[GTDaveMac]

Done some searching and can't find voice sync issues with the Replays (5000) themselves (vice during DVD records). On one of my refubs I noticed this once, and I think there may be some bad sectors which screws up the playback. Rewinding, restarting has no effect.. the voice stream cannot be realigned after that part of the show.


My father has a refurb and this has happened to him two nights in a row. I advised him to delete a few recordings to hopefully change where in a recording these bad sectrors are written to.


Anybody seen this? Could it be something else? I really don't want to have to walk him through a hard drive upgrade. I haven't done it myself... I know I could do it in a heartbeat, but many of you may know the difficulty of guiding someone over the phone, esp those that aren't as computer literate.


On another note, he just noticed that his 60 hour refurb is showing 64 hours free. (Said he has 8-10 recordings on it.) He didn't really notice the hours free when he got the unit. I didn't have time to get the serial number to ensure it was indeed a 5060 that they sent him, but do you think a previous owner could have repartitioned the drive? It wouldn't surprise me that this could get past the refurb quality control.

 

[Bargonaut]

I recently saw this same problem on my 5080. I could not find a way to trick the Replay into restoring A/V sync for that show. It is clearly a recording error, though I don't know if it was a HD error or simply an encoder glitch. If it starts to happen regularly, I'd be inclined to pull the HD, low-level format and restore the OS image.


Easier than an upgrade walkthrough by phone, I'd buy a new HD for your Dad, patch it and send it to him. Then all you have to walk him through is pulling the old drive and plugging in the new one.


-BS

 

[GTDaveMac]

Ah, didn't think about that. That would be significantly easier.

 

[Jeff D]

search for streamfix and see if that is the same problem you see. If so streamfix can fix the show, but it has to be off of the replay and served back to the replay with DVArchive.


There are documented cases where the 5k boxes will screw up a recording. There are a few issues, but the one documented in the streamfix thread is the most serious one.

 

[Paul Bruneau]

I have had a couple of those exact problems on my upgraded 5040/5250. I just figured the processor couldn't keep up when encoding and freaked out a bit. It was always accompanied by a couple seconds of black and then after that, loss of sync.


If it is caused by a sector problem, you are better off leaving that show on the drive until you do a low level format, because then the bad sector will always be "tied up" in that recording, and never released to foul up any new recordings. I think it would be difficult to tell if it was a sector problem though.

 

[GTDaveMac]

From the sounds of it, probably is the problem described in the streamfix thread. I have seen quick flashes of artifacts, and I thought that bad sectors was the obvious culprit. Now I understand that the 5000s simply aren't as stable as the showstoppers/3000s and sometimes the encoding just screws up a bit.


If this happens to me in the future, I will try the streamfix.

 

[Jeff D]

Paul if you get a chance and have a windows PC with DVA I'd love to know if stream fix works. Dave, it sounds like you're mac... if you are that may be a problem... I don't have a mac version at the momemnt and my mac is an 8500 running 9.1 so I wouldn't be able to get any OS X native app for you to use.


As for the problem, it's not a disk based problem. As best I can tell there is a problem in the encoding process, maybe with a clock chip or some error in the software that constructs the MPEG program streams. I'm really suspicious of the clock crystal. I've also noticed that between rev5 and rev7 motherboards DNNA uses a different clock crystal. This is a BIG hint at what may be the cause. =) I want to try to fix the problem, but it's hardware (replace the 48KHz clock crystal) and see if that helps. Crystals can be flakey.



As you can see, this isn't a very common problem, and to test it would be pretty hard even if I swapped the crystals. =?


So, feel free to delete the shows, it won't show up on the next program that records over those sectors.


The other thing is I've also noticed on several occasions the video just freezes for any specific period of time from 2-30 seconds. From the best I can tell this is a problem with the encoder, but I haven't been able to isolate the root cause here.

 

[GTDaveMac]

I am Mac, as in my last name starts with Mac... No Apple though.


If I see this problem ever again on my replay I will try the fix, and if it happens to my dad then I will try to get him to install DVA and bring his laptop to to the replay. He uses dial-up right now since he doesn't want to wire the Replay to his upstairs network.