USB recordings are jerky when played back.

[Mooly01]

I've added a comment to the FAQ's on USB recording as someone over there has mentioned this problem, but I feel that this warrants a thread of its own.

Having got to grips with how to record onto a USB drive I am finding that the replayed images are very slightly and subtley jerky. What might be a smooth zoom in and out, or a pan left to right on the original broadcast is replayed as if there is a random dropped frame every few 10's of milliseconds. It is subtle but hugely annoying and renders the USB record feature useless imo. The problem is identical on recording both HD and SD broadcasts.

There has been another identical report of this on a different model over in the FAQs section with no outcome or resolution. None of the TV settings appear to satisfactorily correct this problem.    

[Mooly01]

I asked Sony to escalate my complaint and I had a rather terse reply saying they had done as I wished and "that someone would give a solution as soon as possible". Perhaps I will get that list of supposed approved drives.

Non of this rings true to me. I've tried three drives, all very very different (USB2, USB3 and a USB3 pen drive) and all three are identical in the symptoms.

At the end of the page timcock links to is a basic specification of suitable drives. The only information I could gather from that is that it is pretty easy going on what is acceptable. USB2 (so high data rates not really needed). That makes sense because an hours program seems to show around 6Gb used, which is easily written and read in the time frame. HDD RPM speed also not important.

If anyone was wondering about whether the drive should be formatted any particular way, well my experience is that is doesn't matter. The TV seems to format the drive with a unique structure (and actually changes a standard plug in drive from the default MBR or Master Boot Record configuration to GPT, something I only found out today when I went to use the test drives on a Windows PC. I wondered what was going on when certain applications couldn't see files I had put back on the origianal drives. Had to 'delete' the drive, change it back to MBR and reformat. Something to be aware of.

I also made a recording similar to that of Quinnicus that really highlights the issue very well indeed. I'm not very proficient at adding a video to this site (as in I don't know how) but I am going to send the file to Sony via Dropbox to see what thy make of it.

[rooobb]

didn't know that now these TVs use gpt but it is actually a good news since it has not the 2tb limit mbr has (not that I think anyone would use 4tb for recording but just in case... )

it should not have anything to do with the stuttering 

[MiCal1967]

My HDD and SATA to USB3.0 controller, are unrelated with what Sony says.

"Officialy supported drives" does not apply, is not a valid demand. Has nothing to do with the drives.

It is either, the broadcast in your region, the USB 3.0 cable if used or the USB 3.0 port pins. HDDs and data are "sensitive" in pin contact, either USB pins or SATA pins.

Someone can see the disk, browse folders and files, read and write but the system is "stressed" "struggling ?". I have seen this on PCs with bad SATA cable, not necessary the main boot OS disk, but a secondary HDD, I have also seen on mainly USB3.0 connected external disks. The system takes ages to load or shutdown. And all of this because of bad contact on cables or ports. USB3.0 is a "bad Standard" because of non proper Controllers and a tiny issue on ports and plug length-depth. Something about a half millimeter.

Another issue that I noticed is when I inserted my Sony registered HDD on PC, there was a registry corruption. This created some "dead keys and binaries" with result not to be able to complete any search inside registry. Search never ended. When I found those keys and deleted them, the search was possible again. I am talking about Windows PC.

[MiCal1967]

Recorded BBC World News HD from Satellite. Playback is exactly as @Anonymous above video.

Looks like a "frame loss" during Playback on the scrolling news tickertape.

Nothing to do with my previous issue and ES File Explorer.

[timcock]

It's frustrating when one receives replies from support people who don't know the answer and won't take the trouble to find it!

Sent Fri 13/01/2017 16:23

Dear Sony support,

Thank you for this list of hard drives. To confirm yesterdays tel. con., my complaint was about picture judder, with a KD43-XD8305bu combined with a Maxtor M3 1TB portable HDD (USB3.0, 5Gb/s). Freeview HD when played back is largely watchable and sharp, but judder on panning and on scrolling text is very noticeable: much worse than, for example, when using a Humax FVP-4000T stand-alone recorder, which I use in a different house.

I have now found http://sony-eur-eu-en-web--eur.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/133297/~/what-types-of-usb-hard-... which gives a little more information, particularly “no condition” for read/write speed and disc rpm. Most of the drives you list seem not to be available in the UK. Can you identify any parameter(s) where the Maxtor M3 1TB is inferior to the listed drives?

Regards,

Tim *****

Fri 13/01/2017 16:55

Dear Mr. *****,
Thank you for contacting Sony support.

As per our conversation, please note that we would not be able to advise about features of other devices.

The list sent to yourself has the HDDs that have been tested and proved to work fine.

You can check with your retailer for the availability of them or check online retailers.

Should you have any further questions, please feel free to reply to this e-mail.

Thank you for your enquiry.

Yours sincerely,

Abdullah

....and, in reply to a similar query about my Maxtor M3 1TB, to Seagate:

Sat 14/01/2017 10:17

Dear Timothy *****,

Thank you for contacting Seagate Technical Support. I'm sorry to hear there's an issue with the Seagate Maxtor drive. I would be happy to assist you with this.

These drives are designed for use with Mac and Windows computers. TVs, DVRs and devices similar have a different formatting system typically Exfat. The Maxtor drive can be formatted to that type of format however we do not support the use of these drives when not used with a computer.

If you use the drive on a computer do you have any issues with the data on the drive? If you do the drive might need to be reformatted.

Unfortunately we do not have any information about drives from other companies so could not provide any information about what could be different.

Kind regards,

Kayla S
Seagate EMEA technical support

[Garymjh]

It's tempting to buy one of these "tested" (my *****) drives just to send a video of the exact same issue with their "tested" drives. I know that they'd just claim the drive was faulty.  I personally think it's a waste of time contacting Sony. The only faint hope is that it becomes an issue they'll actually investigate as a fault reported by Quinnicus. And if they did actually test it I think they'll say that's the best the tv can do. 

[Mooly01]

Manufacturers of drives aren't going to have made one specifically for Sony Android TV's. It would be good to throw back at Sony why only specific drives are deemed suitable and why this information was not provided with the TV's. There is no mention of having to use an approved list of drives with any information supplied with the TV's .

As we suspect, this just sounds like a get out from them.

As I mentioned before, I don't know how to embed a video into a post here. However for anyone interested, this is a 30 second MP4 video clip recorded with a compact camera that shows exactly how the problem appears for real on scenes with slow panning. Once the pan speed reduces below a certain threshold the problem disappears. This is clearly shown in all the scenes in the clip.   

This is what I am going to send to Sony. The file is in a zipped folder (20Mb in size).

Edit... files now removed. See end of thread for solution.

[Mooly01]

Just bringing this up to date.

I've had a couple of replies off Sony after sending the video that showed the problem, the latest one asking me to show the message that comes up with 'HDD configuration'. I sent a set of images showing a new HDD being registered with a shot of each screen during the process.

I'm not sure what that would prove or otherwise but I'm now waiting to hear back.  

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the update @Mooly01

[Mooly01]

A very short reply from Sony saying 'thank you for contacting support.... suitable HDD's are :' and then this link which I think we have seen before.

Compatible Drives

The link only lists models to 2015 and also as far as I know the drives they list are outdated and have been superceded.

I shall give this some thought.