DirecTV HD DVR - HR20/HR21/HR22/HR23 Master Topic - Page 86  

You upgraded Vista and started having a problem. How could that sound like an HR-21 issue? Media Share won't stay enabled on the system that was upgraded ... again, what does that point to? How to fix it ... maybe Microsoft knows. One way that sounds reasonable though is to do a System Restore to a point before the "upgrade" ... or downgrade as it may more seem to be. Putting the system back to prior to the upgrade may resolve the issue you are having ... and then waiting until Microsoft comes out with a fix to another of their blunders before upgrading to another over-secured security upgrade.

I agree--my assumption was that this was aVista problem, actually...although there have been many times in the past when the HR21/20s have "dropped" the media streaming to it...

Just wanted to make sure that hter ewas not a recent upgrad ein firmware on the HR20/21 that could be a culprit as well...

Also, I am thinking of upgrading my Netgear (g) router to an N type for stability and range reasons...is (n) all that it is cracked up to be--and will it solve the occasional "dropping" of media streams? here is my current setup:

netgear WGT624 (router)
netgear WGPS606 (wirless print server--used as an ethernet bridge for the HR21)
netgear WGPS606 (wirless print server--used as an ethernet bridge for the HR20)--yes, I use two of them;
Netgear MP101
HP laptop with integrated (g) wireless

The DirecTV2PC app works much better with the "N" type router.
My Vista is current [updates] and still works with media share to DVR [going the other way].

What is Directv2pC?

"Something coming" that lets you play recordings from your HD DVR on a PC through your home network.

Is this a good thread in which to report HR21 bugs? (Yeah, I know that DBSTalk has version-specific "Issues" threads, but I prefer AVSForum for many reasons.)

I've had an HR21 for less than a week, but I've already identified a handful of bugs (as well as a large collection of design deficiencies) -- but I'll report just one fat bug for now:

Last night two recordings on Minneapolis's channel 11 (KARE-HD) were totally black. I tried playing them from the Playlist with Play and also with Select, Select and they always had the correct length, but were blank from beginning to end (at FFx4). There were no error messages of any kind, either in the picture or in the detailed description.

The programs:
Sat 8/16 10:00p (duration 0:30) KARE 11 News at 10
Sat 8/16 11:30p (duration 1:30) XXIX Summer Olympics

Also, when I used the Stop key to quit the first program, the system froze with a totally blank screen; a second Stop worked as it should.

Each program seemed to occupy the correct amount of space for Mpeg4/HD programs: 1% for the news show and 4% for the 90 minutes of Olympics.

HR21-100 -- version 0x0255

I have no idea if DirecTV even reads this forum, but "I know" they do read those at DBSTalk.

Yep .. who are you looking to report them to? Not DIRECTV I hope. We're just people like you here, no official folk.

OK, guys, I guess you're both right. DBSTalk it is. Denizens of that forum are pretty certain that DirecTV folk read the bug reports and feature requests there.

BTW, I'm pretty sure it'd be a waste of time to post anything at the forum on the DirecTV.com website. One of their CSRs told me emphatically that she's been told to stay away from that forum. (!) Not many ordinary people post there either, probably because the type is so small and hard to read (and the pages are narrow enough to fit on a PDA).

I have a similar situation, and don't know what upgrade did it, Windows or DirecTV. In any case, I used to be able to view my photos and never video. I guess I need to tweak the crap out of the computer to make it work. I don't know, don't care either. But my photos pretty much quit working. There is an attempt to load pictures, but as I navigate I eventually get an "unable to access media" then following that is "Unable to fine me, reconnect to the network and try again." Sadly enough, it still shows connected on the info screen. Then the Music, Photos & More entry is removed from my main menu. I have to restart the HR21 for the item to become available once again, only to have it repeat itself. Sometimes pictures will play, but it usually fails before I get a chance to start a slide show. Music seems to still work though.

Frustrating when something won't work as advertised.

I can Guarantee that DirecTV reads the DBSTalk forums, daily.
You may not see a reply "from" DirecTV, but several posters do work for DirecTV, in various positions and if you read their posts, you can see that they're "informed".

I have a new HR21 hooked up to a new plasma tv. I have HDMI from the HR21 to the TV and an optical cable from the HR21 to my AVR. When using the TV for sound there is no lag as the audio and video are in sync. But when I use the AVR for sound the sound coming from the AVR is slightly ahead of the video. Has anyone else encountered this problem? is there a way to fix it through settings?

