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.    

[rooobb]

By writing your setup I mean including maybe a faulty tv... 

[Garymjh]

So,I took the usb stick and formatted it on my brothers Sony android tv and as expected it played tv recordings perfectly on his tv. When I got back I then reformatted it on my tv and it now, for no reason I can explain, plays my recordings perfectly too. 

All I can think of is that it was formatted correctly on my brothers tv and it retains some memory of this when being formatted again on my tv. I do have to increase motionflow from the usual 1 or 2 to about 3 or 4 but this no longer makes recordings look bizarre and they play perfectly. 

My tv, 55x8005c, had quite a low hz rating of 200 max and I wonder if yours does too?

I would suggest formatting on another Sony android tv if you can and/or increasing motionflow. 

If neither works then it's still a mystery. 

[Mooly01]

Pleased to hear that you are getting somewhere over this.

You mention a USB stick... you mean a flash drive, not an HDD ?  I'm using a traditional 320 Gb HDD but I think I have a 32Gb USB 3:0 flash drive I could try as a test. The motionflow settings made no difference to the problem for me, in fact I went through all the menus looking to try different settings as an experiment but nothing altered the jerkiness.

It is a strange problem. I can confirm that the issue shows when the motion on screen exceeds a certain 'speed'. For example a left right pan of a scene taking say 5 seconds could be very jerky. Same scene or content panned at say 10 seconds would be super smooth like the original.    

[Mooly01]

The 32Gb flash drive I have is deemed unsuitable as when formatted the size comes out at under 32.00Gb.

.  

[Garymjh]

Yes, although the guide says 32gb it never accepts them and it's 64gb
minimum. In any case the problem occurred with usb drives, my passport
drives, Seagate drives, everything. My problem has been hidden rather than
solved. I still get recordings which are jerky when motionflow is turned
off but is now effectively hidden when it's on at higher levels. The only
other thing I changed was removing a bluetooth usb device from the tv. It
seems unlikely that the tv couldn't cope with two usb devices attached but
you never know.

[Mooly01]

Thanks for the update on that. So there really does seem to be some underlying issue as work...

I'll do some more digging.

[Mooly01]

Still ongoing...

I had the chance to try a 64Gb SanDisk 64Gb USB3:0 flash drive and that is exactly the same as the other two traditional drives I had previously used.

Additional info for anyone trying all this... the correct method/s for removing and registering new drives seems a bit flaky. I de-registered the drive in use and then used the 'Eject' feature which takes around 30 seconds to presumably dismount the drive. Trying the 64Gb flash drive in its place gave an error in registering it with an on screen message of 'could not complete at this time'. I removed the drive and rebooted the TV. Plugging in the drive and registering it then worked first time.

The removed drive is not recognised when connected back to a Windows PC for reuse. You have to go into the 'Disk Management Console' where you will see the drive but it will be showing (or rather not showing) a valid file format such as NTFS or FAT32. You need to delete the volume and then recreate a new 'simple volume' picking either NTFS (recommended for a traditional drive) or FAT32 as the format type. So your drive is still 100% OK, it just needs reformatting back to something Windows (or OS) can recognise.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Mooly01

Can you try recording BBC News - with the ticker-tape along the bottom.  I recorded a segment yesterday, and even though the video is smooth upon playback, the tickertape along the bottom was juddery.

Cheers

[Garymjh]

But if the ticker tape on the bottom was juddery then surely the video wasn't smooth. As I said earlier this issue is most clearly seen on football matches (Match of the Day etc) Quinnicus, if you try recording a football match it will show judder if you can see the same issue. Can we have this reported as an issue to Sony by you yet? Thanks very much. 

[Anonymous]

@Garymjh

I will report it to Sony - will do tomorrow though.  Got a few more things to do and im off ta bed