Intermittent TiVo Audio
A good friend of mine sent me an IM telling me that his TiVo is having some problems. For some reason, his TiVo’s audio seems to drop unexpectedly. While watching live TV he notices that the audio all of a sudden disappears! If he waits long enough the audio seems to come back on its’ own. He has tried restarting the DVR however; this doesn’t work all of the time. His previous TiVo’s hard drive died unexpectedly so I kind of feel bad for the poor slouch ;). Has anybody ever seen this problem before? A quick look on TiVo’s support forum turned up this post. Unfortunately, this post hasn’t been updated with a solution. The only “solution” was to return the box back to TiVo and have them ship you a new box. Any ideas?
October 27th, 2005 at 4:52 pm |
There is an audio chip (at least in the 240 series), as I understand it. This was what went bad on my parents’ tivo. We dealt with tech support, they’ll fix the TiVo for a fee around $80? plus shipping. In the end, it was cheaper to go with the awesome rebate deal we saw and buy a whole new one. That said, i have a broken TiVo sitting around still if anyone wants to tear it apart
October 28th, 2005 at 12:57 pm |
Not sure if this is the same problem, but on mine once in a while the audio drops out of a recording and the video acts funny for a while, then it clears up (usually after a couple of recorded minutes). The video weirdness looks like the colorburst is having trouble as it is mostly B&W but the colors seem visually “noisy” on some areas of the picture. I’ve rebooted (although not the full power-down method), and it still happens once in a while. It also happens on various channels so I don’t think it’s a specific channel, but it definitely could be the cable box. I haven’t ever seen it live, but I almost never watch live TV. Since I now have an HDTV, I’m probably going to have to leave my TiVo anyway and go with an HD box from ComCast.
October 28th, 2005 at 2:32 pm |
I should add that the intermittency that your friend is seeing is exactly what my parents went through before it failed outright. A reboot helped on occassion, but not always. I do think his TiVo is doomed
October 29th, 2005 at 6:20 pm |
My buddy called me today and told me that he thinks he has figured out what the problem was. Apparently when he removed his splitter the problem went away. I don’t know how a splitter could have caused intermittent audio however; when he put the splitter back in the place the problem returned. Hopefully this solves his problem. I would hate to see him have to send his TiVo back.
November 4th, 2005 at 12:06 pm |
Alex - where was your buddy’s splitter? I’m having the same audio problem and I split the cable coming out of the wall, one out to the cable box, the other out to the TV so I can TiVo one channel and watch a different one.
November 4th, 2005 at 4:10 pm |
My spilter was connected to the cable coming out of the wall. I spilt it there and then one went into my TiVo and one into my TV. I really can’t figure out why that fixed it, but it has been almost a week and it is still working. Now that I have posted this message, I am almost positive that it will break soon…again
November 4th, 2005 at 5:20 pm |
I know what you mean. I have this angel thing sitting on one shoulder whispering ‘Keep the faith - TiVo is good … Keep the faith - TiVo is good’ in one ear and a devil thing sitting whispering a completely different four-letter replacement word for ‘good’in the other!
Anyways, the splitter deal could be loss of signal strength to the TiVo unit. Electronics isn’t a strength of mine but in my travels through the various TiVo support forums (official and otherwise) I seem to remember coming across a post that talked about the type of component the Audio processor TiVo used and how it can be sensitive to signal loss and, if one were going to split the signal that an amplifier was in order. Again, Greek to me, but …
With all that in mind, and with fingers crossed, my splitter is coming out tonight.
December 9th, 2005 at 1:21 am |
Splitter is an issue on my new install - signal drops out on various channels, but not all - loss of color, total loss of signal etc. There is a 3.5dB loss on the outs of the splitter - must be just enough to screw up the TiVO, even though the TV works OK on its own.
December 20th, 2005 at 10:37 pm |
I’m having problems recently with split second drop outs of audio on both live and recorded shows with my series 2 DirecTV Tivo. But, if I rewind, the audio is there. I’ll try a restart tomorrow, but I can’t find anyone else with this problem out there…
September 23rd, 2006 at 6:48 pm |
Ed,
I’m having the same problem on live and recorded television. I do not have a splitter going into the tivo. But, tive goes out into my dvd/surround sound player and that goes into the TV.
I had a first gen tivo connected in the exact same way without issues. . .
Does anyone have any suggestions?
July 22nd, 2007 at 6:03 am |
My Tivo S2 will drop audio and I get static. A restart works sometimes. I even got the audio drop while the welcome to Tivo was playing after a restart. I get the audio drop on video that played fine before. It is getting worse to the point that the Tivo is becoming useles. HELP!!