I will be getting DirecTV with HD DVR installed soon and I was wondering if they now bring with them the HR21 or do they still give you the older HR20. DirecTV doesn't carry my local CW so the tuner on the HR20 would be nice or I'll have to get the $60 USB tuner adapter. Also, will the guy that installs the satillite and HD DVRs have any touble setting them up with no HDTVs in the house? I'm moving from my apartment into my brothers house and I want to get this set up before my TV will be there and my brother will get an HDTV a little later on (no point in having them come then if we can set up both now).

While you may get a HR20, it all depends on what the installer has on the truck (and it would probably be a refurb if he does have one). However the HR21 has the AM21 ATSC tuner add on available now from the DirecTV web site, $50.00. If you're signing up you might want to see if they'll give you the AM21 for free, tell them you watch the CW a lot and really want to see it in HD, maybe you'll get lucky.

No, you don't need a HD set to complete an installation, you can use either a composite or s-video connection to the TV (it needs one of those two input types, no RF/coax output on the HD set top boxes).

You should find if you post at the DirecTV tech forum your question gets answered. Maybe even by me (since I am one of the tech guides on the forum). DirecTV employees are not allowed to post on the forum, hence the comment by the CSR, (or indeed on dbstalk or any other forum - except for one or two specially authorized employees) but I can assure you that the direcTV forum is monitored by some senior DirecTV technical people.

On some AVRs you can set a delay time. Most of the newer ones can.

I have had an HR21 for about a month now. It is working fine except for one thing... the clock is about one minute behind real time, which causes all of my recordings to start a minute late. I know I can set the recordings to start a minute early as a qiuck fix, but I cannot set them to end a minute early (only later). This causes the machine to not record a second show with the early start that immediately follows the first on the same channel. Changing the series recordings back to "On Time" corrects that issue, but everything starts and ends late by that minute the clock is off.

Is there a way to get the clock back on time?

Thanks...

I'd like to know how to do that too.

Why is this even an issue? It certainly wasn't on my TiVos. (I believe TiVo systems re-synch the time very frequently -- at least when the data comes from satellite.)

I have an older Sony AVR (10 years old) and I don't think I have this ability. There is a setting for "screen depth" but I can't figure out what that does. The reason I thought this was an issue/setting with the HR21 is because I have the same setup wth my PS3 (HDMI to TV, optical to AVR) and I don't have this issue. Sound and video are perfectly synced.

I seem to have resolved the clock issue with a reset. I did the one on the service menu. It takes maybe five minutes to do this, but after the reset, the clock is now accurate. I hope I don't have to do this very often. I am also a transplant from TiVo where this never seemed to be a problem.

I went out to dbstalk.com and apparently this is a huge and widespread issue - lots of threads deal with this. The audio is ahead of the video on most HD channels. Sounds like a problem with HD no matter the source - directv, dish, FIOS, etc all have this problem. Here is a quote from that forum:

"The problem is not necesarily DirecTVs to fix, although DirecTV has its part to play. You will see similar posts about audio-video sync on dish, digital cable and FIOS forums, and on forums discussing both hi-def DVDs and video processing in general. If you do a google search on A/V sync TV, you will find lots of references, including this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/V_sync and this http://tvtech.com/pages/s.0076/t.1814.html

And a quote this year from the Director of Engineering at Iowa Public Television;
QUOTE There are actually engineering working groups (I am on several of them) that are working within the industry to create a set of standards and recommended practices to address this issue. A/V sync problems have been around for decades, but in the past, the audio usually lagged behind the video and our brains are accustomed to seeing something and then hearing the sound because in nature, sound travels slower than light and we have adapted to that. Most of the time in DTV, the sound is ahead of the video and that is very unnatural and it doesn't have to be very far off for us to notice. We are currently in the process of renovating our production facility for HD production and we are giving exceptional attention to insuring that audio and video signals travel through are systems in sync. This is not to say there won't be problems but we are working dilligently to correct them. UNQUOTE


The problem is that even if the audio and video are synced correctly at the source (and often they are not), with digital signals the audio and video are not tied together through the various stages of transmission, reception and display. Every time the digital video and audio goes through any processing , the data accumulates in queues and buffers and all these cause delays, and they are different for audio and video. This buffering, particularly of video, happens at the station, in the distribution system between the station and DirecTV, in DirecTVs transmission system, the satellite, the DirecTV receiver and the TV itself. Some TVs are notorious for adding as much as a second of delay to the video. And the delays in HD are much worse than in SD because of the large amount of data.
There is no easy fix for this, especially since the delays involved in your equipment setup will be different from mine, that's one reason why some people see poor A/V sync and others watching the same channel don't..

