[Zuwadza]

I've been lurking here for over a year and a half now. This forum has been a gold mine for legitimate information on the Replay scene. Now I need to ask for all y'alls help.


I have a 3030 upgraded a couple of months ago to 80 hrs. w/ a 5400rpm drive. All was honky dorry up until I got home from work today. I turned on the RTV to record THE hockey game and got the "No Video Signal Detected" screen. Typically the Replay shows this screen for a couple of seconds after changing the channel on the digital tuner it is connected to. But today it went on, and on, and on... I started changing channels, and kept changing channels, but to no avail. My wife said she got to see her Y&R this morning with no problems.


So I changed the input to straight cable, eliminating the digital tuner. Same screen. Horrible pain. Next was routing my VCR's RCA cables to Inputs 1 and 2. Again, the hideous blue screen. So during the second peroid I had the unit unplugged, and plugged it back in during the intermission. Again the same problem.


So here is my assessment. The MPEG encoder chip is out. I don't think that there is any sort of diagnostic built into the unit to determine this from my end. Please, someone prove me wrong on this point. I want to know for sure what happened.


Now what I am asking all y'all is this. Is it as bleak as it sounds. If so, should I try to get the unit repaired/replaced by SonicBlue, or bite the bullet on this unit and get another one?

 

[Mikeyboy]

I wouldn't give up on it yet, still could be a software issue. If you still have the old drive put that one back in. If it works do a 777 zones "restore factory default" on the new one. You will lose all recordings and have to run setup.


Whether to get it serviced by SonicBlue is best left to you to decide.

 

[TimSH]

This may be a silly question, but it's not clear from your posting...


Have you tried just rebooting the unit?

 

[Zuwadza]

TimSH,


I did a hard reboot by unplugging the unit and leaving it that way for about 40 minutes, giving the unit time to cool down. I also have the unit in an entertainment center that had the black cardboard back with the perforated holes for the cables, but it also had a perforation that made just one big hole that only leaves a border around the back. I took that out so that not only would the RTV unit cool down, but also decrease the temperature for the other components (Tuner, Cassette Deck, VCR, Digital Cable and a 5-disc DVD player). The setup has been the same for nearly two years.


After the second period, I tried to watch live TV with the unit again, but again it was not showing anything. So after the game, I tried '243-Zones' and checked the memory. I had about 193K showing, so I think I was OK there. I was not quite ready to do a '777-Zones' rebuild yet because I wanted to get the HBO 9/11 program onto tape, everything else was expendable. So I fiddled a bit with the menu and deleted the Channel Guide and forced a network connection. The re-connect was going verrrrry slow so I went to bed, with nothing but the RTV unit on.


This morning, I checked the unit to see if the symptoms were still there. To my surprise, all was well. WTFO! I checked all the local channels and a few of the digital channels, and it was working as it should. So now I am confused whether this was a hardware problem (overheating) or a software problem, though I don't know how the software could have been affected during the day when it recorded and played only one soap opera.

 

[GatewayTony]

Sounds like it was probably overheating to me.


Before I bought my Replay, I had one of those back panels on my stereo/VCR/Laserdisc/DVD setup and I found that my Laserdisc player would actually shut down because of the heat and that my Receiver would "skip" ( the sound would shut off for a few seconds then come back). Removing the back panel stopped most of those problems, though the receiver still has problems on a loud movie towards the end. (I'm working on getting a fan in there.)