For the past week or so I have been testing an upgrade to the EPG in my Formuler Z7+. This "Beta" test is something they have been working on and we've been authorized to post some of the results.

As anyone who has one of these boxes, and the Dreamlink versions of them, knows, the EPG can be painfully slow to load with some (most) services. To combat this, the developers have been working on a way to have the EPG load in the background so that it was no longer necessary to scroll through the entire guide to populate the EPG fully.

They have succeeded in this.

As tested, the current version of MyTVOnline (DOL2 for you Dreamlinkers), will load the entire EPG in the background while you watch TV. It takes roughly 3-4 minutes for most providers, although the official statement is to allow 10-15 minutes for full population. There is currently no way to track the progress of the EPG or to force it to load other than on initial startup. Some of the issues that are being worked on are the loss of data when exiting MTVOL, they hope to be able to cache the EPG so that its still populated when reloading the portal. Also, there is an issue where the EPG does not seem to reload after several hours of consistent watching. It loads an initial pull, but never seems to pull the info again. With some providers that is a problem as only several hours of info is pulled at a time, so watching for the whole day can leave gaps as the day goes on.

This is very exciting for those of us that have had these boxes for a long time! It shows once again that the support they give these boxes is incredible! They just keep improving! The official release is scheduled for sometime in late March along with some other upgrades. Hopefully by then they have worked out all the bugs! Even if they don't, the current Beta version is a giant improvement over the previous way of loading the EPG.