Proving the Obviously Untrue

Success at last. I've written before about my problems getting vidzone working, and tonight while taking a breather from some work I tried the Oracle of Google again, and I found a solution. As I suspected, it wasn't a network problem at all.

Kudos to lyonix, who suggested that deleting a corrupt cache for Vidzone from the game data utility often works. It worked perfectly for me, (note even removing and reinstalling the software doesn't affect that).

Posted by Colin Turner

The PS3 has an free network application called Vidzone. I downloaded it when it originally came out some time ago, but it never actually worked. It would load, show playlists, adverts, and the seize up the whole console when I tried to actually play videos. It's a shame, because it looked like a nice app for putting on some music.

Since then the PS3 itself has had a big firmware upgrade to 3.0.1 and Vidzone was upgraded to 1.0.4. Worth trying again I figured. Well, initially I couldn't get the application to crash the console anymore (I did later!), but certainly it wouldn't play videos. It did show adverts, even video adverts, playlists, everything but actually play videos. Which is weird to say the least. So to be honest, it looks like the problem is somewhere at the PS3/Vidzone end, since absolutely all other network functionality works on the PS3.

But, as a precaution I thought it was worth checking out that old bugbear, the router firmware, and there are some hints that's an issue. I'm a Virgin Media customer at the moment, for complex reasons I don't really have a choice at the moment, and they supplied a cable modem and router when they connected me (rather late as it happened). When I looked at the router firmware, it's shockingly old. So I clicked on the link for the knowledge base and downloaded the latest firmware. It failed to upload, no explanation of why. I tried every intermediate release, which took quite a while to do. They all failed.

So now I'm suspicious and confirm that, yes... Virgin are specifically blocking updates, even though many, many bugs have been fixed in the new releases. I find this pretty puzzling.

I phoned their tech support to try and confirm this in person. I suggested that I would have to buy my own router if I wanted to get round these problems, and they informed me I wouldn't be supported. I put it to them that I seem to have a choice between being supported with no actual support and no means to help myself, or getting new hardware, being officially unsupported but able to help myself. He put me on hold to check it out, a minute later the line went dead.

So if you're out there googling for "vidzone doesn't work", this might be part of the reason, but who knows? It seems it could be fixed at the PS3 end in any case. But it's a cautionary tale that the stock VM hardware might come with lots of problems you can't fix.

Posted by Colin Turner

I have a nabaztag, a wifi rabbit, but it hasn't been functional for some time now. I've lacked the time to explore why, but over the last couple of weeks I've spent about 10 hours all in all testing various things. The problem seems to be with my Netgear DG834G v3 (UK) router, or at least the interactions between them.

Essentially, the rabbit is configured to connect to the network and then has four orange lights, that go progressively green as it goes through the connection phases. When the wifi is unencrypted all the lights go green, but for any other encryption setup, not a single light turns green, suggesting that the rabbit cannot see the router.

I found that some people are having similar problems with the PS3 and have reported that old firmware resolves the issue six months ago. Unfortunately the firmware to fix it is so old it's off the main websites, but you can find it on the development website for netgear.

That might be intimidating since this site is intended for people trying to play with the code (which I've done myself once or twice), but no coding is required here, you just need to download 4.01.20 firmware (for the UK) and find a tool that can bunzip and tar extract the archive. Of course, in GNU/Linux, this is a snap .

I'm writing this up in case some other pour soul is using Google to look for the same issue, as I did some days ago. It's only when I started to focus on WPA problems with the router that I found these references. I reported some bugs with NTP handling in the DG834GT (emails have the wrong month name in the date header in the second half of the year), and Netgear has never fixed for them yet . I may have to do it myself.

Posted by Colin Turner