HD300 Issue - Strange

[davidjames]

Was listening to a playlist today when the music just stopped. Nothing I could do corrected it. A song appeared to be playing, I saw it increment time but no sound. I went to TV and while the signal strength meter showed 100%, no picture or sound.

I went to the SageTV server and everything that didn't work on the HD300 worked fine.

Going back to the HD300, I turned it off and back on, same issue. I tried music w/o connecting to the server, same problem. I was reaching the media folders as I could scroll through pictures without a problem.

I decided to pull the plug for a bit and replace it. The unit was warm and when I touched I felt a spark and the screen went blank. I pulled the power plug, waited a bit and put it back in. The SageTV logo came up but nothing else. I waited a while...nothing. I then turned it off and back on.

Everything came back and began working, TV, music, etc.

Strange.

It happened again mostly the same symptoms. This time I noticed a song I was playing ended, but the time countered continued beyond the indicated song length of 5:59 to over 8:00. The returned to like it did prior to starting that song. But never played. Everything else was much like my comments above with one exception. When viewing pictures I would see a brief shot of the picture only to be replaced by what looked like a music visualization. By the way, I didn't have visualizations on when listening to the music.

Now this is even more weird. I turned off (via remote) the HD300 but the image remained on the screen. The visualization along with the icons telling me how to move to the next picture.

[gdippel]

Have you installed the latest beta firmware? Some problems with music files have been addressed and fixed.

[davidjames]

Originally Posted by gdippel

Have you installed the latest beta firmware? Some problems with music files have been addressed and fixed.

Yeah, actually I just did. I'll do some testing later.

I'm very concerned about the little shock (not spark as I mentioned earlier) I get when I touch it, however. It causes the box to restart.

[Mike]

I've had similar issues and the UI will get super slow to operate if I try to navigate away from the music. A reboot by pulling the plug has rectified the UI problem, but it still happens pretty much whenever I try to play music. Sometimes it takes longer than others to start acting up. I'm fixin' to upgrade the whole system. I'll check on an updated firmware too.

Mike

(fixin' is Texan for getting ready to)

[davidjames]

Latest update:

Was playing a music playlist, active for a couple hours. I noticed the music stopped and looked at the TV it was blank. Looked at the HD300 it was off.

I turned it on via the remote control and the same symptoms as before returned. I tried playing a song, all indications were the song was playing but no sound. I then tried to view TV. After selecting a show the show seemed to tune in but no picture or sound (plug in indicated signal was 100%)

I unplugged the HD300, it was pretty warm, not hot but warmer then I would expect such a device to be. I plugged it back in and everything works fine again.

I have a ticket opened with support.

[vhm9ks]

I've also had this problem with my new HD300. Shuts off and when it is turned back on, there is no video or audio but the interface works fine. When unplugged for a few seconds and plugged back in it works fine.

[eqwalker]

New HD300 user here and I have noticed the exact same thing. I was actually playing some music and when I selected an album to play the sound went away but the UI indicated that it had started playing. I jumped to several tracks but no sound. I then went to TV and it pulled up the channel but no video or audio. Just a black screen. I tried turning the unit off and back on but still no picture (on tv) or sound. Everything else appeared normal. I unplugged the unit and plugged it back up and everything was ok. I noticed I could get it to screw up again by selected the same album to play that was already playing. It seems to always take a power reboot to get it back. This is with the latest firmware update.

[_Demo_]

Let me know if you find a reliable way to reproduce this problem as we haven't been able to so far.

_Demo_

[vhm9ks]

I will turn on logging and send them in when it happens to me again.

[eqwalker]

I will see what I can do as well.

[eqwalker]

Well, tonight I spent some time listening to some music (FLAC) off of my WHS w/SageTV 7 to my HD300 extender. In the course of an hour it has locked up 5 times randomly but right when it changes from one track to another. It appears that it is having trouble in the transition from one track to another. I will have the visualization going while I'm listening and when it locks up so does the visualization. I can play the same album again and it may play right through the track transition that it locked up on before so it is not related to the track itself or so it seems. I can back up and go to different things like the TV but I will have no picture and no sound. No other songs will play in music and also no online content will play once buffered off of the internet. The timeline will show that it is playing but no pic or sound. A power reboot will put it back to normal for a while but I can't even listen to a full album without locking up it seems in between tracks. I have a wired Cat5e network with a Gigabit switch that everything is attached to so no wireless is involved. I can see where I can enable logging but what do I need to do once I do that to get the info to Sage? Anyone else having this happen to then like this?

[Olias]

Originally Posted by eqwalker

Anyone else having this happen to then like this?

Yep, all the time. My flac music will eventually lock up the HD300. Haven't got around to logging a support incident with Sage yet, although they are aware of the issue already.

