farmerjohn wrote:
If the network is involved how can recorded shows that were received with no garbling play back later with the garble? Of course there could be more than one way to generate the garbled HDMI audio.
It doesn't sound like holding our breath waiting for a fix would be very productive.
FarmerJohn,
I agree that a network issue should not be causing garbled HDMI audio when playing back a previously recorded program. Moreover, if you noticed, when you rewind the recording and playback over the time frame it was garbled, the audio probably would not be garbled again. However, this is what I was told.
Realize that the ATT box is Windows CE and having dealt with Windows' challenges spanning several decades, I can state that a network issue could still be the root cause. However,I suspect that even if you disconnected the ATT box from the network, the garbled audio may occur, though less frequently because of the way Windows CE and the ATT box with associated drivers for the windows hardware support work. Windows CE is interrupt and priority driven, thus if something more important than streaming data to the HDMI interface happens, that streaming could skip a beat. Skipping a beat should not be an issue if sufficient buffering existed. It is my understanding that part of the ATT box fix is to increase the size of buffers.
This is speculation on my part but this may be how it all works; a block of data (from hard drive or network) is queued up to go out the HDMI interface. The queue has a physical size and probably is a software queue that is made up of memory. Getting the block of data on and off a queue is accomplished by buffering the data. Buffers again are probably software buffers made up of memory. Both buffer and queue sizes can probably be adjusted, but the kicker is that the higher layers (application) must know that larger buffer and queue sizes are available and be programmed to take advantage of it.
As you can imagine, this has got to be a nightmare for ATT in coordinating effort (re-design and testing) with vendors.
I highly suspect that by the time a fix comes out, a new generation of ATT boxes will be available to the consumer for a fee. That is what most electronic manufactures do.
