Take part in a short activity and share your valuable opinion on new design concepts for AVSForum! >>> Click Here
Our native mobile app has a new name: Fora Communities. Learn more.

Replay editing olympics for me?

140 Views 17 Replies 11 Participants Last post by PRMan, Sep 26, 2000

DrStrange

Discussion Starter · Sep 18, 2000

Im watching womens gymnastics live/buffered and I notice my Replay keeps dropping 1-2 second chunks of video. In the past hour or so it's done it a dozen times at least. The skip occurs on replaying as well so it looks dropped from record, not just playback. The skipped chunks are present and healthy on my Tivos so it's not my signal or NBC.

I've watched plenty of recorded shows on the Replay and not seen skips in any of them but I seem to recall seeing it once or twice before on live TV. But this is the first time I've 1) watched enough live TV to care, and 2) had a Tivo watching the same thing so I could definitely say it's the Replay.

Has anyone else seen this?

Status: Not open for further replies.

1 - 18 of 18 Posts

klmay

· #2 · Sep 18, 2000

YES, I have seen this and it is very aggravating.

I had some friends over watching the Raider game and it did this several times. It is very hard to get others interested in Replay TV when it acts like this when it counts.

I am sure there will be several people who will say "MY Replay NEVER does that.", but that does not mean there is not a problem. Either 1)They are not that aware 2) Are really lucky and somehow got a setup that really works well.

I know Replay is working on an update that should take care of this, as well as some other minor annoyances.

So for now... Keep the faith!

See less See more

DrStrange

Discussion Starter · #3 · Sep 18, 2000

During the Today show this morning the Replay is still doing it, and each time it jumps the audio drops out of sync. It probably did that last night too but I wouldn't have noticed since most of the speaking during olympic coverage is done by faceless announcers. So this seems to be the same problem I mentioned here and had probably always been a problem had I just watched enough live TV on the Replay to notice it.

It also seems to do it only when I'm behind live, not caught up.

jleavens

· #4 · Sep 18, 2000

Have you tried turning off the Replay or watching the direct feed on another input to see if there's any interruption of the signal?

There was a huge solar flare recently, and you can expect to see a lot of communication problems over the next few days (it started showing up late last week).

DrStrange

Discussion Starter · #5 · Sep 18, 2000

Quote:

Originally posted by jleavens:

Have you tried turning off the Replay or watching the direct feed on another input to see if there's any interruption of the signal?

As I said, my Tivos were tuned to the same thing and played the stuff the Replay skipped just fine. I'll try turning the Replay off tonight when it acts up but thats too cumbersome to be a real fix. It's much easier to just use a Tivo.

Jeff D

· #6 · Sep 18, 2000

I too had the same problem during the opening night. I had friends over and watched as we were waiting for others to show up. I was recording it for my gfriend. And it kept having problems, the sound would drop out and the video would freeze up and then a second or two later, back to normal.

I thought it was just me.

rbienstock

· #7 · Sep 18, 2000

I have two replay units, a 2004 and a 3030 and both of these were exhibiting the same exact problem. I've never had this before, but I do now with the Olympics. I have a guess, which is that the glitches are caused by using QuickSkip to advance through commercials and that the reason why the problem seems so much worse with Olympics coverage is that the Olympics have very frequent very short commercial breaks (it seems that they are all 2 minutes long and occur at no more than 10 minute intervals).

Chris Myers

· #8 · Sep 18, 2000

I've had these kinds of dropouts several times in the past week while watching live TV (buffered through the box) on crystal-clear broadcast channels received with a rooftop antenna. It happened during a football game yesterday and it's happened during the Olympics a few times.

I can't recall whether the problem's happened with programming from satellite or not. With the Dish, it's possible that the dropouts are on their end. The OTA signals were rock-solid, though, and I don't think they were blipping on me as often as the ReplayTV seemed to think.

PRMan

· #9 · Sep 19, 2000

I had the same problem. Eventually, when I hit QuickSkip, the unit froze entirely. I had to reboot it. When I went back watched the recording that was being made at the time, it had all these dropouts. The recording that picked up after the reboot did not have these glitches (only once near the very beginning of the picked up recording).

