Hello. Up until recently I have had very few problems with my T825, however it is now suffering some stuttering or breakup problems (fractions of a second of missing picture and sound). It is only apparent on some channels, the ones I have discovered so far are Channel 4, ITV 4 and ITV. Watching any channel is fine, however recording one of the mentioned channels gives the stuttering. In addition, the problem also shows its self if I am recording any channel and watching one of the problem channels live. Other channels record and watch live with no problems.
My ariel is pointing at Waltam and problem seems to have started with analogue switch-off at the start of the month. I have powered down, rebooted, and done a couple of first time installations with manual tuning. During manual tuning, the machine reports very good signal strength. I have also deleted the unwanted channels to make life for the machine a bit easier.

It is on version 13.0, the hard drive (80 gig) is around 1/3 full, only a small number of series timers set. I have owned and used this PVR for a couple of years now and had very few problems. Is this a signal problem or a fault with the machine? If anyone has any suggestions as to what the cause is and how it can be remedied, I would be very grateful. Thanks, Chris.

It's a well klnown problem with Vestels at DSO, see my related thread nearby. It should go away after DSO is finished.

The known cure is to run the hard disk from a separate power supply.

It's a combo of weak power supply, and unexpectedly high disk activity due to unknown stuff in mpeg info field.

Not every Vestel T810/16/25 is affected. All of them are "on the edge", but it depends which particualr power board & disk combo uhave!

I was starting to think it might be some thing to do with the hard drive rather than a bad signal. I have an external ide power supply that I can use as an experiment.

I have disconnected the power plug from the hard drive. It is now being powered by an external power supply that came with a USB to IDE cable I have. This seems to have cured the problem. Talking with my uncle who regularly reads this forum, he tells me that there is an issue with the capacitors in the power not smoothing or suppressing the power to to hard drive. I have searched the forum but can not find a reference to that. Can someone point me to where it is? Thanks.

Yep, that's correct.

This DSO associated stuttering is a complicated issue, involving:

1. Known weaknesses with the power supply board, which is only just good enough to power the hard disk, giving rise to a range of probelms prior to DSO.

2. Extra info in the mpeg2 info fields, causing more than usual disk accesses ........ sets of mpeg fields then go missing due poor supply rail regulation.

3. Variations between different manufactured batches, depends which power board/disk drive combo you have.

4. It should vanish after DSO completion.

are you sure? I am in Yorkshire where digital switchover has completed - yet any recordings I make are stuttering when I watch them.

That surprised me as well. My aerial is pointing at Waltham which completed switch off at the start of September, the time when my stuttering problem started. One of the channels is on low power, presumably due to it affecting the signal in a neighbouring area that is yet to go through switch off. That particular channel works fine. I am hoping that when it returns to full power the stuttering problem will go away.

The symptoms of this particular problem is, the stuttering occurs while recording only, and affects all channels on a particular mux. It's also there on the recordging, since what's affected is continuity of the mpeg stream.

There's a few other reports of continuing problems post DSO, but it might not be the same thing. Dunno.

The main problem I have is stuttering whilst watching recordings always, and more occasionally whilst watching live tv (which might or might not correlate with recording - I have not checked).

Its pretty poor to be honest that things worked ok pre-switchover and now things are worse.