Seeing issue with HD-PVR recordings

[gplasky]

I still haven't done much troubleshooting on this. But I just started noticing the issue during the 6.5.20 beta. I'm not sure if it is the cable box/provider/station doing this or something has changed in Sage. So far I have seen this on THT-HD, USA-HD and SyFy-HD. Areas of the video recording start to break up. Picture may sometimes freeze or macroblocking occurs. But when this happens what it looks like is really occurring is that the audio is changing. I record over SPDIF and get 5.1 DD thru my receiver. I've had no issues up to this latest beta. Now when the video is disrupted the audio can change from DD 5.1 to DD 2/0. I lose the blue light and it may stay like that for 14 minutes. Sometimes it will go back to 5.1 DD and stay that way to the end. Or dometimes it will stay stereo until the end, I'm going to take a look tonight and possibly roll back to .19 to see if the issue disappears.

Gerry

[HelenWeathers]

I have a tale to tell that I think may be related.

I've been trying to get a 'best I can get' recording of Once Upon A Time In The West. I've recorded it three times w .19 and .20 releases. When I play back the recorded tv files I get video break up and macroblocking. (Since it's a movie the audio is the same throughout so not the issue here)

I finally gave up on getting a better copy, and used tsMuxeR to make one of the .ts files into a Blu-ray folder structure so I could add cover art etc and put it into my recorded movies import folder.

I watched a bit of the muxed movie to see how tsMuxeR handled the dropouts and to my surprise there were no dropouts.

So either tsMuxeR does a bang-up job of fixing macroblocking, or SageTV handles the playback of Blu-ray folders differently somehow than the playback of recorded tv.

I've seen this with several other recorded movies now as well.

[Narflex]

Helen,

If you could chop out a short clip of the HDPVR recording that has the macroblocking and then remux that to see if it fixes it; I'd be very interested in seeing those two files (I think you know my email by now). From your test this sounds like it might be an issue with the timestamps the HDPVR is putting on the MPEG2-TS stream its generating; since that's what tsMuxeR would regenerate when it processes the file.

[HelenWeathers]

I deleted the original before I realized the BD version played differently. But I should be able to duplicate the same situation (with a smaller file hopefully) and will send through when done.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

(Since it's a movie the audio is the same throughout so not the issue here)

I'll have to record a movie to the HD-PVR to compare. But just so you know the audio is actually changing in the middle of the TV scenes and randomly. This is not the audio changing during the commercial. I could be 5 minutes into the episode and then all of a sudden the audio drops, changes to DD 2/0 and starts playing havoc with the video. I'm going to try tsMuxeR on my problem episodes and see if that corrects the video.

Gerry