I agree that it might be Quickskip related. I was using it an awful lot to skip all the boring in-studio parts and many of the athlete profiles in addition to the commercials.

------------------

PRMan

ken.kipnes

· #10 · Sep 19, 2000

I've had this problem on several occasions on both my machines over the past few days. In addition, a friend asked me today about it. I wonder how all of our machines got "infected" at the same time. Seems weird

-ken

Jeff D

· #11 · Sep 20, 2000

Anybody notice a software upgrade in the past week that could be the cause? Replay hasn't chimed in here, wonder if they've noticed it to and are hard at work on a fix?

Michael Gwynn

· #12 · Sep 20, 2000

Quote:

Originally posted by ReplayMike:
2) Jeff: no software upgrade has been released since 2.1.

We are definitely working on a fix, so please bear with us a little bit longer. We want to be sure to give the fix plenty of testing.

Oh, go ahead and give us whatever you've got cobbled together. This approach works so darn well for our good friends in Redmond.

Actually, I'm serious... we'll test it for you. Thousands of tests in just 24 hours, think about it!

See less See more

riker

· #13 · Sep 20, 2000

They already have a beta tester program... Guess you missed the memo http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

------------------

-=- Glenn -=-

MikeNY718

· #14 · Sep 24, 2000

I have the same problem, too. In fact, it's very frequent. I've found that I never have any problems with live TV or pre-recorded shows from my ReplayGuide. The problem only happens with delayed TV. My original guess (though I'm no techie) was that the processor probably gets backed up sometimes when it has to both record/compress and play/decompress at the same time, but if that were the case, it would have that problem during live TV, since you're always watching it on delay.

It doesn't bother me that much, but I usually get a sync problem after it happens that I have to fix by pausing/unpausing the unit.

DrStrange

Discussion Starter · #15 · Sep 25, 2000

As it happens I just cleared nearly everything from my Replay today, yet it just skipped again during the Olympics, twice in the last couple of minutes. I'm watching live delayed just as before. Pause time remaining is 9 hours 22 mins.

I still have seen no skips in any prerecorded shows, including all the stuff I watched today.

[This message has been edited by DrStrange (edited 09-24-2000).]

MikeNY718

· #16 · Sep 25, 2000

Quote:

Originally posted by ReplayMike:
Hi Mike,

Out of curiosity, is your disk typically pretty full when you see that problem? The simplest way to answer that question is to tell me how much Pause time you see in the countdown when you hit Pause on live TV.

I don't know if it was always full whenever it happened, but in the last week or so, I've had about 2 1/2 to 3 hours remaining in the countdown. Is there some correlation?

Michael Gwynn

· #17 · Sep 26, 2000

Quote:

Originally posted by RMyers:
I've never seen this happen on my Replay, but it sounds to me like the disk is fragmented. Does the Replay perform defrags when not in use?

Rick

Didn't we hear somewhere that the OS used by RTV doesn't require defragging? And is that even possible that this could be true?

How could it NOT start fragmenting files as more and more stuff was recorded and deleted, as the months go by... or else it's wasting storage space.

How does Tivo defrag?

See less See more

PRMan

· #18 · Sep 26, 2000

I had it lock up again last night. Here are some interesting things to think about for debugging purposes:

My unit was completely empty as recently as 2 days ago, so fragmentation of the data partition is probably not contributing to my problem.
Both times it locked up, I was watching the morning Olympic show while the evening was recording, and then immediately picked up on the evening show when I was done (more than 2 straight hours into watching while recording).
Both times it locked up was on a QuickSkip that was about my 20th in a row.
This time, I felt the top of the unit and it was pretty hot, but I could leave my hand on it as long as I wanted, so not that hot. Only the left top was hot to the touch, the right top was cool. It's not as hot this morning as it was last night when it locked up, so it could be a heat issue. I only have my cable box on top of it and it's small enough not to cover the vents. It runs cool to the touch, so I don't think stacking is the problem. It's not in a cabinet or anything, just sitting on top of the big screen. My VCR is under it.

I think I'll rig up a fan and see whether I can make this go away.

------------------

PRMan

[This message has been edited by PRMan (edited 09-26-2000).]

See less See more

1 - 18 of 18 Posts

Status: Not open for further replies.