Tivo hiccups after upgrade

Hi,
I've been running my Tivo for 3 years now with no problems until recently.

A couple of months ago I decided to move to the new emulator. I bought a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 400Gb disc, & installed the NZTivo (Phillips) 1.5 image. It all works just fine. Except for one aspect.

Periodically (every few minutues) the sound & video hiccups ...everything slows down and then speeds up. The whole effect takes about 1/2 second and sounds similar to the effect of an old tape warble ...wow & flutter type effect. I've experimented with turning off all the optional services such as ftp, msftp, and even tivowebplus. I have worked out that it happens more when the Tivo is under load. I can force it to happen by running Top ( which I did to see what was hogging CPU). Its most obvious when Tivo is recording something and I'm either watching delayed or watching another recording.

I figure its either the disc or the OS. The disc has been running fine for 3 months...I thought if it was a crap disc it might have failed completely or got worse...but it hasn't. Has anyone heard anything wrong about the Seagate series 9 discs (single disc in Tivo)?

Can anyone suggest what might be causing this & how I could fix it ?.

Help

Possibly IR interference - do you have one of those IR sender/receiver things pointing at your TiVo?

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Originally Posted by dread

Hi,
Periodically (every few minutues) the sound & video hiccups ...everything slows down and then speeds up. The whole effect takes about 1/2 second and sounds similar to the effect of an old tape warble ...wow & flutter type effect.

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Sorry - can't help, but have noticed a similar issue occuring after upgrading my drive to a Seagate 320GB and imaging with the new software. Not a major, but a little annoying... Wish you the best in sorting this and any additional info I can provide to see if it is the same issue just ask,
Cheers
Neil

I have had no trouble with seagate 7200.9's, and with such a large disk it would be unlikely you are encountering the same bad sectors so frequently.

I would go with your initial thoughts of a resource hog. Seanofshotgun's suggestion is a likely possbility. Some IR senders are very noisey and can cause these problems, as can fluro lights and strong sunlight.

Have you checked whether these problems are on the recordings or only at random places on playback?

I will guess playback as it is most common. I suggest you start watching a program and then cover the TiVo's eye completely so no light can enter and see if your show is glitch free.

Peter.