Relief! Blocky picture break-up not due to new DVD recorder!

[seb]

Just thought I'd share this in case anyone else in the UK has been having similar experiences...

I got a Pioneer 420 Hard-drive/DVD recorder the other week. Generally happy with it, and finding that we're using it for general recording/time-shifting to an extent that we never used our old Philips DVDR75 for. I leave the quality set to MN31 (max bitrate with AC3 audio) and always record to hard-disk.

However, I'd been noticing that quite frequently, when watching programmes we'd recorded, there might be a couple of moments when the picture would freeze momentarily or break up into blocks. I'd never seen it before with the Philips, and was thinking that it might be a glitch in the MPEG encoder, or maybe a hard-disk problem. We're only talking a couple of seconds out of a three-hour recording, but this kind of thing bothers me and I was thinking about returning the machine for a new unit.

Last night I was recording X-Factor (UK - ITV1 - through internal tuner), my wife was watching it at the same time on the TV through its own tuner (analog/terrestrial). I happened to walk in to the room just at the right moment to see the picture break up with exactly the same kind of artifact that I'd been seeing.

Then I realised that I'd only seen the problem on programmes recorded on ITV1, through the aerial (i.e. not cable or digital). The fact that I'd seen it happen live, when the TV was on its own internal channel (i.e. not monitoring the output from the DVD recorder) meant that the blocky breakup was happening somewhere in the transmission process! I'd only ever recorded stuff on the Philips from my cable-box RGB out, so that was why I hadn't seen it happen before.

So I'm now feeling much happier and don't need feel I need to box up the Pioneer and take it back for a swap. I'd assumed the problem was at my end because the glitches looked just like MPEG artifacts/errors. I don't know if anyone else in the UK has noticed this or if just reveals a degree of obsessionality on my part (!). Be interested to hear about whether it's a problem across UK terrestrial channels though, or just ITV1.

[Capmaster]

Glad to hear it wasn't the recorder, seb. That would have been a shame to return the unit. We have the same sort of breakup occasionally on our satellite programming.

Bad weather is usually the culprit but occasionally it just does it for no apparent reason. So maybe it's not just UK programming that does this