Occasionally garbled video / audio - may be getting worse

English Bob

New Member
We recently bought a HDR-Fox T2 to replace our PVR9200 which was on the way out, and I linked it to our standard-def (I think - model number to follow if it's important) Sony TV via HDMI.

From the beginning, for about a minute after switching on, video was "blocky" and the sound stuttered. It cleared up of its own accord, and scheduled recordings weren't affected, so it was easily ignored. Now, however, the problem seems to be occurring more often, i.e. not necessarily at switch-on, but occasionally in the middle of viewing. So far I haven't seen a recording affected in this way, but that may just be luck.

The symptoms look a lot like decoding errors, the static video blocks in particular. When this happened yesterday, I called up the system menu to check signal strength, which was around 76-80%; but the quality indicator regularly fluctuated between 100% and 30%. It's normally steady at 100%. However the TV, which is on the antenna feed-through, had no such problems. It says its signal strength is 100%, although I realise the measurement methods will be different. We're very nearly line of sight to Sandy Heath, no more than 30km distant as the TV signal flies, so signal strength shouldn't be an issue; there may be reflections, but I don't understand why the TV would cope with them, but the Fox can't.

The PVR9200 is still plumbed into the TV's SCART so we can watch old recordings, but currently lacks an aerial. I intend to link it back in so that next time I see this problem, I can compare the quality readings.

I haven't found any reference to this problem elsewhere on the forum, but feel free to call me a noob if I've overlooked something. The language used to describe video errors can be as personal as that used in wine tasting. :)
 
First thing to check is that the aerial cabling isn't kinked and the joints are properly made. If there is a fly lead from an aerial socket to the Humax try a different one. For some reason that I have never understood the Humax boxes are particularly sensitive to bad joints etc which don't affect other boxes.
 
Thanks Martin. I've rearranged the aerial cabling as part of getting the PVR9200 back online anyway, so we'll see what happens. Either the problem will go away, or I'll get more information... ;)
 
I called up the system menu to check signal strength, which was around 76-80%; but the quality indicator regularly fluctuated between 100% and 30%. It's normally steady at 100%.
Does the signal strength ever hit 100%? If so, this will probably coincide with when the quality dips and suggests the input is being over-driven.
 
No, it's fairly consistent. It fluctuates a couple of percent either way, but there's no correlation I can see between the signal strength and the errors.
 
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