corkbuoy
Newbie
Hi
I would like to share my experience with using a Skybox F5S, which turned out to be a clone box which caused me alot of grief, but I overcame the issues and dont have much bad to say about the box now that I am that bit wiser. For the money it is good value as long as you watch the issues I mention below.
From my reading of various different posts on this, and other forums, I believe many others have experienced the same issues that I experienced and so I wanted to consolidate as much of that info into this post in the hope that it will save many others the time I spent trawling the forums for answers to several questions and many hours of trial and error on my own.
So, I purchased a Skybox F5S in Jan 2014. I wasnt aware at the time that there was such a thing as a clone box and had no reason to believe it was anything other than genuine and there is no real way to tell until you power it up as they look identical (hence "clone"!). I plugged it in and it worked fine, I did a scan and it picked up all the channels. The box came with various plugins pre-installed, which was brilliant (CCCam, MGCam, etc). All good so far.
Once I had it running I decided I wanted to edit the channel lists and came across various posts from people who provided their lists in a TP_PROG.dbs file which can then be uploaded to your box and saves you having to edit 750 channels with the remote, which is no easy task!
I downloaded the TP_PROG.dbs list, and uploaded it to my box via USB... and from here it all went horribly wrong! :)
The list uploaded fine and it appeared to work for a few minutes and then the box rebooted for no reason and it failed to come back up. All I had was a small red light on the front of the box and nothing else... box was "bricked".
So, a trawl of the forums told me I had to use an RS232 null modem cable and flash the firmware. I did that using firmware from 3 different sites and tried several versions from those sites and they all resulted in the same problem....it was now going through the boot sequence (which was progress) but it was still not working. It would show L090, L093, L095, L097 on the display and then it would reboot again. It never reached L100. And it rebooted continuously in this way.
It was at this point I saw posts about clone boxes and different firmware. It was obvious at this point that my box was a clone and would not work with the official Skybox firmware.
I found a few sites that provide Skybox firmware. Here is the list I have so far and I'm sure there are others:
The lesson here is that before you load a TP_PROG.dbs or firmware to your skybox you need to be 100% sure that it is compatible with your skybox and you need to have a backup of your firmware so that you can recover it, if it all goes wrong.
I dont know how you can determine which website is applicable to your clone box. For me it was trial and error. There is a way to tell if you have a genuine Skybox and that is detailed on the Skybox.cc website but it requires you to have the box working to do it.
Once you have your Skybox up and running the first thing to do is take a backup. You can do that via USB but I found the LAN tool was easier. That tool is available in many places but I used the official Skybox.cc one and it works fine for me, even on my clone box. It is here.
You enter the IP address of the box and then login and you can easily download and upload the TP_PROG.dbs file without fiddling around with USB sticks between computers and the box.
Now that I had my box back in action I still had the issue of the channel list. I really did not want to do that via the box remote. So, I saw some posts about channel editors. There was one called PVR800 something or other and another one called alieditor (which looked the same)...they didnt work for me and just bricked the box again when I uploaded the resultant TP_PROG.dbs file. I believe that channel editor is only for genuine skyboxes and is the reason why I bricked my box in the first place.
I found another editor, which was actually easier to use and that was called Setedit and is available here:
I downloaded my TP_PROG.dbs from my box using the LAN tool described above. Changed the extension of the file from dbs to abs and then open it using Setedit. From there you can add/delete/move channels as you see fit and you can also create your favourites.
Save the file, change the extension back to dbs and use the LAN tool to upload to the box again. It auto reboots the box and voila everything was exactly as I had configured in Setedit. Happy days.
NOTE: The favourites worked except for the naming of the favourites. Within Setedit I created favourites for "Kids", "Movies" etc but when I uploaded it they just had their default names of "Favourite Group 1". I dont know if this is a limitation of the Setedit tool or the Skybox but it didnt concern me that much as long as the right channels were in each group.
