Strange recording issue

[CadErik]

Lately I have been getting some issue with TV recordings. These look to be mpg2 artifacts (I attached a sample). I have an ATI Theater Pro 550 PCI card. These artifacts usually occur after a little bit of recording and sometimes disappear but they often make the recording unusable. I cannot figure out any rationale to these artifacts. Hardware? Software? Broadcast?

[Fuzzy]

What are your feeding into your 550? Those look like signal quality issues (on the digital side), so my guess is you are feeding the 550 from a STB, and the signal into the STB is weak.

[CadErik]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

What are your feeding into your 550? Those look like signal quality issues (on the digital side), so my guess is you are feeding the 550 from a STB, and the signal into the STB is weak.

Thanks for the advice. I'm feeding an analog cable signal into it. There is a splitter on the cable after the main output from the cable company. I suspected it might be one of the causes, so I replaced the cheap splitter by a better one. If that's not enough, then I'll put an amplified splitter there.

Erik.

[Conejo]

The example pic you attached looks a lot like SYMBOL errors on a DIGITAL Cable STB. I think that's what FUZZY thought as well. Mpeg2 errors tend to create mosaic blurs while QAM Symbol errors create small colored tiles.

But if you're taking the analog cable feed directly from the wall into your ATI Theater Pro 550 PCI card configured as an Analog Tuner (ch 2- 125) ...AND... the files are having problems besides the artifacts, especially playback issues, then you can almost bet that the issue is with the encoder (capture card).

When you play the file back, rewind, play, rewind, play... do the artifacts always appear in the same place in the timeline? This would tell me that it based in the MPEG2 encoded file.

If the artifacts move around each time you replay the same segments then it would be your codec.

Did you changed anything on your system around the time this started to occur? Changed recording quality settings?

You might try uninstalling and reinstalling the driver software for your ATI Theater Pro 550 PCI card.