Bad Playback Problems (Stutter-Freeze-Reboot)

[wbradney]

I've had the S3 running for about a week now with the cable cards installed and working fine, but now I'm getting a lot of problems with recording and playback of HD material.

I've recorded a bunch of prime-time network shows in HD and I haven't been able to get through playback of any of them without pixelation, audio dropouts, freezes and eventually reboots.

I've checked signal strength at the outlet (-1 to +1 dB for all HD channels), and both cablecards are receiving all the channels I get. Last night the wife watched CSI as it was being recorded and didn't notice any problems, yet today I can only get through about 15 minutes of the show before freeze-reboot. Analog recordings seem to be playing back just fine.

Anyone else seeing problems to this degree? Is there anything else I can do to diagnose the problem before exchanging the unit?

I'm thinking it's probably a bad hard drive, although if that were the case wouldn't at least a few analog recordings also be affected?

[malvarez]

I had this problem on my upgraded Series 1 when the 2nd hard drive went bad. The "Now Playing" listed teh show, and it would play until it tried o access a bad sector, then it would freeze, re-boot, an dlet me do it again if I wanted.

I would assume it is a hard drive failure, and go for the exchange.

[wbradney]

So this is bizarre. I placed an amplifier after the cable modem split and then set the variable attenuator such that I was getting exactly 0dB at the S3. Since I've done that every HD recording I've made has been perfect. I wouldn't have thought that +/- 1dB would have made much difference. I'm going to test it through the week with HD material so I can fill the drive.