Jim Hall, How about turning of Multicasting During the Final Four?

[Pat]

My opinion is that the broadcast was better than last week.  The colors were accurate and properly saturated, the clarity was outstanding.  The NTSC colors and clarity were not as good but not worse than other NTSC material, aside from the aspect ration distortion.

Regarding video freezes and audio dropouts, I had about 1 freeze per hour, and 3 audio dropouts per hour.  I didn's see Jim's request until this morning to time-stamp the events, but I'll try to do so this evening.  I'd like to time-stamp the passing of big trucks on a major street a few blocks away to see if that correlates -- but it's hard to get somebody interested enough to cooperate.  Maybe their aluminum sides reflect signals especially well causing multi-path.

The freezes and audio dropouts were both "cleaner" than before.  The video freezes were not accompanied by pixelization, and did not cause the video to go backwards for a fraction of a second, as I usually saw last week.  The sound dropouts were very brief, perhaps one second on average.

No changes were made here, so whatever  caused the difference was on the long route from our antenna back to Atlanta or Washington.  All Jim has to do is check all the connections, both hardware and software from here to there and fix any problems found.  Simple.

Perhaps what we're finding is that some sets need adjustment.  There are a lot of parameters that can accentuate the faults of NTSC (even when carried on the HD signal) to the point of being nearly unwatchable, especially if you switch back and forth so the differences are easier to note.  An equal number, and maybe more, can degrade the HD picture.

[Tom Snyder]

The low power made it unwatchable for me...constant freezes, lock ups, audio drops and pixelization every few minutes.. finally just said screw it.  

As I feared, the trees are starting to bud, and the line of trees blocking my line of site to the tower is wreaking havoc on my signal... even the typically solid WTMJ signal is gronking peridoically as well...but not to the extent 58 is.

If it gets any worse, I'll be without local HD until Time Warner starts passing through the HD channels...cuz the spousal unit has already said ix-nay on the oof-ray op-tay!  

[Pat]

During the game last night, I logged all audio and video blips.  There were two video blips, one at 8:17 and one at 9:57.  Both were very short and hardly noticeable.

But the most interesting thing is that audio blips occurred as steady as clock-work every 6 minutes.  Each was very short -- perhaps 1/4 second.  The Samsung T150 has had audio problems in older versions of the software, so the fault may well lie there, even though I'm up to date on software.  But 6 minutes seems like a long cycle for a buffer-handling software fault or for a garbage-collection slow-down in a set-top box.  It seems to me more like a disk-drive IO problem (cylinder switch?) -- which, of course, an STB does not have.