Suddenly have HD recording issues

[othy]

Hi Everyone,
I'm hesitant to post since I've only done rudimentary troubleshooting, but I figure it's worth asking to see if there's an obvious solution before I get too carried away.

Sage has worked great for me for many years, through a handful of hardware changes. My current setup has been going strong for (IIRC) about a year: WHS server, HD100, gigabit backbone. My HD-PVR has also worked flawlessly since I bought it (within a week of its release).

About a month ago, I started noticing subtle video problems in my HD recordings, both from the HDHR and the HD-PVR, and it has steadily gotten worse. It's not significant enough to really call it stuttering or choppiness. Maybe "tiling" is the correct term? Just a little blockiness every 10-20 seconds in a localized part of the video. Interestingly, it's much worse on certain channels. My local Fox affiliate is the worst--the bottom half of the picture occasionally turns lime green for a few seconds then clears up.

Here's what I've done so far. I verified that it's in the recording, not in playback. I verified that it only happens in Sage, not when I connect my STB directly to the TV. I disconnected my HD-PVR since it is notirously touchy for many people. I de-fragged both of my recording drives which, incidentally, are NOT in the WHS pool and are formatted at 64k. I upgraded drivers & firmware for the HDHR and upgraded to the Release Candidate betas on both the server and the extender software. I upgraded to the latest version of Java and uninstalled the old versions. Oh, and I verified that I do not have the defective power supply that shipped with many HDHRs (and like I said, the problem happens both on HDHR recording and HD-PVR recordings).

Like I said, my setup had been rock solid for many many months, but in the past two/three weeks it has really made some of the recordings unwatchable. I hadn't touched anything (until the upgrades I just mentioned) or made any changes to my setup.

I guess I'm hoping you all can suggested some diagnostic tips I can try in order to narrow down the problem.

Thanks,
Tim

Thanks,
Tim

[HelenWeathers]

What kind of signals are you feeding the HDHR and HD PVR? From what source?

I have for the last few months been experiencing the same kind of issues with my two HD PVRs being fed by DirecTV receivers. After trying lots of other things I decided to hook up two Blu-ray players to the two HD PVRs.

I put in two movies that ran about three hours, set up some manual recordings thru SageTV, started the movies a few minutes before the manual recordings were about to start, recorded from both HD PVRs for 2.5 hours and guess what? No pixelation/blockiness thru the whole test sequence.

I came to the conclusion that it's my DirecTV signal. It looks ok fed to my TV, but the HD PVRs are touchy I guess. They seem to have trouble recovering from any slight signal degredation.

Maybe it's snowing lately in Denver or DirecTV sacrificed signal a little bit to carry all the area sports networks and locals in new citys in HiDef. But it turned out not to be my recording equipment or SageTV.

Don't know of a way for you to test the HDHR but if you have a BD player you can test the HD PVRs.

[kevine]

I have to agree. The problems you describe seem to be signal problems. Have you recently split the signal from coming in the house? If not, maybe the cable company has. You have 2 choices. First, call the cable company and 2 buy an amplifier.

On the HDHR signal meter it shows 3 items. Signal quality, strength and symbol quality.

The symbol quality should be at 100% all the time on both tuners. Watch each tuner for a minute or so each.

The signal quality should be above 50% and the signal strength should be between 80 and 100%.

[othy]

Thanks for the quick replies!

Sure enough, I set it to record to different channels at the same time. NBC has a great signal and I don't see any video issues. The Fox affiliate that's been giving m problems does indeed have a weaker signal (in the 60's) and the symbol quality is bouncing all over.

I have been using a Channel Master amp this whole time and nothing's changed in that regard, so I'll get the cableco out to take a look.

Thanks guys,
Tim