TiVo Community Forums Archives - Skipping driving me crazy

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Skipping driving me crazy
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Posted by: multisol

I've had Tivo for several years but the past few months have been so irritating that I am considering disconnecting. I have an old Phillips model. The probelm is that watching programs is nothing but skips. The pictures/words stick and then I jump to another part -- I thought it was Cox Digital so I changed that box and puit in one of the originals -- still the same probem - actually it seems to be getting worse -- any thoughts?

Posted by: maharg18

Check the internal temperature reading in the system info screen and make sure it's normal. If it is, then I'd say you've got the classic symptoms of a hard drive getting ready to crap out. If you've ever put a hard drive in a computer, then replacement of the one in the Tivo shouldn't be too hard for you. Head over to the upgrade forum for more info. If you don't feel like all that trouble, then you can buy a pre-imaged drive from somewhere like weaknees.com and just drop it in.

Posted by: JPriller

If you rewind and it always skips in the same spots it's probably the disk. If it skips in different spots on replay then it's probably the MPEG chip - it's going bad, or is just too warm (adding a CPU fan might help).

Posted by: multisol

Thanks for the tips -- both of you are telling me it's likely the disk -- guess I'll start exploring how to buy and replace the disk -- if anyone else out there thinks it's soemthing else -- let me know

Posted by: ccwf

quote:
Originally posted by multisol
if anyone else out there thinks it's soemthing else -- let me know

No, it's probably the disk. However, if you search old posts, you'll see lists of less likely, less expensive things you might want to try first. The least expensive is simply to try shutting off your TiVo for a few minutes and see if that changes anything.

Posted by: LtSparky

The only other possibility that I can think of is due to poor reception. Does this by chance happen only on digital channels (likely channels over 99)? We had some problems with cable reception where it caused problems with digital reception. Analog reception would be acceptable, but the digital signal was not strong enough and the affected channels would drop in and out occasionally. When the channel would drop out, TiVo ignored that portion, stopped recording, and started again when a signal resumed. Thus, we had programs that would play with skips, stutters and missing portions as you describe but not due to hard disk failure. Just a thought.

Posted by: Skylooker

Take off the cover of the unit and place a fan so that it blows down into the top of it. If it's a temperature issue, this should take care of it within minutes. I had the same problem with a "normal" temperature reading. Once I fund that It was temperature related, I installed a pc cooling fan in the top cover and have never had a problem since.

Posted by: badcrc

quote:
Originally posted by multisol
I have an old Phillips model. The probelm is that watching programs is nothing but skips. The pictures/words stick and then I jump to another part

I just went through this problem on one of my tivos. The skipping and stuttering kept getting worse, so before the hard drive finally died I took the drive out and used MFStools to copy the whole drive to a new one. Worked great, and after running the powermax utility on the old drive (drive was a maxtor of course) it had several bad spots so I got it replaced under warranty.