Errors in Recorded HD Files

[reggie14]

I have an HVR-1600 tuning QAM, and a DCT6200 cable box recording via firewire. Software players, including SageTV sometimes, have problems playing back the files. Things got a lot better in Sage when I made the DCT6200 record program stream files, but it didn't improve things in other players (and seemed to make things worse in VLC). Sometimes the playback problems are just hiccups, sometimes the audio doesn't work, and sometimes playback just hangs. Sometimes when I try remuxing things in mkvmerge I get warnings that there are problems with the AC3 track.

Does this sound like errors in the recording files? Is there anything I can do about it? Playback is fine on my HD100, and it seems like my signal strengths, at least for QAM, are pretty good (about 85-90% as reported by Sage).