Serious Error [caused by EAS Test]

*I Can't Get the Youtube video to embed so here's a link to a 2 minute video showing where it switched from SOAPNet (One Tree Hill) to CBS HD (The Talk) after the EAS Test.


I came home last night and flipped on my TV to find the TiVo on CBS with the ugly telltale pillar bars of an EAS Test (the black is a slightly different shade for the pixels nearest the inside edges, whereas regular pillar bars are solid black). The TiVo would not change channels [or for that matter do anything] even after I disconnected the coax from the back. It was recording, so I waited until 12 AM and then pulled the power plug.

Once it rebooted, I brought up My Recordings to find that everything that recorded between 2 PM and 12 AM had recorded on CBS HD [with those ugly pillar bars blocking off the right and left sides]. Instead of The Tonight Show, it recorded Letterman. Instead of Up All Night, Survivor ???. Thankfully, most of my recordings other than these two I can probably rerecord [as they were from Cable Channels which run the same show multiple times]. The only 2 shows that recorded were Criminal Minds and CSI [since they're CBS shows] and even then they were pillar boxed 4:3.

I looked through all my recordings and found that the problem occured just after 2 PM. While recording One Tree Hill on SOAPNet, a National EAS Test occured. But, instead of switching back to SOAPNet after the test was over, it stayed on CBS HD and remained there the rest of the night not even changing for scheduled recordings. I transferred the One Tree Hill episode to my Desktop Computer and tried to open it in VideoReDo, but it refused saying there was "no data" in the file. The file seriously messed up. Only VLC was able to reencode it (AVIDemux, FFMPEG, and Handbrake all either froze up or produced an incomplete video) to something that could be opened with VRD.

According to MediaInfo it had 3 Audio Tracks, 2 AC3 and 1 MP2. VRD reported 2 different video dimensions (528x480 and 544x480). The former was the part before the EAS and the latter was the EAS Alert and the part after it, which had for some reason been scaled and cropped from 1080i to 544x480i.

Comcast has been running ALOT of "Monthly" EAS tests the last week or so. I should probably call and complain. Twice (2 nights ago and 1 week before that) they ran "Monthly" Tests every 5-10 minutes or so from 2 or 3 AM to 4 or 5 AM to the point I had to actually disconnect the cable line for 2 hours just to be able to watch my recorded shows [without being interrupted every 5-10 minutes]. But, this is the first time that it didn't switch back to the correct channel after the alert.