Picture Pixelation

[Bob_Jankers]

Hi.

Our TV picture breaks up on a daily basis and appears pixilated.  Sometimes it briefly displays "Channel Failed" before resuming.  It happens on any TV channel at any time, day or night.  Not sure if this is normal as we've only recently joined VM. We use the 360 box with 100Mb/s broadband.

I don't think it's related to signal strength as switching to a standard aerial through my TV works without any problems.

Do we need to book an engineer already?

Thanks

[japitts]

Do you get any similar problems with C4+1 (CH 142 outside London) or C4-HD (141 outside London)?

[roy247]

Hi Bob,

Sorry to see you are still having problems, did the AFM's actually recognise a problem or is it a case of try swapping something to narrow things down. Was the cable replaced from the box to the house ? I assume internal cabling has already been replaced.

Assuming everything has been replaced from the cabinet to your TV, and I would have thought they would have swapped connections in the cabinet before replacing the street cable, it doesn't leave much, the distribution unit in the cabinet or the signal reaching it.

You did say in an earlier post that a Virgin technician said there had been a few problems in the area, if thats the case can someone not check to see if the problems are related.

It's always easier looking from the outside, I might have been looking to the sky by now.

I hope you get the problem sorted sooner than later and it would be nice to get some of compensation although I don't think the forum team can do this but it would be nice to be proved wrong.

[japitts]

I would certainly be interested to know what's been checked/changed thus far.

But throughout this thread, ITV-HD keeps getting mentioned. Forgive my repetition, but I'm not seeing an answer to whether the co-located channels are affected. C4+1 & C4-HD are 2 of them.

I'd also be interested to know how "intermittent" this problem is. If it's as occasional as I suspect, that makes tracking the cause down that much trickier.

[roy247]

I thought BBC was the reoccurring problem, message 22 second video was BBC, message 42 BBC1 + 2 mentioned, message 47 video, Gaby Roslin presented on BBC, and message 49 video was our great hope in womens tennis on BBC and my picture was ok.

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @Bob_Jankers,

Thank you for coming back to us and updating us on this issue further.

I'm sorry to hear that this issue is still active, even though it doesn't occur as often. 

I wanted to go through some further diagnostics with you after your appointment, but your TV box is showing as 'unreachable' on our system. Would you be able to reboot your current TV box and let me know once that has been done?

I will be able to look into this issue further for you.

Thanks! 🙂

[Bob_Jankers]

Hi all.

@Paulina_Z , we've switched off the TV box at the plug and again checked all the cables are tight, just for the fun of it.  It's now back on, and unfortunately within the first 10 minutes of being on we've already seen the random intermittent pixelation  (this was on BBC1 HD).

@japitts , we rarely find anything worth watching on C4 HD and not sure how would that fix the problems we have on the other channels?  I assume that the problem would also affect it though since all other HD channels that we do watch regularly exhibit these glitches.  These glitches are sporadic and usually we couldn't watch an hour without seeing them, but since the last technician call out, we can sometime go a few hours before experiencing them.  Also, we've not seen the CS2004 error which we guess only happens if the interference is so bad that it overwhelms the stream?

@roy247, the cabling in the road was replaced and the cabling up to the VM hub in the house was also replaced.  However, the engineer didn't replace the cable from the hub to the TV 360 box for some reason?  Apparently our account is not eligible for loss of service credit under VM's auto-compensation scheme (not sure why), but we can talk to the customer care team regarding compensation for poor picture quality on 150/789. 

Thanks for all your advise guys. To be continued...

[Martin_N]

Thank you for that information Bob_Jankers. 

When was the last engineer visit? Have you discussed with our teams regarding changing the cable from the hub to the Tv 360 box?

^Martin

[japitts]

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@Martin_N wrote:

Have you discussed with our teams regarding changing the cable from the hub to the Tv 360 box?

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Sorry to "poke in" here, because I'm getting lost in some of the detail of this thread, but the connection between the hub & 360 is only used for the internet - which will affect OnDemand & streaming. Also in post-33 & 41 this appears to have been covered off.

I can see @Bob_Jankers has repeatedly mentioned BBC1-HD & ITV-HD as affected, although as per my post-63, "I'd also be interested to know how "intermittent" this problem is. If it's as occasional as I suspect, that makes tracking the cause down that much trickier."

If there is an (intermittent) issue affecting ITV-HD, then IMO it would be a good test to see if it affects the other channels that are broadcast on the same mux - that's where the C4-stable comes in, but the OP hasn't been able to confirm this one way or another.

[Bob_Jankers]

Hi @Martin_N

An engineer came 16th July.  We've not discussed any further changes, but if you think this cable must be the culprit, please can we have it changed?

@japitts, the replacement cable that comes in to the house goes via a 2-way splitter, see photo below:

The left-hand side has the replacement cable and the cable to the VM hub.  The right-hand side goes off to the TV 360 box and hasn't been changed.

Thanks

[roy247]

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@Bob_Jankers wrote:

Hi @Martin_N

An engineer came 16th July.  We've not discussed any further changes, but if you think this cable must be the culprit, please can we have it changed?

@japitts, the replacement cable that comes in to the house goes via a 2-way splitter, see photo below:

The left-hand side has the replacement cable and the cable to the VM hub.  The right-hand side goes off to the TV 360 box and hasn't been changed.

Thanks

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Surely the cable on the right is the cable coming into the house and the connector on the right is the input to the splitter and the 2 connectors on the left are the outputs to the hub and 360 box.