kandlg, thanks for the tips. I'll try more tests when I get home from work tonight. I suspect signal issues. My cable system doesn't have HDTV so I'm using a Terrestrial Digital DB8 UHF HDTV Antenna with a Channel Master CM 7778 Titan2 VHF/UHF Preamplifier
http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_display.asp?PROD=TD-DB8
http://www.solidsignal.com/prod_disp...=&PROD=ANC7778
This high gain antenna coupled with the preamplifier is necessary for me to pull in the stations in my area. However I haven't yet mounted them very high to clear the trees. Since I'm not line of sight yet and not aimed optimally, I might be getting some multi-path reception, which if it gets bad enough could explain the issues I have. I’m used to a friends set (also in the town I live in) which shows jpeg artifacting when his signal strength gets in trouble – you know, the square boxes, etc. Perhaps this ATI Theater 650 PRO shows it differently by opting to freeze the image while it resyncs rather than showing it breaking down into squares.
The hard drive is in DMA mode. Running a test it sustains a little over 50M/sec which should be more than enough. If I'm doing my math right, recording at 8G/hour=2.2M/sec, which is less than 5% of the drive's ability.
I have a novice question. I've been watching 1080i broadcast which are perfect except for the occasional frame skipping / pausing. Tomorrow night will be the first football game of the season so I'll get to test the system with a much more active image. The question is how do the broadcast stations make use of their bandwidth? Does regular 1080i show like a sit com use the same bandwidth as a sports show also broadcast in 1080i which has significantly higher video activity? In other words does the broadcaster make use of all the available bandwidth and simply increase the detail on a sit com, where as decrease the detail slightly on a sports event to maintain bandwidth? If the answer is they use more bandwidth on a sports event, then I may expect to see the problem I am experiencing get worse.