[Charles_I]

I have a title that won't play. When I go to play or edit it tries to play the first second and then stops and displays 0 time. I did one edit at the start of the program before this happened to remove a lead-in commercial (which I do all the time without any problem). In this case it seems that the Philips doesn't know where the start point/marker is. I've seen discussions about this before and solutions but I can't find them in the search. I tried renaming the title and it took the rename but it didn't help. If the solution is to remove all the other titles I'll have to wait until I can. I only have 6 or 7 on the hard drive at the moment and this one is number 2.

Thanks
Charles

 

[7558037]

See if you can Divide that title shortly after its start point (10-sec or so, maybe more?) and see if the split-off portion will play? At least this will show if the "Edit" option is still active on that title.

 

[Charles_I]

Sadly, it didn't work. As soon as I go into Edit the time shows zero. I can't Play, or Divide, or Pause. It just shows the play icon with a black screen but won't move. I can back out of it with the back button though without having to shut down and I can go into other titles. I might have to remove everything else and see if it'll go at that point.

 

[7558037]

I doubt that removing the other titles will help. I remember these older machines could record a "zero" title that was hard to get rid of... it would usually be the result of stopping a recording while the REC/red-dot was being displayed.

It might be worth a try to do two resets to see if they straighten out the zero problem:

Reset 2 (Soft Reset) here. See if this helps but if not, do Reset 3.

Reset 3 (Hard Reset). Before doing this reset, write down or take a pic of your timer programs since this reset deletes the clock and timers.

If these don't work, you might have to delete that title... this can turn out to be more difficult than expected.

 

[Charles_I]

I know I posted this quite a long time ago, but it took me several months to clear off all the titles ahead of the problematic one and then I forgot about this post for awhile. I did solve the problem, so I thought I should post the outcome.

Eventually, I removed everything other than the title that wouldn't play and as Wajo suspected, it didn't make any difference - the title would still not play. I tried a soft and hard boot a couple of times each and that didn't work either. However, I did manage to solve the problem by accident. One day I walked away from the unit with the title that wouldn't play in Edit mode and the usual 00 displayed on the timeline - despite the fact that this was a program that ran for several hours. I think I had forgotten that I left it in Edit mode and went away to do something else. When I came back, about 10 to 15 minutes later, to my amazement, the title was playing! At that point I was able to divide several minutes off the front and delete the starting portion. Once that was done I could edit the rest of it - which was what I wanted.

So if anyone else ever runs into this problem - frozen title that won't play - try going into Edit, pressing Play and then leave it like that for a long time. My guess is that the start point was lost and that even though it looked as if the unit was doing nothing it was actually searching the hard drive until it found it.

Now if I can only solve the noise that the hard drive makes - like a small airplane. It was very quiet when I first bought it, but at some point along the way it developed this noise. I opened the case at one point and determined that it is the hard drive whirring away. I don't think I've ever heard a computer hard drive do that. Maybe I should try Wajo's hard drive replacement trick. It's just that everything has been working for many months since the frozen title happened without incident, so I hate to try it in case it doesn't work again.

 

[7558037]

...
Now if I can only solve the noise that the hard drive makes - like a small airplane. It was very quiet when I first bought it, but at some point along the way it developed this noise. I opened the case at one point and determined that it is the hard drive whirring away. I don't think I've ever heard a computer hard drive do that. Maybe I should try Wajo's hard drive replacement trick. It's just that everything has been working for many months since the frozen title happened without incident, so I hate to try it in case it doesn't work again.

Are you sure it's not the fan? I'd try pressing on the top of the case in diff. spots to see if you can silence or change the sound, which could indicate a "loose" fan (loose-fan check here) or bad bearing (fan replacement procedure here).