Who still has skipping with their A1? - Page 2

All three disks that I played (the only ones I own) skipped and all three were brand spankin new and clean as a whistle.

i have as many skips as i do wiht my car dvd player and wiht my laptop and my other dvd player heh i guess a skip here and their is normal

crazy thing is when the A1 first came out people said the same thing. Those that cleaned the new discs, many got them to play flawlessly. I dunno why, they look perfect when new but it worked. It makes no sense, I know that but since then I've cleaned them all, Netflix or not. As I said earlier, one disc has skipped in over 50. It could be that I'm lucky and got a perfect player.

I wouldn't have thought to clean a brand new disk........oh well.....the A2 is on it's way now.

Granted I lose the ability to play TrueHD (analogs) but at least I "shouldn't" have the skipping issue.....I hope.

Yea, its definitely non-sensical and counter-intuitive. Good luck with the A2, the load times and ergonimics should be benefits that will make you forget about your A1's analogs.

That's what Im hoping....at least until I upgrade my receiver. Now how do I tell my wife that?

I read this in another thread and it appears to help. In setup change the HDMI Audio out from Auto to Bitstream. The theory is the skipping is due to maxing the CPU. I tried this setting and didn't see a skip afterwards. But as you know it happens infrequently. I'll watch the rest of Kong tomorrow and get a better feel for how much this fix helps.

Let me know if this helps you. Thanks!

All hd discs that have had skipping & audio dropout problems on the A1 are playing
100% on the A2......Specifically the Eagles and Cream Albert Hall discs.

I had my first skipping on miami vice. I was able to replicate the location of the skip several times. It was a new disc but I made sure I cleaned it again with a nice disc cleaning hand towel. No scratches or smudges but it continued to skip in the same place. I tried bitstream but for some reason there was no sound on my tv. Then I tried downconverted pcm and I think it sounded like crap, but there was no skip. The dvd player was on auto to start with, so I tried just straight pcm. No skip again. I tried 3 parts of the movie that I had problems with each time and I had no skip. I was amazed, and I'm hoping my luck holds out.

It would interesting to know if certain HD-X/A1/D1 settings in the player cause these problems, as everyone will have these players configured differently.

I wonder if audio enabled settings like "Dynamic Range" and Dialog Enhancement" or other type of settings cause these issues?

...Angelo

I had no problems until I upgraded my firmware to play King Kong, ever since then it skips occasionally on movies it never did before.. Seriously disappointing, I just hope this is a software issue and not a hardware one. I know it's not dirty discs anyways it skips on brand new movies out of the box. It's not frequent enough to warrant a return and anyways since I bought it from the US and I'm Canadian the warranty is no good. So I'll just pray the drive doesn't fail like others have had happen

It has it's days...I'm watching Meet the Parents and I had to restart the movie because of Drop Out/Sync issue...this is the first in a while too.

mine skipped the other day but i had it on since 10 am till 1 am and the last disc i poped in only in the menu skipped and thats about it. so i still voted it skips

had the family over but since then i havent turned it on.

You have chosen wisely. I too will do the same until A. I get a 2nd generation player or B. a non skipping player. Was never my intention to do this however I keep hoping the firmware upgrades work but it seems they only improve things but not fix skipping problems.

Like said I did a hard restart about 5 discs ago and so far flawless playback of HDDVDs.
I just use my player for HDDVDs. So I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it

I've had skipping on about 80% of the HD DVDs I've watched. I have hardware version 2.0. VERY frustrating.

I'm in the same boat as Patrick. I just upgraded from 1.2 to 2.0 today, so that I could watch King Kong. Had at least 6 skips during the first hour of King Kong. It played the last 10 that I watched virtually perfectly so I am really hoping I didn't shoot myself in the foot by doing this upgrade.
I bought the extended warranty here in Canada from Future Shop, so theoretically, I am covered if the player gets worse.
The picture is fantastic but it really does seem to me that the A1 was rushed to market without proper quality control.

My A1 also skips often. It is a bummer to have to pause the film in order to make the audio sync back up to the film. I hope a firmware update fixes it

So William, did this work for you??

Yeah, I agree. I popped in Dune a few weeks ago to watch on my A1 and i couldn't get past the first 5 minutes. Luckily I also have the 360 add-on and it worked fine in there.
I hope Toshiba will release something.

I have the A1 and the only skipping I have is on Tomb Raider. The interesting thing is that if you play it in DTS all is fine, but in DD+ the skipping happens again. All other movies are fine. Strange!

The only HD DVD discs i buy now are Universal.I will also pick up a BR player within the next 2 weeks for the other studios.
Not sure who should foot the blame for the skipping, Nec for making a dodgy drive or Tosh for allowing that drive to be used in the A1/XA1, either way i'm sure i'm not the only one who has decided to give HD DVD a rest and try the other sides hardware & software.

If I were you, while the HD DVD player is "resting" why not send it in to Toshiba repair for a drive replace/fix? A lot of us (2/3's?) have not had problems, and some who did, no longer do after Toshiba service.

Sorry you got a problem unit.

Wish i could ! alot of us imported players so the warranties were less than stella.To be clear i don't see eny issue on the software side, i think they (studios)have done wonders with the HD DVD format.

Yep, unfortunatly my player still skips/freezes on many disc's. I clean every disc with Plexus spray before use but it still happens.

I have no complaints at all about boot-up time, its faster then my projector and not as noisey as my Panny BR player

When someone says his player skips I always think of what happens when a drunk fat chick gets a little too (edit-spelling) physical on the dance floor while the CD is playing. Or from back in my day when a vinyl disc was playing.

Would someone please describe 'skip' to me. Does your player go past part of the content without playing it? Does it hang up in one spot and repeat a sequence? Does it completely miss a chapter? Or is the word 'skip' simply a generalized term for anything abnormal that happens during playback?

My A1 (version 2.0) works fine except for scratched up discs. It will stumble on a scratch sometimes. The picture freezes, audio stops but the counter keeps going. That's a fatal crash for me and I have to get out of my chair. Slightly scratched discs usually play just fine. I'm amazed at some of the ones from Netflix that play well.

A few times the audio has lost sync with the video. A brief pause will fix that. I have seen that same problem with my old standard DVD players, especially if I pause a movie for a long time. With those players pressing stop and start would fix the sync issue. I learned that trick from my kid.

I love my A1 but I would buy a XA2 in a heartbeat if I had the money. But I wouldn't trade my A1 for an A2. If I felt my A1 was broken I would send it for repairs.

-Byrd

Oh, by the way, the other format is not immune to this kind of behavior. The PS3 has become a chronic 'skipper' after a 1.5 firmware upgrade. Lots of crying over on those threads.
Even the hugely overpriced Pioneer Elite has issues. The equipment is all new and we are pioneers.

-Byrd

My A1 skips a lot (badly). Other than that I like the built of the player compared with A2, and I do need the 5.1 analog out. Since it is an ide hr1100a (NEC) drive inside, could one buy a 360 add-on (for ~$180 or less) and swap the drives? Still a cheaper option for me than buying a new XA2 (I don't think I can sell the A1 due to its condition). Anyone had looked into this?

Not according to the service manual. In fact just replacing the HR-1100A NEC drive with another one requires the service tech to contact Toshiba and get a new crypto ID thingy (to satisfy AACS) and enter it. Not simple for Joe Blow.

If you really want a true factual poll, you would do well to conduct an open poll in which every voter would be readily seen.

Polls like these invite members who do not own, or hate HD DVD, to vote without been identified.