The following is also a useful site for checking the latest sat frequencies:
Firmware flash procedure
It is well documented how to do this but for the sake of completeness I will re-iterate it here and add some gotchas.
Each of the above sites have an RS232 upgrade tool listed in their download sections. I think they are all the same and the procedure is the same for genuine and clone boxes and I believe is the same for F3 and F5/F5S boxes.
NOTE: Ensure you have a backup of your firmware before attempting this and also note that a firmware upgrade will wipe your channel list so you should also backup your TP_PROG.dbs file so that you can upload that again after the firmware upgrade.
1. Download the upgrade tool and the firmware you need to your PC from the appropriate website above.
2. Plug the box out (important)
3. Connect up your PC to the Skybox using a null modem (aka crossover) serial cable. A normal serial cable wont do.
4. Run EromUpgrade.exe
5. Select the firmware .abs file that you downloaded, NOT the one in the upgrade tool directory and tick the "Include bootloader" checkbox.
6. Select "Next". It should now show something like "Please reset box". If it shows a message like "Failed to open serial port" it means you have a problem with your PC and not with the box (since the box is off!). Ensure that no other devices (Printers, faxes etc) are configured to use the PC serial port in the Windows control panel. They can hold the port open which stops the upgrade tool from "grabbing" the serial port.
7) Now plug in the box. The PC and box should do a serial handshake and you should see the word "Done" appear which shows that the upgrade tool and the box are now communicating.
8) The firmware file will now be loaded into memory and you should see a status bar appearing showing progress. Wait for it to complete
9) Once loaded the Next button will be enabled and it will tell you that it is time to burn it to flash memory. Click Next and wait for that to finish. Once finished your box should auto boot with the new firmware active.
Happy viewing and hope this will help someone!
I would like to share my experience with using a Skybox F5S, which turned out to be a clone box which caused me alot of grief, but I overcame the issues and dont have much bad to say about the box now that I am that bit wiser. For the money it is good value as long as you watch the issues I mention below.
From my reading of various different posts on this, and other forums, I believe many others have experienced the same issues that I experienced and so I wanted to consolidate as much of that info into this post in the hope that it will save many others the time I spent trawling the forums for answers to several questions and many hours of trial and error on my own.
So, I purchased a Skybox F5S in Jan 2014. I wasnt aware at the time that there was such a thing as a clone box and had no reason to believe it was anything other than genuine and there is no real way to tell until you power it up as they look identical (hence "clone"!). I plugged it in and it worked fine, I did a scan and it picked up all the channels. The box came with various plugins pre-installed, which was brilliant (CCCam, MGCam, etc). All good so far.
Once I had it running I decided I wanted to edit the channel lists and came across various posts from people who provided their lists in a TP_PROG.dbs file which can then be uploaded to your box and saves you having to edit 750 channels with the remote, which is no easy task!
I downloaded the TP_PROG.dbs list, and uploaded it to my box via USB... and from here it all went horribly wrong! :)
The list uploaded fine and it appeared to work for a few minutes and then the box rebooted for no reason and it failed to come back up. All I had was a small red light on the front of the box and nothing else... box was "bricked".
So, a trawl of the forums told me I had to use an RS232 null modem cable and flash the firmware. I did that using firmware from 3 different sites and tried several versions from those sites and they all resulted in the same problem....it was now going through the boot sequence (which was progress) but it was still not working. It would show L090, L093, L095, L097 on the display and then it would reboot again. It never reached L100. And it rebooted continuously in this way.
It was at this point I saw posts about clone boxes and different firmware. It was obvious at this point that my box was a clone and would not work with the official Skybox firmware.
