Thanks Viccot for your suggestion.
Shortly after my last post in mid November, the machine seemed to right itself and from then until a month or so ago, I got 100% faultless service. Anything I set the machine to record was recorded faultlessly: no corruption, recordings started during the station ident, and finished after the credits had rolled.
And then, for no discernible reason, the machine started to fail again. Since then almost all recordings have been as originally when I bought the machine: corrupted almost from the start and starting minutes into the programme.
But not all. For example, I was able to record and watch every episode of Royal Navy school on Channel 4 without a problem. But The Simpsons, also on C4, every episode corrupted without exception.
Occasionally one episode has made it: one of Question time, one of University challenge in the recent past. I’ve just checked and Friday’s Newsnight made it, but not the previous two days’. Yesterday’s QI has made it.
Because the quality of recordings, when the machine does record, seems fine, and because I could watch tv live if I wanted to, it’s very hard to believe that the problem is something to do with the aerial or any connections.
What seems to be happening is that, given a choice of aerials where I live (Stroud, Glos near Cheltenham and Gloucester and about 20 miles north of Bristol), it’s pot luck which aerial the machine picks. Except for that period of over three months when it invariably picked the right aerial. It’s as if, having found and “locked onto” the correct aerial earlier this year, some event unlocked the setting and the machine is floundering again, as it did when I first bought it.
Normally, I do not switch off the machine at night, I just mute it and switch off the tv. There was one event which seems to have coincided with the machine starting to play up again when it wouldn’t replay recordings (or do anything), so I switched it off and on again.
Any thoughts?
| Sun 3 Apr 2016 20:38:58
#16 |