[pjpjpjpj]

I have seen issues with playing MP3s for a long time. But as I stated in some other thread, it's usually a party or some occasion where I am not watching the TV to know when it occurs. I have found the HD300 shut off (turned itself off) and I have found it just locked up. However, I have not been able to continue using it (when it was off, I could not turn it on), so I haven't seen the timeline issues. Generally it requires rebooting the server, rebooting the switch, and rebooting (unplugging) the extender, in order to get everything working again.

Please share (anyone) if you get a resolution from Sage.

[Mike]

I upgraded to v7 yesterday I'm having the same problem that you guys are describing. I'll submit a ticket today or tomorrow too. Need to figure out bug logging for the extender and get a few minutes.

[eqwalker]

I also went ahead and submitted a ticket so it would be in their log and they would know that another person was having problems.

[QueOnda]

I have a problem when I play FLAC files (plays fine) but after playing and go watch a video it's acid wash look. I have to power cycle the HD300 to get to look normal. Has anyone ever experience this? I'm going to try the beta firmware to see if it fixes it.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by QueOnda

I have a problem when I play FLAC files (plays fine) but after playing and go watch a video it's acid wash look. I have to power cycle the HD300 to get to look normal. Has anyone ever experience this? I'm going to try the beta firmware to see if it fixes it.

Are you on the latest HD300 firmware? This sounds like a recognized issue that was a bug, fixed in the last firmware update. Playing music often caused the issue, I believe (it did for me).

On edit, your sig doesn't mention an HD300. Hmmmm.

[eqwalker]

I went ahead and submitted a trouble ticket and got a reply to install the beta firmware which I did and that seems to have taken care of my .flac music playback lockups. I have been listening to several albums and have not had one lockup yet (watch me jinx myself).

Now, I have noticed that when I scroll my albums (looking at the cover art) there is this one artist that his cover art overwrites a few others in different locations. For ex. where Fleetwood Mac should be, Rod Stewart is. But the songs listed are correct and play correctly. When I go to the actual Fleetwood Mac folder the correct cover art is there. When I stream Fleetwood to my Droid or iTouch (via SubSonic) the cover art is correct therefore, I have to believe it is a SageTV issue. I cannot find the cover art wrong anywhere else. I had the HD300 re-scan the meta data but his cover art is still in these 3 locations where the actual artists cover art should be. Anyone seen this problem before?

I am using a Tranquil SQA-5H WHS.

[vhm9ks]

This might fix your cover art issue.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...lbum+cover+art

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by vhm9ks

This might fix your cover art issue.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...lbum+cover+art

Something not discussed in that thread above is the fact that some album art programs add "hidden" jpgs of the art to the folder where the file is located. This is what WMP does (which I struggled through for a long time). There may be some others listed in that thread which do the same. Along with the several jpgs that are thrown into the folder, they often create a "folder.jpg", which will override the art of any file in that same folder that does not have an embedded art file.

However, some tagging programs (might I say, the "better ones"?) actually embed the art into the MP3 file itself. The easiest way to tell if this is happening is if, when you do the fix, the "modified" date on the file changes to that moment. Yes, this makes your MP3 files larger in size (a few Kb), but they will always carry their album art from that point, no matter how much moving around you do. And you can delete the tons of hidden jpg files that programs like WMP create.

I learned this from a great 3-part series on lifehacker (last year) about cleaning up your MP3 collection. It recommended mp3tag, and that's what I used. It does a great job, though, as briefly discussed in the thread linked above, it does not automatically fill in "album artist", only "artist". Every time I tagged albums or groups of songs by an artist, I manually copy/pasted the "artist" tag to the "album artist". Of course, it's up to you whether you want to do this on compilation albums (where you get a bunch of "Various Artists" tags), but personally, I like to have every song tagged by the original album from whence it came. This took a lot of manual work (with the help of Amazon and wikipedia), but I finally got through my entire collection. In other words, if I had a box set from an artist, I went through every song and re-tagged it from the original album, not the box set. This is because I hate when you view songs by year and a song from 1972 is listed in 2004 because it's from a box set or greatest hits CD.

The other thing that is a pain is capitalization (which is differentiated in Sage) and also the "&" vs. "and" in titles. Even after my painstaking re-tagging, I found numerous occasions where albums were listed as being by different artists, i.e., "Huey Lewis and the News", Huey Lewis & the News", and even "Huey Lewis And The News" ("A" and "T" capitalized). Those would show up as three different artists in Sage. Thankfully, programs like mp3tag let you grab all of the songs by an artist and batch-change. But I still occasionally stumble across a double artist in Sage that I missed and have to go fix the files in mp3tag and then re-scan Sage.

One final thing - if you do all of this and the art still shows up wrong, try removing the MP3 folder path(s) from Sage entirely, and then re-scan. At that point, you should have no MP3s in your Music section at all. Then go back and re-add the foile path(s), and re-scan again, to put them back. That should fix it.

Sorry to ramble.. hope that makes sense.