[echeal]

I'm having a minor problem with my 3 week old Pioneer Elite PRO-HD910 plasma. It seems that the DTV tuner in the media box is a little flakey, and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this on their HD910 or HD1110 (which has the same media box).


Lately, after hooking up an antenna for OTA DTV and doing the DTV setup (which appeared to work fine), *sometimes* on startup the orange standby light on the media box will blink slowly for a couple minutes (plasma and media box green power lights both ON). All inputs *except* DTV work fine all the time, but when in this "blinking" state, the DTV input yields a blank (dark) screen. If I try to go to DTV options via the menu, I can't get to the DTV settings screen, it just goes blank when I select DTV options. If I turn-on the TV with the DTV already selected (in the shutdown state), I sometimes get a dark screen with the message "please wait, plasma unit not ready" (or some such thing, I forget the exact wording). After a minute or two, DTV may start working, or may not (I've seen it happen both ways). When it doesn't work, I just get the dark screen when selecting DTV, DTV channels can't be tuned, and I can't access the DTV settings via the menu. Cycling the plasma and media box "fixes" it, usually.


BTW, the manual doesn't list the "both power [green] lights on, media box standby [orange] light blinking" as one of the "normal" states, and its also not mentioned in the troubleshooting section.


If others aren't seeing this, I guess its time for a service call. Ugh.


TIA,

 

[echeal]

FWIW, I called Pioneer, and according to the tech, this was not "a known issue". I'll be getting a service call soon.

 

[bbm3]

I can't help with the OTA issue. I use my STB for that. I found the Pio media box was not as sensitive.

The orange standby LED will flash during normal operation if the clock is not set.

 

[echeal]

Quote:

Originally posted by bbm3 I can't help with the OTA issue. I use my STB for that. I found the Pio media box was not as sensitive. The orange standby LED will flash during normal operation if the clock is not set.

Ahh, thanks for the tip about the orange standby light, I had the clock set to "auto", but I had disconnected the standard antenna input (had no need for it). Manually setting the time made the orange lite stop flashing, but the DTV tuner behavior hasn't changed (still flakey).

 

[echeal]

Ok, looks like I found the problem. Believe it or not, it seems that my Harmony remote (programmable universal remote) was causing the malfunction. Using the Harmony to "change activities" to DTV (IOW, execute a macro that includes changing inputs on the HD910 to DTV) would somehow confuse the Pio media box to the point that the DTV function no longer worked, and required cycling the unit to make it work again. Tweaking the various settings on the remote (input switch delay, command repeat, interkey delay, etc), I've got the remote working fine now, and the DTV tuner in the media box has been reliable ever since. Its surprising to me that some combination of IR signals (perhaps too many commands, too fast) could put the media box into such a funk, such that the DTV tuner no longer appears to work (black screen, can't tune, etc, as described above), and that includes trying to make it work with the Pio remote, but thats the way it appears. And BTW, using macros to switch to other inputs worked fine, all the time, no tweaking required. The problem only occured when switching to DTV.


So the moral of the story is, if using macros on a programmable remote to switch the HD910 (and presumably the HD1110) into DTV mode, you *may* have similar problems. Or maybe not.