What timezone does the player think it is in? As far as I can telll I am already usiing GMT/UTC since it defaults to that if it can't locate a localtime file or if TZ is NULL.

That's precisely what I'm confused about. It's meant to use UTC, on the basis that this makes the player behave as if it didn't know about timezones at all (like most stereos). An unpleasant wander through the glibc sources showed that, if TZ isn't explicitly set, the default is a path relative to where the library was installed. As the player is cross-compiled from an x86 Linux box, the path refers to a directory on our compile server which doesn't exist on the player itself. Hence it should remain stuck in UTC. But it somehow doesn't.

1.1 players force UTC on startup.

Peter