The TV stations/channels are getting better at anticipating what the delays might be (and for those channels new to HD, there will be a learning curve). There are new proposals for adding data to the audio stream so that the audio and video can be synced later in the process. Some A/V receivers allow you to adjust the audio/video sync, you can also buy add-on boxes to adjust A/V sync ($500 or so). And the latest release of HDMI, HDMI 1.3, has A/V sync adjustment capabilities using an interface between the TV and the A/V receiver..

DirecTV can contribute to improving A/V sync by reducing the amount of buffering in the various stages of processing. The H20 and HR20 buffering, including the MPEG-4 decoders, can become more efficient. But I don't see a complete solution to this problem without introducing some changes in the way audio and video are handled through the processing chain."

Now tell me again how HD is supposed to be better than SD? At least SD knew how to make sure the audio was synced with the video! Wouldn't that be a basic requirement?

Why can't the direcTV/dishTV/Cable boxes implement A/V syncing (not automatic, just allowing the user to manually adjust the delay of the audio)? I've been able to do this on my HTPCs for years, without having to rely on my receiver to be able to do it.

Is there a qualitative (compressed) difference between watching live and playing back after being DVR'd? Thanks!

I don't think so. I haven't noticed it. Even LiveTV is recorded...

Does anyone know when the AM21 atsc tuners will be available? The direct tv site only states that they will be available soon.

They've been available for a couple of months. You need to have a HR21 or HR22 installed on your account already then if you go to order equipment and kits the AM21 should be listed there for order, $50.00.

It takes eight minutes to do a reset from the service menu on my HR21. I hope there's a better way.

It would be technically possible to delay the digital audio bitstream but there would be some issues. First, let's take the normal case where the audio and video bitstreams leave the DirecTV box in sync, and delay issues are created in the TV, because the video takes longer than the audio to process. Most TVs compensate for this by having a delay on the audio, often varying according to the amount of video processing that is done. So 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i could have different delays.The reason why the A/V receiver is out of sync with the video is that the A/V receiver does not know how much delay to make to the audio. If you delayed the digital bitstream in the DirecTV box, the delay circuitry in the TV would not work correctly. So if you had multiple TVs connected to the DirecTV box, only the one with audio from the A/V receiver would be in sync. A much better solution is to use the capabilities included in a full HDMI 1.3 implementation. There, the TV sends a message to the A/V receiver to tell the A/V receiver how much delay to make to the audio to allow for the TV's video processing. Add to that a delay override in the A/V receiver to let you manually compensate for a program whose sync is wrong from the source, and you have what is probably the best short-term solution (short-term meaning until the industry produces a way of linking audio and video together). But it is still not a complete fix. There is a great thread talking about some of the issues http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...php?p=11030665

See also http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/thomas.../042207HDMI13/

But to do this you need a TV and an A/V receiver both implementing full HDMI 1.3 audio capability and most TVs (in particular) don't provide that feature.

Yes, I understand all that. That is why I wouldn't want automatic or set delays, but ways to manually adjust it (on the fly). Having the ability to manually adjust the delay would still solve all delay problems that I have with my current setup. The way it works on my htpc is I can adjust the audio delay in real time while I'm watching programming. This is just a quick way for me to adjust for those times when audio is off on only one program or station, and it is specific to that viewing, meaning I can change it on the fly to compensate for the differences in sources and outputs that you mentioned, and if I change what I am watching the delay setting go away (and I can manually change them again with my remote if the new programming I'm watching is off). To me this is favorable to manually adjusting it on my receiver because my receiver would adjust it universally for that input source, which would mess up the audio more often than it would help, for the reasons you mentioned. this handles the case where the direcTV signal is out of sync and where the TV/Receiver have delays in processing.

So I can watch a show, figure out in the first minute the audio is off (for whatever reason) adjust the audio delay, and that adjustment doesn't affect anything else that I watch after that.

Longtime MPEG4-curious lurker asks:

So these two PPV movies that mysteriously appeared under the "movies now" tab overnight on my shiny new HR21 are just "offerings" yes? No charge unless you actually purchase and view them?

Or has my dog been up to no good.