I found a few sites that provide Skybox firmware. Here is the list I have so far and I'm sure there are others:
skybox.cc (Genuine skybox site, I believe.)
yojiatech.com
bi-union.com
hddvbsw.com (this is the one that worked for me,: SKYBOX_F5S_20130801.zip)
yojiatech.com
bi-union.com
hddvbsw.com (this is the one that worked for me,: SKYBOX_F5S_20130801.zip)
The lesson here is that before you load a TP_PROG.dbs or firmware to your skybox you need to be 100% sure that it is compatible with your skybox and you need to have a backup of your firmware so that you can recover it, if it all goes wrong.
I dont know how you can determine which website is applicable to your clone box. For me it was trial and error. There is a way to tell if you have a genuine Skybox and that is detailed on the Skybox.cc website but it requires you to have the box working to do it.
skybox.cc/newsinfo.asp?id=49
Once you have your Skybox up and running the first thing to do is take a backup. You can do that via USB but I found the LAN tool was easier. That tool is available in many places but I used the official Skybox.cc one and it works fine for me, even on my clone box. It is here.
skybox.cc/down.asp?id=13
You enter the IP address of the box and then login and you can easily download and upload the TP_PROG.dbs file without fiddling around with USB sticks between computers and the box.
Now that I had my box back in action I still had the issue of the channel list. I really did not want to do that via the box remote. So, I saw some posts about channel editors. There was one called PVR800 something or other and another one called alieditor (which looked the same)...they didnt work for me and just bricked the box again when I uploaded the resultant TP_PROG.dbs file. I believe that channel editor is only for genuine skyboxes and is the reason why I bricked my box in the first place.
I found another editor, which was actually easier to use and that was called Setedit and is available here:
setedit.de/startup_d.html
I downloaded my TP_PROG.dbs from my box using the LAN tool described above. Changed the extension of the file from dbs to abs and then open it using Setedit. From there you can add/delete/move channels as you see fit and you can also create your favourites.
Save the file, change the extension back to dbs and use the LAN tool to upload to the box again. It auto reboots the box and voila everything was exactly as I had configured in Setedit. Happy days.
NOTE: The favourites worked except for the naming of the favourites. Within Setedit I created favourites for "Kids", "Movies" etc but when I uploaded it they just had their default names of "Favourite Group 1". I dont know if this is a limitation of the Setedit tool or the Skybox but it didnt concern me that much as long as the right channels were in each group.
The following is also a useful site for checking the latest sat frequencies:
en.kingofsat.net/pos-28.2E.php
Firmware flash procedure
It is well documented how to do this but for the sake of completeness I will re-iterate it here and add some gotchas.
Each of the above sites have an RS232 upgrade tool listed in their download sections. I think they are all the same and the procedure is the same for genuine and clone boxes and I believe is the same for F3 and F5/F5S boxes.
NOTE: Ensure you have a backup of your firmware before attempting this and also note that a firmware upgrade will wipe your channel list so you should also backup your TP_PROG.dbs file so that you can upload that again after the firmware upgrade.
1. Download the upgrade tool and the firmware you need to your PC from the appropriate website above.
2. Plug the box out (important)
3. Connect up your PC to the Skybox using a null modem (aka crossover) serial cable. A normal serial cable wont do.
4. Run EromUpgrade.exe
5. Select the firmware .abs file that you downloaded, NOT the one in the upgrade tool directory and tick the "Include bootloader" checkbox.
6. Select "Next". It should now show something like "Please reset box". If it shows a message like "Failed to open serial port" it means you have a problem with your PC and not with the box (since the box is off!). Ensure that no other devices (Printers, faxes etc) are configured to use the PC serial port in the Windows control panel. They can hold the port open which stops the upgrade tool from "grabbing" the serial port.
7) Now plug in the box. The PC and box should do a serial handshake and you should see the word "Done" appear which shows that the upgrade tool and the box are now communicating.
8) The firmware file will now be loaded into memory and you should see a status bar appearing showing progress. Wait for it to complete
9) Once loaded the Next button will be enabled and it will tell you that it is time to burn it to flash memory. Click Next and wait for that to finish. Once finished your box should auto boot with the new firmware active.
Happy viewing and hope this will help someone!