappear on them also.
How do you know this?
 
I use 4x to "fine-tune" the skip buttons. Everyone knows the skip 30 back 10 are not very reliable in positioning. For instance, skip back will sometimes go back 2 (or more) minutes.
 
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Hall: It is mentioned a lot in your posts that the older Hopper will eventually get the "newer" software, and then the 4x feature will disappear on them also.
How do you know this?

Not Hall obviously, but the new UI has been out for some time now on the Hopper 3 and it has been available for the Hopper 2 via forced download for those that have 4K Joeys...so from that, we essentially already know that the 4X was removed from the new UI as well as how it acts on the original Hoppers via the ones that already have it.
 
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Looks like the new UI will be here sooner than later.

upload_2016-8-31_15-13-53.png
 
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"all new Hopper and Hopper with Sling customers"

Does that mean existing H or H2 customers will remain with the old UI, unless they specifically ask for it?
 
"all new Hopper and Hopper with Sling customers"

Does that mean existing H or H2 customers will remain with the old UI, unless they specifically ask for it?
My interpretation of this, based on how they worded it, is customers can update to the new interface on Sept 1 (and later) if they choose to. At some point in the (very near) future, Dish will push it to those who didn't take it. After some date, they simply won't have a choice.

Dish isn't going to maintain (2) software bases for the same hardware nor want to train their (new) support people, (new) installers, etc on two different software versions.
 
Yeah. Damn Tivo and their copyright claims.

I use 4x rewind mostly to find a particular scene or play I just missed. The other speeds are too fast to do a visual search.
Charlie payed a boatload of money to "license" TiVo technology (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em)

Far as I can tell, though, he hasn't implemented any of their "proprietary" patents. Just wanted them off his back.
 
Dish isn't going to maintain (2) software bases for the same hardware nor want to train their (new) support people, (new) installers, etc on two different software versions.
It was posted that the original Hopper will not be able to take the new UI because the hardware will not support it. If that is true, Dish will have to maintain separate software for the Hopper 1. There will be 2 software bases in that case (unless Dish decides to get rid of the Hopper 1).

In my opinion, if Dish has to maintain 2 software versions, they might as well let the Hopper 2 folks keep the old UI and upgrade only if they want to. However, if the Hopper 1 can be upgraded to the new UI, I agree it would be better/easier for Dish to maintain only 1 universal software for all Hoppers.
 
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It was posted that the original Hopper will not be able to take the new UI because the hardware will not support it.
I agree and that was a stickler. The last news, as of the past few days, is that the Hopper 1 is going to get the Carbon interface now though.

Even if they didn't give it the update, they could at some point simply "lock" the software code and not touch it anymore. Any existing bugs would remain and users would simply have to live with them. Improvements or enhancements would be out of the question.
 
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I am in the skip forward and back camp. The Hopper 3 FF feature is way too buggy for me. Many times I am at the end of programming or the beginning of programming. It is way too unreliable for me. My wife is much more curious than I and wants to know what she is skipping. She misses 4x because it allowed her to see better what is being skipped through. 15 x is way too fast to understand the fast forwarded programming. She doesn't want to miss all commercials . There are ones she has interest in, especially 1st time seen or for products we have interest in. With current technology we should be able to list product areas of interest and get the commercials for them. The logic should also be available to allow the SW to skip previously seen commercials. We have that choice for program recordings to do only new ones. Seems like the logic is available and could be applied to commercials.
 
Disappointed to see the NEW Hopper doesn't support 4x. I used 4x on my Hopper with Sling for fast news watching. I really don't want the UI upgrade if it removes 4x. Why would they do this? Did they have a bunch of users who demanded the removal of 4x?
 
Disappointed to see the NEW Hopper doesn't support 4x. I used 4x on my Hopper with Sling for fast news watching. I really don't want the UI upgrade if it removes 4x. Why would they do this? Did they have a bunch of users who demanded the removal of 4x?
I doubt that anyone ever asked Dish to remove 4x fast forward. Dish probably thought that they were simplifying the interface. One thing that I learned from years of writing software interfaces for medical devices is that customers do not like it when you remove something that they are used to. It is much better to add new features while leaving the old features in place.

I think it was a stupid decision to remove 4x. Leaving 4x in the mix does not require additional programming, and does not simplify the interface enough to justify its removal. I have no idea why Dish thought that this was an improvement to their interface.
 
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