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I had an issue where I was getting short intervals of video freezing and pixilation (duration about 1 second) about every 30 seconds on every channel on both tuners (TWC single stream Cable card driven). Recordings made previous to this issue played back just fine, however new recordings were plagued with the same pixilation issues experienced when displaying live TV. I had already replaced the hard drive about a year ago, so I did some research by searching this board for similar issues and found some great info leading to an accurate diagnosis and successful fix so in an effort to pay it forward, I thought I would share my experience.
I found that the number one suspect in an issue such as mine is a failing hard drive. Since I had already recently replaced the HD with a 1TB Western Digital, a brand which I have found from past experience to be very reliable and not wanting to go through the significant time and energy of replacing the drive again and working with the cable company to "marry" the cable cards again, I decided to dig deeper to see if I could find other issues reported in which the cause was found to be something other than the HDD.
One thread indicated a Series 3 owner having similar issues and having to replace the drive once every year. The suggestion was to check the power supply and a link was included on how to diagnose a bad power supply: http://www.weaknees.com/bad-power-supply.php
Another thread indicated it could be a Cable Card or cable signal issue since the pixilation was recorded and when re-winded from the buffer, the pixilation was identical as observed when watching the segment live.
Since I already had a spare power supply on hand, and I had not replaced the one that came with my 7 year old unit, I opened up the unit and inspected the power supply. Sure enough, two of the capacitors were bulging at the top, one starting to show an ominous brown discoloration. Had I not viewed the link mentioned above, I would have completely missed it (until they would have burst which would have been completely obvious). I swapped out the power supply, booted the unit and it is now working flawlessly.
Thanks to all the contributors on this forum, I was able to resolve my issue in just a couple of hours with no phone calls to the dreaded TWC customer support line.
I hope this will help others experiencing similar issues.
I found that the number one suspect in an issue such as mine is a failing hard drive. Since I had already recently replaced the HD with a 1TB Western Digital, a brand which I have found from past experience to be very reliable and not wanting to go through the significant time and energy of replacing the drive again and working with the cable company to "marry" the cable cards again, I decided to dig deeper to see if I could find other issues reported in which the cause was found to be something other than the HDD.
One thread indicated a Series 3 owner having similar issues and having to replace the drive once every year. The suggestion was to check the power supply and a link was included on how to diagnose a bad power supply: http://www.weaknees.com/bad-power-supply.php
Another thread indicated it could be a Cable Card or cable signal issue since the pixilation was recorded and when re-winded from the buffer, the pixilation was identical as observed when watching the segment live.
Since I already had a spare power supply on hand, and I had not replaced the one that came with my 7 year old unit, I opened up the unit and inspected the power supply. Sure enough, two of the capacitors were bulging at the top, one starting to show an ominous brown discoloration. Had I not viewed the link mentioned above, I would have completely missed it (until they would have burst which would have been completely obvious). I swapped out the power supply, booted the unit and it is now working flawlessly.
Thanks to all the contributors on this forum, I was able to resolve my issue in just a couple of hours with no phone calls to the dreaded TWC customer support line.
I hope this will help others experiencing similar issues.
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