HD2000 audio dropouts
We got a couple of HD600 and HD2000 players for a small exhibit (three silent, SD programs, one HD program with audio) and have run into a problem with the audio track.
The HD program is (for now) an SD program upscaled to 1080i, and will soon be joined on the same player with a native 1080 program. If this weren't happening, I wouldn't be as worried, because I could work around the program for the upscaled content. But since the second program will be true HD content, well, the work-arounds that I've found aren't elegant.
Anyway, the program as delivered from the post-house was a MPEG-2 Program Stream with MPEG-2 audio muxed in, with a combined bit rate of about 20mb/s. The video plays cleanly, but there were odd, irregular dropouts in the audio. Unfortunately, they didn't happen in any regular pattern to indicate a frame-clock mis-match or anything useful like that; they "seemed" random, except that they were repeatable. And on a second player, too.
I've done a few things -- re-compressed to a combined bit rate of about 16mb/s at 1080, which reduced some of the dropouts, but not all, as well as re-scaled the program to 1280x720p. Yes, bad form, I know, and it was kind of brutal to the video content itself, but, at 16mb/s, all of the dropouts were GONE. This includes output at both unscaled 720p and the 720p signal being scaled by the player to 1080i.
The HD2000 is running 1.3.27 code, off of a SanDisk Ultra II CF card; the audio is fed out analog, the video component analog. The "autorun.bas" file is 1.3.0.7, and the overall control is from an ultra-simple autoplay.bsp. (video mode, audio mode, audio level, video file.)
I'm really hoping that there's something obvious that I've missed..
Leo Kerr
Exhibits/Production
