Forum Discussion

Drumbeat's avatar
Drumbeat
Dialled in
2 years ago

Tivo Recordings Breaking Up

A Virgin engineer visited my home a few weeks ago to sort out a problem with live TV pictures (breaking up / pixelating). He changed some cable and this seems to have sorted the problem. However, I now have a problem with recordings made on the Tivo box. On playback, there is so much breaking up / pixelating, that it is difficult to watch the recordings, which are worse on Channel 4 and Channel 5 recordings.

Looking elsewhere in this forum it has been suggested to those with similar problems to pause live TV , then resume, to see if any breaking up occurs. In my case, it doesn't. It's on the recordings only.

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person
    2 years ago

    The two sources of picture breakup & pixellation would either be an incoming signal fault, or a hard drive issue.

    If the fault is on the incoming broadcast TV signal, then it will generally affect the live feed of all channels carried on the affected frequency - this will not correlate to any block on the EPG.

    If the fault is on the hard drive, it will affect all recorded content which is the purpose of the HDD. Paused TV and recordings, both use the hard drive.

    If you're certain that only recordings from certain channels are affected, and the live broadcast feed is fine - the only potential conclusion I can see is that certain sectors of the HDD are at fault, and particular recordings happen to have used those clusters. The more severe the problem, the more clusters are affected and thus the less likely this theory is to hold true.

    • Drumbeat's avatar
      Drumbeat
      Dialled in
      2 years ago

      Hi Japitts,

      Thanks for your reply. So, how do I go about getting the problem fixed? Will someone in this forum contact me to arrange an engineer visit, as has previously happened?

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person
    2 years ago

    If you don't mind waiting a few days, then yes. Fault reporting is either by calling in, or by staff response on this board.

    • Drumbeat's avatar
      Drumbeat
      Dialled in
      2 years ago

      Thank you. Just to let you (and others) know, ITV1's live programming was breaking up tonight, to such an extent that I had to watch the channel via Freeview on my TV set. This has got me thinking that the C4 and C5 recordings I previously wrote about, may well have had the same pixelation effect had I watched either channel live. That I will never know, but I do know the breaking up / pixelation is worsening.

  • Drumbeat's avatar
    Drumbeat
    Dialled in
    2 years ago

    I have just spoken to a Virgin agent over the phone, and he has arranged for a replacement box to be sent to me. Since messaging this forum yesterday, a few live TV channels have now become unwatchable... and I don't just mean their awful programmes.

    • Daniel_Et's avatar
      Daniel_Et
      Forum Team
      2 years ago

      Hi Drumbeat, thank you for your post.

      Please let us know how things are looking when you've received your replacement box.

      Regards,
      Daniel

      • Drumbeat's avatar
        Drumbeat
        Dialled in
        2 years ago

        Hi Daniel,

        Thank you for your message.

        The V6 box was delivered the afternoon following my phone call to Virgin. Everything seems to be OK regarding the picture, but there are a couple of peculiarities. The first is the volume for ITV1 is quite low, and there are times when I need to turn the TV's volume to near maximum (other channels are OK). Also, subtitles on BBC3  and BBC4 recordings do not appear on playback. They appear OK on live TV and, as far as I can tell, this problem is only with these two channels. But the picture breaking up seems to have been remedied with this new box.