We sat down to watch last night’s episode of The West Wing, the one with the live debate between Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda, and found it was completely unwatchable. The soundtrack was off by at least 15 seconds - we were hearing dialog in some cases before a character was even on the screen. I’ve experienced out-of-sync soundtracks before, but usually the difference is measured in a second or less and is mildly annoying but tolerable. Needless to say, this episode was completely unwatchable and we gave up after the first couple minutes.
Anyone else see this? Has anything this off-the-wall ever happened to you?
Update: Interesting. We tried again tonight. At four minutes in, Forest Sawyer’s voice track hiccuped a few times and all of a sudden everything was back on track.
4 comments ↓
Check your pre-amp/tuner (if you have a speaker system).
Mine sometimes does this, with my TiVo & HD-DVR as well as my DVD player. For some reason it just doesn’t sync the soundtrack properly and I have to power it off and restart the show to fix it.
it’s possible it isn’t your tivo…
Brendan,
No speaker system involved in this particular setup, so that’s not it.
And yeah, I have seen slight out-of-sync audio issues with all DVRs - TiVo, Media Center, cable company HD-DVR - but this was extreme and like nothing I had ever seen before.
Interesting. I sat down to watch that exact same episode in HD on my MCE box. I’ve had stuttering problems on MCE in the past, but had largely resolved them. Unfortunately, due to a program that didn’t completely uninstall and my own impatience, I did a complete reinstall of MCE over the weekend. Right when Alan Alda started his opening remarks, I started to get a couple of hiccups. My wife rolled her eyes in that “here we go again” kind of way and we watched the rest of the show off our DirecTiVo. Believe me, switching from high def on DVI to SD over svideo was a suboptimal experience. Interestingly enough, I went back to MCE afterward and watched a little more of the program, and it appears that the stuttering only occured for a couple of minutes right at the beginning - the rest of the program (or as much as I re-watched) appeared to be fine. This is probably unrelated to your issue, but interesting that they both happened at the same time on the same program.
I’ve never had a recording glitch on my DirecTiVo - it’s been stable as a rock even though I’ve hacked it with an extra 100GB of storage. The only audio sync problems I’ve had have been on MCE and they have been relatively minor. My MCE box is getting close to the DirecTiVo in reliability, but I don’t yet have the confidence in it to stop doing redundant recordings on the TiVo. Ah, but the joys of HD….
Jeff, thanks for the report. I should have been more clear that this glitch occurred on a high-definition DirecTiVo (although the program itself was a local channel broadcasting in SD, because I can’t get the HD local channels here).
I assume you were recording from an OTA antenna on your MCE box?
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