I am suddenly experiencing an odd digital anamaly on the TV monitor from my UTV. It is a green digital flashing distortion from mid screen all the way down. This occurs during live viewing and during playback of recordings. HOWEVER, if you fast forward a recorded program or back up and fast forward through a live recording, the digital distortion goes away and you can see 100% clean picture. It is behaving (and looks very similar) like a VCR head when it needs trimming due to the playback head being off center from the video tape.

Anyone have any ideas and/or suggestions to fix this? Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Sounds like it could possibly be tuner or hard drive related. I’m going to rule out bad weather since you stated the problem still happens while viewing recorded shows. I have experienced the same sort of pixilation during extreme storms. The digital dots…

Heat may also be the culprit. Make sure your UTV is kept cool and see what happens. Set up a fan to circulate the air around the box for a good period of time. Check again.

You may want to try and isolate the tuners. Unplug the cable to one tuner and see if the problem still persists. If so, take the remaining cable that is still plugged in to a tuner and swap that to the other tuner. Check again. Do this with both cables that run to the UTV.

It may be an early sign of the drive starting to go bad. All video is continually buffered on the drive so we can’t rule this out either.

Do you have another receiver handy to swap out with the UTV? Try that and see if the problem goes away. This may help to verify that the problem doesn’t lie with your multi-switch or dish LNB.

Maybe a mouse or something has chewed partially through one or more of your cable runs from the dish to the receiver? I recently heard this one from a friend.. It took several days to find his problem. He thought a coon got in the attic though…lol The tuner swap mentioned above should catch this, but it depends on how bad the cables are damaged.

How’s your signal strength? Maybe something hit the dish and slightly knocked it out of alignment? (football, branch, high winds, etc)

Just some suggestions to try.

Two suggestions:

Try pressing the PIP (Picture in Picture) button during one of these events. Press the PIP button again to dismiss it.

Try powering down, unplug, replug and power up.

Just to narrow things down. Does the "green digital flashing distortion from mid screen all the way down"... only effect the "Live Tuner or Recorded" content... or does it also distort any "Info./Home/Guide/PIP" windows?

When I first read this item I was curious if "OLD" (pre-problem) content was also effected. Have you've tried various "OUTPUT" sources from the UTV to see if this problem is the same using Any/ALL Outputs (Both Video Outs,RF,and S-Video)... Maybe changed/checked that the Output Cables and Connections are OK.

I'd also agree with previous posts to rule out Heat and try to "reset" the UTV (either by code like 12357 or unplugging) to see if that clears up the problem...

Yes, the green pixelation appears even when I play back old recorded material which did not have the problem at the time. So, it is a playback issue. Again, when I fast forward, the screen clears. I'll try the suggestions given above. Thanks! Anything else will be appreciated.

Gentlemen, for your future knowledge base, the problem was with the tuner. It did not occur to me to swap from #1 to #2 until you made the suggestion. The green pixelation is gone! Not sure of the technical reason causing this, but that's for someone else. I'm back in business! By the way, it recorded this anomaly as well, so the problem was upstream of the recorder, probably within the tuner.

Thank you everyone for your responses. VERY HELPFUL SITE!!!

Best of luck!

Good to hear.

Odd that this "tuner" issue seems to be causing problems on (pre-problem) "recorded" content. Maybe its a heat/electrical issue that resolves when the bad "Tuner" is taken offline?