No audio on some HD-PVR recordings

[wayner]

I have been having an issue recently where some recordings do not have audio. These recordings are made with an HD-PVR connected to a SA3250HD cable box (Rogers cable in Canada is my provider) and the connection between the STB and the HD-PVR is via component + SPDIF. My cable box is set to output Dolby Digital. I use firewire for channel changing. I am using SageTV7.

It appears that when the cable box sits on one channel for a long period of time it sometimes loses the audio. On my HD-PVR I often record several consecutive shows from the same channel and I have only noticed this on one channel (Setanta Sports HD) but that is the channel that I record from most often, at least with this tuner. This problem is fixed by changing the channel and then changing it back. But how do I fix this in Sage?

Note - It appears that my cable box does not actually retune the channel when you change attempt to the channel on my STB to the channel that youa re already watching. You can notice this as the cable box does not resync that way that it does when you enter a different channel number. An added complication in this instance that may (or may not) be significant is that the channel is an SDV channel.

I do not think that this problem occurs when using analog audio cables rather than digital cables. I am testing this out by trying to use my second HD-PVR which does uses analog audio cables. I have disabled the channel on my HD-PVR#1 to force it to record on HD-PVR#2.

Anyone have any ideas? Can you add a prefix to the channel tuning command to switch to another channel first? Or change the registry entry to run a batch file to first tune to channel #1 (which is a garbage preview channel that I never record from) before running channelw.exe to tune my regular channel?