Issues with THD on 9.4

[drWatson23]

My Tivo HD (652) had the freezing issue with 9.3 where picture would freeze and audio would stop a few seconds later. I could disconnect the RF line and that would solve the problem immediately.

Within 24 hours of getting the 9.4 upgrade I have a new issues. (previous issue went away). While watching a recorded show, about once a day, the video becomes choppy, kinda like when you have a DVD with scratches. Video and audio stops for a second, then it starts again in a second, this repeats for about 30-60 seconds then evertyhing is back to normal. During this period Tivo is not responsive to the remote, although the yellow light blinks on when you hit a button. Eventually it will catch up and go to the menu...

I just encountered this issue today again, and I hit the Tivo button right away twice to get to now playing list. Oddly enough the video stayed on playing & freezing like I described above. But I had the blue selection bar overlaid the video with the up & down arrows on the right side. I could page up and down, move the blue bar up and down over the choppy video. (There were no program names displayed, just blue bar and arrows)

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? It kinda seems like the Tivo can't keep up with all the tasks it has to do and not enough cpu cycles are left to decode and play back video.

I have to mention that I have a Seagate Barracuda 1TB HD inside, 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache, Model # ST310005N1A1AS-RK:

Spindle Speed 7200 rpm
Average latency 4.16 msec
Random read seek time <8.5 msec
Random write seek time <9.5 msec

I wonder if the drive has bad sectors and keeps retrying to read the data. But that would not explain why the Now Playing list shows up over the video...:confused:

[Dr_Diablo]

Have the same or nearly the same issues you are experiencing since the 9.4 update

Now an update is needed for the update

[rainwater]

It sounds like you have a hard drive going bad.

[drWatson23]

I ended up pulling the hard drive out of my Tivo and hooked it up to my Fedora box. Ran fsck and it did not find anything wrong with the drive. Besides, having bad sectors on an HD is nothing serious. Brand new hard drives come with bad sectors, the HD keeps track of bad sectors and ensures it never rights there.

An other reason why I know this is not a hard drive issue is the fact, that if I restart the show and go back to the part where it was stoping/restarting, it plays fine. So the data is not corrupt.

To me it seems like the tivo is overloaded and can't keep up with all the tasks. I wish someone would weigh in from Tivo. They sure make it sound like 9.4 upgrade fixed everything and life is just awesome for all THD owners out there. I have yet to see them acknowledge any issues caused by 9.4 upgrade...

[doconeill]

I ended up pulling the hard drive out of my Tivo and hooked it up to my Fedora box. Ran fsck and it did not find anything wrong with the drive. Besides, having bad sectors on an HD is nothing serious. Brand new hard drives come with bad sectors, the HD keeps track of bad sectors and ensures it never rights there.

An other reason why I know this is not a hard drive issue is the fact, that if I restart the show and go back to the part where it was stoping/restarting, it plays fine. So the data is not corrupt.

To me it seems like the tivo is overloaded and can't keep up with all the tasks. I wish someone would weigh in from Tivo. They sure make it sound like 9.4 upgrade fixed everything and life is just awesome for all THD owners out there. I have yet to see them acknowledge any issues caused by 9.4 upgrade...

fsck isn't going to check for sector errors. It is only going to check the areas of the disk that contain a standard filesystem (ext2/3 by default), and it checks for filesystem errors - inodes allocated but no directory entries, directory entries but no inode, etc.).

The video is not stored in an ext2/3 filesystem, so fsck isn't going to look at it at all. If you tried it, it should have told you it didn't recognize the filesystem or it couldn't find the superblock, which should have indicated to you something was different.

If you REALLY want to check for bad sectors, do a search for SpinRite.

Drive manufacturers remap the known bad sectors before shipping the drives. However, although I've heard of the magic ability of a drive to remap bad sectors after the fact, I think they must do a pretty poor job of it, or don't have enough spare sectors, because they come up all the time and are pretty fatal.

By the way, I have two THDs, one with a Seagate DB35 750GB drive, and I have ZERO such problems. So I think you are asking Tivo to acknowledge a problem that is not evident on all units.

[V7Goose]

I ended up pulling the hard drive out of my Tivo and hooked it up to my Fedora box. Ran fsck and it did not find anything wrong with the drive. Besides, having bad sectors on an HD is nothing serious. Brand new hard drives come with bad sectors, the HD keeps track of bad sectors and ensures it never rights there.

An other reason why I know this is not a hard drive issue is the fact, that if I restart the show and go back to the part where it was stoping/restarting, it plays fine. So the data is not corrupt.

To me it seems like the tivo is overloaded and can't keep up with all the tasks. I wish someone would weigh in from Tivo. They sure make it sound like 9.4 upgrade fixed everything and life is just awesome for all THD owners out there. I have yet to see them acknowledge any issues caused by 9.4 upgrade...
I lived with a variety of video and audio problems on my S3 for several months. It did not impact all programs, and it seemed to get very bad for a week or two (virtually all HD programs recorded), then it would be much better for a while (meaning new HD programs recorded would have little or no problems, but the ones recorded while the problem was bad still had bad problems).

I kept very detailed notes during these problems. They varied from very brief pauses (1 second or less), to massive macroblocking, long freezes and spontaneous reboots. In most cases, if I jumped back to where the problem was, it would still have similar problems in that general area, but not always at the exact same point. On some programs, the problem would reoccur at the exact point several times, but if the S3 was rebooted, the problem point would change or occasionally go away completely. The ones that were so bad to cause a spontaneous reboot would almost always happen exactly the same way on each play, but NOT ALWAYS.

I finally pulled the drives and put them in my PC to run extended surface tests (I used the free Western Digital utility since I was getting ready to install new WD drives anyway). The external eSATA drive had MANY bad sectors! The problems I experienced were ONLY on HD recordings, and while I cannot say for sure, my guess is that this was somehow related to the massive additional amount of detail recorded in an HD signal. Maybe the TiVo can just deal more effectively with the errors in a simpler SD signal?

My two new WD drives scanned with zero errors, and once the upgrade was done my S3 is working perfectly again.

So, having the problem not repeat identically upon replay may SEEM to indicate the problem is not caused by a bad spot on the drive, but don't bet on it.

[drWatson23]

Update: It happened again today. Recording 2 shows while watching another one. Show started freezing. I hit the Tivo Button, Tivo Central came up. I could move up and down in the menu, but the show was still in the background. The show would start playing again with the menu being displayed, freezing then starting again.
I could not make the menu go away or get out of the show until the show actually ended! (5 more minutes played)

Is this weird or what?!?

So you guys still think this is a hard drive issue with bad sectors? Why would it continue playing the show with Tivo Central on the screen? Why couldn't I exit either the show or Tivo Central?

[mattack]

Total guess: I suspect this is related to the "show the guide over the playing show" feature.

That is, enabling this is also allowing these weird symptoms to happen. (I have seen things like it too -- but I don't think 5 minutes' worth.)

I can't say if you're having hard drive issues too, though.