SBS Audio Squeak Problem

[simonshead]

It took me about a month to figure this out myself, it's that time of the year when it gets cold that I develop very bad antenna problems losing channels, and I got sidetracked chasing ghosts trying to improve reception. I thought this was a related problem.

Anyway... installing a new relocated antenna aside, I can sort of live with having to change to the alternate setting to stop the annoying screeching if I'm watching it live. The problem is, when you want to record a program on these two HD channels (#30 and #31), the TiVo changes the current channel and starts recording the squeaky mpeg4? audio stream. If you catch it early enough, you can manually change it to the mpeg1 stream, and the rest of the show will be recorded with usable audio. It sort of makes a joke of setting a season pass to something as an unattended recording as you are only going to get the BAD audio. If you catch it in the middle of the show and change it to mpeg1, the first half of your recording will still have the screech. I must not be receiving HD on World Movies & Food (#32, #33) as they're fine when ever I watch it.

I don't know why SBS couldn't have made the standard audio the default. I think they changed it so they could have alternative audio as well -- some shows now also have spoken word dialogue over the top of the standard soundtrack for visually impaired viewers, and that data is being decoded as squeaks even if the narration isn't there. I watched a couple of shows and thought the narration was intentionally part of the program until the penny dropped. It seemed to have been activated by itself without intervention by me. Seeing that 99% of the population aren't visually challenged and don't need these features enabled, I'm at a loss as to why they would make this stream the default and enable narration. I'm going to try and speak to someone at SBS in the technical section to sort out what is going on. They seem to have a few contact numbers for antenna problems and reception difficulties on their website.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what other solution we can devise for the TiVo OS.

Here is a short example of the audio defect, and narration on the main audio channel. There was no alternative audio on this program.