AM21 with HR44 and Samsung RVU F5500-series Smart TVs very glitchy locals

[rtvtom]

I have an AM21 OTA tuner box connected to my whole-home HR44 Genie DVR. This setup works perfectly on the main TV set (connected via HDMI). The clients on the other TV sets are Samsung F5500 model Smart TVs. These work perfectly on the sat channels, but on the local OTAs the picture is very glitchy when there are motion images. The glitchy picture is at the top third of the screen (tearing effect, looks like non-sync transitions). This only affects AM21 locals, and only on the RVU TVs.

Both TVs are newly purchased (within the last 2 weeks). I had initially bought a Samsung E5300, and it had RVU issues across the board with random audio dropouts and freeze-ups, as well as occasionally displaying the guide and DVR List in a weird yellow color (versus black background) and at one point it even crashed my Genie box. I found many complaints on this, and other forums about the E5300 misbehaving with RVU, so I exchanged it for a 2nd E5500. The ironic part is that the upper third glitchy garbage picture did NOT happen on the 5300 set. Now I have two 5500 sets that work great EXCEPT for the OTA/AM21 tuner locals. The first 5500 is in a kid room, and it has the same glitchy OTA locals issue -- I hadn't really noticed it before since that TV is always on Nick, Disney, etc. Now that both the RVU TVs are 5500s I see they both are bad with OTA AM21 locals.

Is there an updated box to replace AM21's? These boxes are 3 generations ago versus the Genie receivers. Time for an updated box, DirecTV! And this time, make it a compact box that simply goes inline behind the real receiver. No one wants to look at a big clunky additional ugly box.

My TVs have their latest firmware, as does the HR44 Genie. I have rebooted all the boxes both separately and together, as well as power-cycled the TVs, no improvement. Has anyone else seen this issue? Any tips on how to proceed? Who do I complain to -- Samsung or DirecTV?

Anyone who has this setup; AM21/Genie/RVU Smart TVs please respond.

Thx!

 

[bobvick]

I doubt it would make any difference, but they do make a "newer" version, the AM21-N. It is the same size as the AM21 but the finish is kind of a matte black like the HR22 rather than a piano black. Also it has a little different tuner from the AM21, if memory serves it is made by Pace. Do you know which version you have?

 

[rad]

Let's see, the AM21 worked just fine with the E5300 set but you change to the E5500 and now it doesn't work. I'm going to place my money on the client software in the E5500 is the cause of the problem and not the HR44/AM21. My experience with using Samsung RVU client code has been that it's not anywhere near as good as just having a DIRECTV mini client on the set. Right now having an issue with the TVApps where if you try to edit your cities the window for entering the city name shrinks to a very small box in the top left corner where you can't do anything with it, same app works just fine with a C31 or C41.