If you’re here, then maybe you’re curious of the hardships I’ve been having with the Hopper 3. As I said in my Games blog, the Hopper 3 is very new. It came out in January 2016. Because of this, there are several things that need to be fixed with a patch.
The first thing.. well, actually this issue somehow fixed itself. But the Hopper 3 has apps, such as a Weather Channel app. When I went to it, the sound gets muted. I close out the app, and the sound is muted on all channels. So I turn off the Hopper and turn it back on. This restores the sound… yet I lose the picture.
So I have to preform diagnostics. And since I have the main receiver (the rest of the house has a Joey system), I can take out everyone’s signal to preform this. Of course, this is bad. This is why (obviously) I’ll only use it if there’s a real problem.
But by doing this, this restores the picture. Thankfully, the issue has fixed itself. So now I don’t have to do all of that shit.
The second issue (still waiting for a fix), the Pandora app thankfully links to my existing Pandora One account. So I can listen to my music on my TV, without using the app on my computer. And in the words of direwolf20… “Nice!”
The issue is the music channels. We have SirusXM, and DISH’s own music channels. The Pandora app, if you leave it alone for about a half an hour, will activate it’s ‘screen saver’ mode. It dims the screen, and shows the CD of the song being played in random locations of your TV. This is needed to protect the screen from being burned out. When we were with DirecTV, and you viewed their music channels, the screen would darken and you would see a box drifting around your TV, bumping into the sides that contains info of that song (Title, CD, etc…).
The music channels, do not have any of these features. The screen dims, but not anywhere as much as the Pandora app. Plus, the CD of the song isn’t bouncing around.
I called DISH about this problem, and all they did was leave it as customer feedback (and as a suggestion). So it’s unknown when (or if) we’ll see a patch for this. What really annoys me is I called before, and the guy told me the Hopper 3 does have an option. Yet for some reason I cannot access the diagnostic settings; it goes right back to the DISH Settings menu. And now I’m being told there is no screensaver for the Hopper 3.
And the final issue. When I load up my Hopper 3, it goes to the Home menu instead of what I’m currently watching. With DirecTV, I was able to turn on my receiver and switch to a channel before my TV shows the screen. Now I have to wait for it and then hit the Back button to be able to do it, as I cannot change channels on the Home screen.
There has to be a feature to make it work the way I want it. If not, I guess it’s something else they’ll leave as a feature request. 😛
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There is one more thing. It’s not an issue, but a slight annoyance. The Netflix app, I cannot access it ’till February 11th, yet the Joey system can. The reason is, once again, the newness of the Hopper 3. But the cool thing, is we get a year of Netflix for free (a $119.99 value).