My machine has been working successfully for about 1 year now apart from the occasions freeze during playback. Recently I have been having problems with trying to record the daily Tour de France broadcast on SBS each night. I have had a number of successful attempts but have had 2 occurrences of premature stopping and 2 occurrences very short, highly pixelated noise on screen. I checked the /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log after these events. For both cases I get lots of messages likeThe funny thing is that on one occasion another program was recording on another channel. I read another thread which indicated it could be a hard disk issue and suggested fsck. I forced a fsck yesterday but it still did not worked. Yesterday I also checked mysql for errors and could not find anything.

It is funny it is so specific to this TV program. Are any other Aussies having problems with this broadcast? Can someone suggest a possible problem with my machine?

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

I wouldn't be worried about your machine if I were you.

Here in Perth, we'll get SBS clear as a bell one day and can't lock the signal the next. The symptoms you describe sound like the same sort of signal issues I was getting when I recorded Mythbusters.

I have no idea why SBS's transmission is so flakey. I thought it was my antenna at first, but I was getting >90% signal strength from the other channels, including Channel 31 on UHF. Then after 10:00pm, SBS jumped to 87% signal strength.

My suggestion is, if you have Foxtel, record SBS off channel 104. If not, I sympathise.

I totally agree, i can't get SBS at all on Digital via a DVT card or my tv tuner. The digital signal is very weak here.

Thanks for that guys. Unfortunately I don't have foxtel nor an analogue card so I guess I will just have to hope. I do notice that the signal strength in my set top box is better (~90)% than I get from the card in my Myth box (65%).

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Something that might help is an antenna amplifier. I cheaped out and got a 2 output mains powered amp from JayCar ($49) that I keep behind my TV. I'm too lazy to install a masthead amp.

That helped increase the signal strength to about 65% and has cut down the number of times I get no signal on SBS.

I have managed to pin-point my particular problem to my second tuner card. Recording or watching live from card 1 is fine but card 2 will not pick-up the SBS channel adequately. This explains why the problem was intermittent. The problem could be the coax patch lead between the cards which is a home made special but it is funny it only effects the SBS channel and SBS HD.

With both cards the signal strengths and S/N ratios are similar for all channels (45% and 4.7 dB respectively) but when I try SBS through card 2 I get the same values but the BE number is huge (65535) whereas all others are around 0. What does this number mean? Before I replace the coax patch lead I would like to understand what's wrong.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest