some shows (not all) will have no audio but a perfect picture. When I record these shows and look at the audio stream it is encoded with MP3 instead of the usual AC3 or PCM format.

I can not find a decoder that will permit hearing the sound.

Am I doing something wrong or is the station doing it wrong?

I do not have this problem with anyother OTA HDTV station.

All OTA DTV audio must be Dolby Digital (AC-3) If it isn't then the station is doing something seriously wrong. Perhaps there is something else wrong with their stream, too.

Give 'em a call and let them know, although shame on them for not caring to monitor what they transmit.

Double check to make sure your audio is not set to SAP. I've noticed sometimes there is no sound on this setting.

My audio is Serial, I use the digital serial port on my audio card to my receiver

I have no problem with other stations, just the one station and that is only certain shows. When the show has no audio it will be for the whole show just not part.

The SAP idea might be a good one. Double-check the audio settings on your STB. There may still be a SAP PID in the bitstream, but it is silent, or the PID may have gone away and the STB doesn't scan for an other one.

I am recording off the air into a PC with an ASUS motherboard. I am using the onboard audio for output. The ota capture in through an avermedia m780 card.

I am not sure where to change the STB, PID etc. settings.

Where are you located?

You could call SCETV Engineering in Columbia.

I just got back into the office today and am looking into the issue. So far, this only appears to effect the AverMedia M780 PCI tuner. I can not reproduce the problem on any other tuner we own, so I have ordered the AverMedia unit off the internet. All PSIP data looks correct on my stream analyzer, and of course we are encoding AC-3.

I hope to have this sorted out soon, and am glad this was brought to my attention. Please feel free to contact me with any issue dealing with our services. If I dont know the answer, I will pass it on to someone else that does.

-Shaun

I am using Windows Vista premium, when I upgraded to the SP1 RC1 the audio problem when away. I was actually the only problem that the update did fix - the MCE is very nice with vista but otherwise I do not think much of the product.

It is still interesting that the problem only occurred with the SC ETV station and no other OTA station.

I talked with an someone at SC ETV and he was very interested in the problem and wanted to find the cause. He even bought an AVer m780 card to try to reproduce the problem. Such service now days is rare!

I did end up purchasing an Aver M780 tuner and installed it in a XP Pro machine. I was able to replicate some of the problems with our HD service using AVer MediaCenter software. Sometimes when I tuned to the channel there was no audio, and sometimes it played fine. Audio played fine using VLC Media Center.

Upon further investigation, I found that MediaCenter was looking at the line-in input of the soundcard instead of pulling the signal directly from the PCIe bus since the tuner does not have a sound output interface. I installed a cheap soundcard and disabled the on board HD soundcard and the problem cleared. Ultimately, I ended up formatting the machine with a clean install of XP and went back to the original onboard soundcard with no problems using MediaCenter to tune our HD service.

I have no definitive answer as to why this tuner had a problem with our HD audio. I can only speculate that it was a codec/driver issue on my computer. I am glad that OLD_FART65 had his issues resolved. We can’t have him watching UNCTV instead of SCETV for his PBS programming.

-Shaun

This is off subject but:

SC ETV offers several great education programs that NC does not.

The recent 2 hour special on President Jackson seemed very good. It was OTA about a month ago at 2 am. I recorded it but when I when to see it the next day, there was not sound. When will they broadcast it again?

Many great education, history things are OTA HD on SC ETV in the early morning hours.

The recent 2 hour special on President Jackson seemed very good. It was OTA about a month ago at 2 am. I recorded it but when I when to see it the next day, there was not sound. When will they broadcast it again?

I think the show you are talking about is: ANDREW JACKSON: GOOD, EVIL AND THE PRESIDENCY. I checked with programming and unfortunately it does not look like it will be re-aired any time in the near future by PBS. WGBH in Boston is offering the DVD in their online store starting on 02/21/2008.

Sorry for the bad news.

-Shaun