TvTonic -Caution

griffithc · **22nd April 2007, 01:02 PM**

AS an MCE plugin, Wavexpress's TvTonic brings fantastically high quality vodcasts to your lounge room screen. But BEWARE of the following:

When a channel's cache is nearly full, the very efficient TVTonic download engine will start then abort the download and then restart it repeatedly, the result being you can use up several GIGABYTES of your precious ADSL2+ monthly quota in a day. Yes, gigabytes. And nothing is downloaded.

Compounding this is that if you increase the cache for a particular channel, you'll get enormous downloads anyway because some vodcast producers insist on including all back episodes since Adam in their feed. TvTonic won't let you opt not to get old episodes. Choose the wrong channel, and you'll end up with 4-5 GB of old episodes that you weren't interested in.

I can vouch for this from first hand experience. A week or so ago I exhausted my 30GB ADSL2+ TPG quota before realizing what the problem was. Even when I was throttled back to 256kB/sec, TV Tonic was still able to do c. 4GB of downloads in a day -- unfortunately as the cache for three channels had been exhausted, these were attempted downloads that never arrived, but the download engine was beavering away in the background nonetheless.

Again, I say this is a great program, but I want to ensure others don't waste their precious monthly quotas like I did last month. Being throttled back by your ISP is like going to jail. Hopefully this problem is being fixed. Here's a link to the forum addressing it.

http://www.tvtonic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=616

Cheers, Chris

bigbob · **23rd April 2007, 12:01 AM**

I have uninstalled it for the very reason you mention, this issue has been around for a long time now. It is astounding they have not put in an option to fix it.

Must be that those poor yanks have unlimited downlads and don't have to worry about such trivial matters as a download quota.

bob

mksutton65 · **28th April 2007, 08:31 AM**

Hi, I'm Michie Sutton from Wavexpress. I'd like to assure our users that we are committed to providing you the best Media Center experience as possible. To that end, we have and will continue to carefully analyze all issues reported to us and address them as quickly as possible.

We are currently working on a release that will fix the repeated download issue reported above, and we will provide additional options allowing you to control the download behavior.

We really appreciate the feedback, and will continue to improve TVTonic with many of our users' suggestions. Please continue to provide feedback either through our forum or email to customer support.

Thank you.

griffithc · **28th April 2007, 09:29 AM**

I have also received an email from Wavepress that they are working to fix this bug.

They are demonstrating goodwill in addressing this issue.

I am making a commitment to report in this forum that this problem has been fixed -- once a new version of TvTonic is out there and the bug is gone.

Chris

mksutton65 · **18th May 2007, 06:12 AM**

We just released TVTonic 3.2.1! We strongly recommend current 3.2.0 users to upgrade to this version. This release addresses a critical issue with bandwidth usage.

Here are the highlights:

Fixed the repeated download issue. When the channel cache limit is hit, download will stop.
Added a nice feature to the system tray that will allow you to schedule downloads.
Disable download state is now persisted across reboots and TVTonic RSS service restarts.
System tray icon reflects download disabled / enabled state.
Fixed bugs related to cache management.

Please install or upgrade today!

Thanks,

Michie
TVTonic Team

griffithc · **2nd June 2007, 09:59 PM**

Michie, it's working really well. Thank you for the upgrade. Chris