Been having issues with recordings jumping and skipping during playback. '100 Funniest Moments' off C4 was bad to the point where the recording was unwatchable (voice/video sync skipping too often etc)

Some recordings have been absolutely perfect
eg. Rogue Traders (bbc1) was fine, The Gadget Show (c5) skips. Both were recorded the same day tho not at the same time

When watching channels i usually dont get the 'not very strong signal' pausing so i cant see it being that, or is the the box more sensitive to that when recording?

any ideas?!

cheers

I have had similar things from time to time, usually when I have been doing fast forward/back etc. Often just pausing and then resuming with the play button clears it.

I have forund that skips do indeed tend to be signal dropouts. They do come in bursts, perhaps relating to transmitter maintainance. You can usually spot this by all the channels on 1 mux falling over together.

Trouble is if it is a recording you dont notice.

I tend to find I get a lot more glitching and break-up on Mux 2 (ITV, C4, etc) than any other mux for some reason. This is despite signal strength and quality being higher than on some of the others. Some of this of course is attributable to Mux 2 being broadcast at the less stable 64QAM, although so is Mux A (Five, etc.) which suffers much fewer errors.

Does anyone know if Mux A has better error-correction than Mux 2?

I used to get similar problems, and found a few things that helped for me:

1) Changing the error correction setting from freeze-frame to macro-blocking, it's hidden somewhere in the engineering menu. Doesn't eliminate the problem but picture and sound stay in synch better and it's less annoying to the eye.

2) Pausing and restarting if problem during playback - seems to be a glitch with subtitle recording and "noise" in combination!

3) Rerouting my aerial cable order so that they went from aerial to Thomson first, then from there to signal booster for distribution to TV, video, freeview box etc.

4) Being tidy with my cables so that the tv aerial didn't run too close to power cables / video sender.

HTH - Rufus.

thanks for the responses - i had found the macroblocking option earlier (code 1004 when on the technical help screen for that menu) and it certainly helps when watching a couple of recording that were jumping...

aerial already goes straight to the thomson box first & ive rejigged the cables to help improve my signal (was noticably better on analog straight away)

i have various recordings scheduled on different channels the next few days so will see what happens!

cheers
-karl

seems to be alright now - only had a couple of weird occurances out of all the recordings -

1 recording would play about 3 frames of the beginning of the recording (which would just loop like a wierd mtv video effect)

and yesterday i came home to find lots of lights on and a spectrum loading style screen (and of course no recording that i had set) (pic below if ur interested)
thomsoncockup.jpg


It works more than it doesnt so i shall stick with it - you never know, they might even do another software update!

i take it back - this piece of crap has crashed in Standby twice now, have arrived home to discover no recordings done. At least my VHS didnt crash!

I'm not going to accept that 'it crashes sometimes', that defeats the point of a PVR!

will get one of these as soon as i can afford it http://www.firebox.com/pvr
Last edited by micropizza : 28-10-2006 at 00:17

I get similar picture jumping problems - I think mostly because I use an indoor aerial. I'd like to try changing to macro-blocking - I've read it mentioned a few times - but I don't know what it is or how to do it! Can anyone help? Where's the engineering menu? thanks
jack

Since the 2.3.9 firmware came out, mine (a heavily used 160gb upgraded model) has never crashed (well, apart from when I took it apart and added a usb port the wrong way round!)

Sounds like you just have a duff unit - the days of crashing dhd4000s are well behind us.

Matt

Key 1004 when in the Technical Help menu.

mine was fine for about 4 weeks then started all these problems, so whats to stop the next unit 'appearing fine for a while' in the same way, lol

based on the amount of problem posts in this forum I certainly wont be getting another. Its almost like Thomson released these as 'a cool idea' and never tested them