It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally you’ll get short audio drops when watching live TV on a DIRECTV DVR. It’s not a sign of a real problem and it’s easy to fix by yourself. Generally changing the channel and changing it back will fix the problem but then of course you lose your live buffer. The answer is even easier.
Why does this happen?
In order to understand the problem, you have to consider just how magical a DVR is. When you’re watching live TV, you’re really watching it live. Generally the delay between the audio on a DVR and the audio on a regular receiver is so small that you can’t even tell it. If you had a DVR (or client) in the same room as a receiver, you could get the sound from one and the picture from another and not even notice.
However, at the same time that you’re watching live, that content is also going to a local hard drive, either in a DVR or in your Genie server. All this happens constantly. If you’ve been on the same channel for over 90 minutes, there’s even another trick that happens. The 91st minute of TV drops off so the most recent minute of TV can be recorded. Again this all happens so fast you don’t even notice it.
Now sometimes, and I said this is pretty rare in most cases, the whole thing won’t quite work right. The sound won’t sync up, or the device won’t be able to do everything it needs to quickly enough. In that case, something happens. Sometimes a frame of video drops. Chances are you don’t notice because it comes and goes so fast. But our ears are tuned differently from our eyes. When the sound drops out, even for a sixtieth of a second, we notice. And there it is, an audio drop.
The easy way to fix this
All you need to do is back up about one second. Audio drops on live TV with a DIRECTV DVR are due to some issues with pulling video from the hard drive at the exact moment it’s being put down, and that’s what’s happening when you’re watching live TV but you started a program late. I would say, 99.9% of the time you don’t see a problem, but when you do, use either the rewind button or the replay button (the one just above it in this picture) to skip back a second or two. You won’t notice that you’re just the tiniest bit behind but the amount of “breathing room” your DVR gets is enough to stop the issue from happening.
If it happens a lot
If you’re getting very common audio drops, you can try turning Dolby Digital on or off. Unless you’re using a sound bar or home theater receiver, you probably won’t notice the difference. It could be an issue of simply rebooting the box… that solves a lot of problems. But if none of that works, and you think you need a hardware replacement, let us help! Our technicians are standing by during East Coast business hours. One call to Solid Signal can get you the replacement you need. Our staff uses the same computer systems that DIRECTV uses so we can get the same deals. Give us a try! Call us at 888-233-7563. If it’s after hours, fill out the form below. We’ll get back to you, usually within one business day.
