Bizarre Sling Adapter Problem

[stevenmh]

Picked up a Sling Adapter for the 722k recently. Hooked it up, tested it out with a PC connected to another TV, network supports the full 8mpbs, the quality in best/HD mode surpassed my expectations. A few days later sat down with the wife and watched a recorded episode, perfect experience, she was impressed too.

Then last night we go to watch another episode. Starts out fine, but then the picture starts flashing and tiling. Sound is fine. Thinking the recording is corrupt, I switch to a recorded episode of a different show. Same thing. Connection is running about 2mpbs. I switch the quality down a notch to "better" and we're able to make it through the episode.

I won't bore you with the next several hours' worth of troubleshooting, but suffice it to say I methodically eliminated every piece of hardware in the chain as being the culprit. Having done that yet still having the problem, I began to look at the programming itself. It turns out that it's only happening with two of the shows I'm recording... Revolution (1 episode) and The Big Bang Theory (2 episodes). Remember when I said the first thing I did was change shows to rule out programming? Yup, lucky me, it was Big Bang that we tried to watch, and Revolution was the show I changed to. Wait, though, it gets better. You might be thinking there's something in the encoding of these particular shows which is causing it. But remember when I said the first episode we watched a couple nights prior was perfect? Guess what we were watching... Revolution.

I've gone back and watched the beginning of the problem shows several times now. The timers are set to start a minute early. The end of the previous show and "coming up next / starting now" preview is fine, running 8mpbs. The very instant the actual show starts, the flashing / tiling starts. At the same time, speed immediately begins dropping. Sometimes it will get down to 2mpbs. At other times it will stay in the 4-5mpbs range, more than enough for HD, but the flashing/tiling continues. If I change to "good" or "better" the flashing/tiling stops. Go back to best/HD, it begins having trouble instantly. It's not an intermittent type disruption like a marginal signal, it's continual.

If I play these shows straight from the 722k, there's no problem. If I stream these shows to my Android Tablet there's no problem, although it maxes at 4mpbs and I don't believe it's in HD resolution. The two problem shows are not recording at the same time as anything else. The two shows are on separate stations. And again, one of these problem shows, Revolution, did not have this problem with the previous episode. The problem isn't confined within a date range, because other shows which were recorded in between dates of problem episodes do not exhibit the problem.

In summary, I'm unable to blame any piece of equipment, as most shows are streaming at 8mbps via my PC-to-TV with no issues. I've tried a different PC hooked to a regular monitor with the same result. I've tried both IE and Firefox. As for the shows which are having a problem, I'm unable to determine any pattern to explain why it's happening. Having done some googling, I've not even been able to find anyone who's ever had a problem with a Sling Adapter video flashing / tiling.

I'm stumped and open to any suggestions.

 

[Miner]

Try rebooting your 722k. Sometimes my setup acts flakey and a reboot gets the streaming right back.

Also are the 2 recording's in question via sat or OTA? If OTA perhaps the bandwidth (uncompressed) requirements exceed capacity. I seem to remember the OTA recordings take up much more disk space than the compressed sat signal so it would seem logical the streaming bandwidth would be greater. The sling is supposed to deal with it and auto adjust, but perhaps it doesn't always work?

Miner

 

[stevenmh]

Rebooting the 722k was the first thing I did. It was rebooted several times over the course of a couple days, including pulling the power cable from the wall.

The recordings are both sat. The only show I do record OTA is one that works fine.

After my initial post, I came to realize that the previous week's viewing of Revolution was not a valid data point, as I wasn't watching from the DVR. I didn't notice that when you have a show recorded and go to watch it, you will be offered online viewing first, with a list of your DVR recordings below. So I was actually watching that episode via Hulu and didn't know it.

Additionally, while watching the latest episode of Revolution the other night, we were going along fine in "better" mode. I fast-forwarded through a commercial, and then when I resumed play, we started getting vertical green lines across the screen in flashes. We had to reduce quality to "good" to eliminate them. Going back to "better" got us the vertical green line flashes. I thought the fast-forwarding had fouled it up somehow, and went to restart it, and that's when I realized I could watch the latest episode in Hulu, and after seeing the different interface, realized that's what we had done with the previous episode. So after finishing the episode in Hulu, I went back to see what would happen if I restarted the DVR recording of Revolution. Not only were the problems in "better" mode resolved, but it also played in "best / HD" without the tiling / flashing. Then, when I clicked on DVR - My Recordings, it brought up a list where every episode was doubled. i.e., if I had two episodes of a show recorded, it said I had four, and if I listed the episodes, each one was listed twice. Of course, going to the room with the DVR, this was not the case and everything was fine.

For a specific episode to be unable to play properly for days, then play properly out of the blue with no corrective action taken in between the last failure and the current success, doesn't make sense. There certainly isn't anything wrong with my PC, TV, or network hardware that would cause the Sling software to report doubles of each episode, so the problem is obviously either with the 722k, the sling adapter, or the sling software. I'm assuming if it was the internet browser plugins, there'd be a lot of people reporting it. It seems like the best plan right now is to get an exchange on the sling adapter and see if that solves the problem.