Unstable Video

[KaroriPete]

Hi all,

I have a Philips Series 1 TIVO that is fed with an AV signal from my Saturn Digital STB. It's been running pretty reliably for a couple of years apart from the odd freeze up, but even these have pretty much disappeared since I moved it to the NZ image a while back.

It has however started to exhibit some video instability. Live TV appears as two images offset horizontally and flickering. The TIVO menus also appear to wrap around the screen horizontally. Restarting fixes the problem, although anything that has been recorded while it's in this state remains corrupted so it would appear to be some kind of sync issue at the video input.

Up until about two months ago I had seen the problem about two or three times over the previous couple of years. It has now happened three or four times in the last two months or so, so it looks like something is dying.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has experienced this problem or thinks they might know what's going wrong.

Thanks,
Pete.

[Darren King]

Hi Pete

That's a hard one to nail down because you have something amiss in the playback section by mentioning that there is something wrong with the menus which are generated in the MPEG decoder chip *AND* something wrong in the recording section by mentioning that previous recorded material has an issue which may be the MPEG encoder or the video input switcher. Trouble is neither of these areas have any common circuitry and for both to fail or exhibit an issue at the exact same time is almost impossible.

Maybe a good idea would be to rule out a software glitch by trying to image up a test hard disk and see if you can replicate the problems on a totally seperate hard disk. That way you can for sure rule out a software issue or hardware problem with the motherboard without losing any recordings or settings.

Try that and see how you go from there.