Weak signal & stuttering

[gtreneman]

I want to apologize if this is already covered, but I wasn't sure what to even start with when searching the posts.
Everything has been fine with my setup for years: HDHomeRun Prime (3 tuner) on Fios. I go away for the weekend and when I get back all of a sudden I'm getting weak signal issues (can't watch HD channels, SD are also struggling) and I can't even play previously recorded programs. It will stutter, the time bar will continue but the playback is frozen.

I feel like these are two separate issues, but they both happened in the span of ~48 hours. I've been using MCE for years now and feel like I can diagnose one of these at a time but both popping up baffles me.
Thank you for any and all insight.

[holidayboy]

Random thoughts:

Could it be a hard drive issue maybe?

Not sure if that could "cause" a low signal issue but wmc does use a hdd buffer for live tv...

Unless your recordings are on a network share and it's a network issue that links the 2 problems?

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[gtreneman]

Random thoughts:

Could it be a hard drive issue maybe?

Not sure if that could "cause" a low signal issue but WMC does use a hdd buffer for live tv...

Unless your recordings are on a network share and it's a network issue that links the 2 problems?

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So! I just tried moving a simple 30min recording from the storage drive (internal to the media center) to the OS drive and got an I/O error -- maybe my storage drive is dead? The exact error, 0x8007045D apparently commonly comes up involving USB drives, but could also cover bad sectors on a disc?

[holidayboy]

Definitely worth running a scan with something like hdsentinel to check the drive - if it were me then I'd probably jump the gun and order a new (bigger!) hdd for recordings too!

https://www.hdsentinel.com



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[holidayboy]

You could also check for any sneaky Windows updates that may have installed themselves in your absence as well I guess...

It does sound like a poorly hard drive though.

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[gtreneman]

To come back to this: do you think the buffer would cause a weak signal warning?
Thanks for the help!

[holidayboy]

If there are "missing bits" in the tv stream due to read / write errors from a bad hdd then wmc might well interpret that as a weak signal... assuming wmc doesn't check the tv signal before it writes it to the hdd.....

I suppose a weak signal may look very similar to I/O errors - it's all just missing or garbled 0s and 1s I guess.

Let us know how you get on once you check / swap the hdd

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