Over-the-air TV signal suffers during live sports events

December 30, 2019 12:03 PM

I watch over-the-air television broadcasts via a SiliconDust HDHomeRun DUAL tuner connected to a Windows 7 computer running Windows Media Center. This system works well, except during live sports events.

I encounter problems when watching live sports events, like football or baseball. In those cases, the TV signal freezes or drops out for a few seconds at a time, roughly once every minute or so. These dropouts don't happen during every sports broadcast, but often enough that it's annoying. I very rarely see this intermittent problem on any other sort of show, like sitcoms or newscasts. I've had this issue for years, and I've never been able to figure it out.

I know someone who works as an engineer for a local TV station. He's never heard of such a thing and is baffled by it.

Anybody know what might cause this? And how to fix it? Moving the antenna doesn't seem to make any difference.

posted by alex1965 to Technology (6 answers total)

It’s possible the stream encoding is different for live sports for a bunch of technical reasons and the HDHomeRun may have issues keeping up and reencoding it.
posted by GuyZero at 12:17 PM on December 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Digital TV needs a certain amount of bandwidth for very active video, like a sporting event -- sitcoms and newscasts frequently have stationary cameras with fewer edits so a large portion of each video frame is the same data, allowing for lower bandwidth video. Sporting events have a lot of cuts and camera movement, and can suffer from poor reception -- it may be your TV card is only able to get enough data to show video for a little bit before it chokes and doesn't have enough data to display the video until it 'catches up'.
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:18 PM on December 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Per here, sports streams often have higher bitrates than dramas or news and probably the decoder is having issues keeping up.
posted by GuyZero at 12:19 PM on December 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

It sounds like either a firmware issue -- one Amazon review talks about firmware weirdness -- or some kind of processing logjam on the box or on the computer so it gives up every so often and tries to catch up. Is there a setting to upconvert from the broadcast format -- e.g. FOX is 720p, CBS is 1080i -- to the native resolution of your display? Can you throw more RAM into your computer?
posted by holgate at 12:26 PM on December 30, 2019

I can confirm I had a similar issue when I ran Media Center on Windows 7 with a Ceton InfiniTV tuner - one of the evening news broadcasts was higher-bitrate, less-compressed, or both (can't recall at the moment), than the others, and only that show stuttered - but I can't recall which link in the chain was stumbling (maybe the network link to the Xbox360 I was using as the extender?)

(I use the HDHomeRun now, with Emby as the DVR, and I have other problems, but not that one any more.)
posted by Rat Spatula at 2:50 PM on December 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I had a similar set up several years ago and my solution was to connect everything using ethernet instead of wireless. I assume that the wireless didn't have the bandwidth for the (presumably uncompressed) video.
posted by ElKevbo at 9:17 AM on January 1, 2020