Development #3...

(blip... bloop... blink)

Whoa. What was that?

After watching Shrek, I flipped over to Video 2, (Dig Coax 2) and turned the Samsung Satellite tuner on.

Flipped from channel to channel, and all was fine until...

Moments before NCIS came on there was a jumble of tv commercials. Sort of what you seen when a local station has 'filler' ads at the national level, but a local ad trumps it, so the stream changes within half a second from the advertisement that ran, then the very tail end of the 'filler' that ran underneath the local ad appears suddenly. (along with the audio stream that came with it)

Well, in this bizzare case, the audio streams must have been of widely varying format.

Combined with the new format incoming from the NCIS broadcast (DD 5.1) The 970 officially wigged out.

My guess is that it literally got so confused it outright shut down. Yes, shut down. Not protection mode or anything, just powered off. I thought I had sat on the remote and sent a power off signal or something. (until I looked down and saw the remote on the coffee table by my feet)

After experiencing this, I made the decision not to wait any longer, and grabbed the serial cable I had bought, intent on flashing the unit right then and there, instead of after the super bowl had passed. (I didn't want to chance bricking the unit before a big party)

So, just for clarity's sake, next I'll describe the strangeness of my firmware flashing process...