Very Strange Commercial Breaks!

[jcjefferies]

Last night on my client I watched a two hour recording made earlier in the day. At the start of every Ad Break video freezes on a frame of what would be a few seconds of “Sponsored by ***” although the sound continued but not from this advert! Jumping forward 3 minutes took you towards the end of the break and the same sponsor’s still frame appeared although the sound from the programme continued. It took quite a bit of jumping forward and back after each break to start watching immediately after the break.

This was a 4:3 programme and the screen changed to 16:9 just before the break and back to 4:3 just before the end of the break but this does not coincide with the video freezing. Afterwards I quickly tried a couple of other recent recordings and neither displayed the problem. This morning I try to investigate the problem further and play the same recording on the server and client and there is no sign of this sponsors advert. So what on earth was going on!! It looks like at the start and end of the adverts a still from an advert was being displayed instead of the correct video stream. I assume this rogue video frame was stored on the video card and something in the data stream caused it to be displayed instead of the video stream. Has anyone else seen anything similar happen?

[sub]

Its possibly they're dynamically changing the pids to do local ad insertion or something like this. The app is supposed to cope with this, but I've not had a test recording to check it with.

If you want to make a section of the recording available, I can check it out? You could use the cutchunk utility to cut just a few minutes from the recording.

[jcjefferies]

Thanks for the offer Sub but I have been unable repeat the problem I had last night. At the moment it looks like a random one off problem so is not really worth you spending time looking for what may never happen again. My initial reaction was to suspect an R2 patch as I had only installed them a few minutes earlier!