HR10-250 dragging during live play

[Scramble]

I have an HR10-250 that appears to run poorly when in a time shift mode (not viewing current live). Occassionally, I will notice a stutter in the picture. When I check into it, it has dropped behind current viewing by a couple of seconds. As this continues and begins to lag further behind current viewing, the picture begins to pixelate, stutter, etc. As long as I monitor and fast foward to current viewing, the problems do not occur. I have even turned on the TV and found the TiVo anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes behind after tuning in again sometime later. In a few remote cases, I turned on the TV to find it stuck on the Welcome, Powering Up screen (a reboot resolves this problem).

I have tested the hard drives and find no indication of the drives going bad. The problem is not easily replicated as I believe it is almost always associated to digital broadcasts (both OTA and Satellite). The analog stations coming in over Satellite don't seem to be affected in this way, but I could be wrong about this.

Would a clear programming be my next step, or is there an explanation to the problem and a better solution?

[nrc]

My experience is that playback falls behind real time when the stream has a lot of errors. Maybe in your case thats because of hard drive problems, but in mine I think it's purely ongoing problems with multipath and satellite signal. In my experience, catching up with current time doesn't do anything but get me past the current incidence of multipath.

In your case there may well be something more going on as well since random reboots aren't normal.

[Scramble]

I don't believe its a hard drive problem, but it well could be. I don't think the problem occurs on anything but digital broadcasts (HD or SD). The other satellite channels have never given me a problem. And broadcast signals seem to be fine.

I was watching a football game in HD today. It seemed like after 1 hour I started getting the occassional stutter. The stutters continued after about another hour I believe the time shift is more than 30 seconds.

I suspect if I forwarded to current, or toggle tuners (which I believe resets to current), the problem will disappear - at least for some amount of time.

All I know is that before I started keeping the viewing current, I was running into many severe problems with stuttering, pixalating and some screen freezing. Now that I keep viewing current on a regular basis, I rarely encounter any problems.

I believe the few random re-boots (maybe only 3 times) may have something to do with when the timeshift gets to the 30 minute buffer.