Cable HDTV - occasional dropped frame? (1 Viewer)

[jeff peterson]

I've got Time Warner cable and the Scientific Atlanta 3100HD cable box running through a Toshiba 50H81. While watching HBO-HD, the picture looks terrific but every once in a while it'll give a little jerk as if we just skipped a frame. No sound dropout, just a picture glitch.

Has anyone else experienced this? Could it be a setting in my Tosh that I need to change for the HDTV feed from the cable box?

 

[Steve Schaffer]

Jeff,

Occasional dropouts and stutters are pretty much the norm for most HD channels, it's pretty new technology. It's definitely not abnormal and not a problem with your set.

Other problems that sometimes occur are audio going out of synch and sometimes major picture pixellation. With the exception of iffy OTA reception for those with no HD cable service, these are all either with the originating station or somewhere in the signal path to your set, like the sat uplink and downlinks to your cable company.

I get HBO HD, Showtime HD, and HDNet off DirecTV, and have seen what you describe from time to time. My local OTA stations are worse, but still quite watchable most all the time.

This will improve in time as station and cable co. equipment and station and cable engineers become more experienced.

I'm old enough to remember the early days of regular tv back in the 50s, when stations would often go on the fritz for hours at at time.