Recently, one of the main Canadian television stations that I get over-the-air reception for went digital (the station is TVO ... Canada’s main “public” television station which I get from the Windsor, Ontario broadcast area). The problem is, one of my two digital converter boxes can *not* show the video portion of the channel. On my Zenith DTT-901 it comes in fine ... audio and video come in beautifully and very strong. On my other converter box, a dish/echostar DTV Pal Plus, will only get the audio ... but not the video portion. This is not a matter of signal strength as the audio comes in at the top of the scale (80+ of 100 on signal strength) ... and moving the box to other areas of the house (including where the Zenith box is) makes no difference. The station's signal on the Zenith box also shows extremely strong at my location. Like I say, not a signal strength problem. No other channel has this issue on the DTV Pal Plus. I’ve tried cold-rebooting the box ... eliminating the station from the channel list and then letting the unit add it back by scanning ... and performing all sorts of positional and antenna adjustments ... nothing will bring the video portion of the feed in. This is not a matter of an issue from the broadcaster as it comes in fine on the Zenith box ... this is specifically a (another!) problem with the DTV Pal Plus box. The “website” for the dish/echostar DTV Pal Plus (www.dtvpal.com) has dropped ALL mention of this converter box or any other converter box and is now a pure solicitation for the DISH satellite TV service ... even though the URL references the converter box in-name. More abjectly sleazy behavior from the manufacturer, DISH. To quote Buddy Young Jr: “don’t get me started”. Does this problem of the missing video portion seem familiar to anyone? Has anyone heard of any issues, patching etc, with this converter box? ... Could it be a conflict with the on-screen TV guide? Can anyone suggest any solutions I should try? Thank you in advance.
I just called TVO and found out that their broadcast to a large part of Ontario has had issues with the implementation of the Program and System Information Protocol ("PSIP"). This has lead to the problem with the video portion of their broadcasts as noted in my original post, as well as the timestamp being inaccurate (something else I noticed). They are working on a fix and hope to have it implemented within the next 5 days or so. They advise to keep re-scanning channels to make the fix effective to one's converter box. Hopefully the fix will take effect soon. Now I can take the Echostar DTVPal box back out of my bag of clay pigeons where it was waiting for the next time I go skeet shooting. Just wanted to follow up to close this issue for this thread.
