User`s guide

60 Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting
I can play the Alcorn McBride promo clips and see them on my monitor’s output, but I cannot
see my own files playback. I believe I have encoded everything correctly, but I am still getting no
video from the DVMHD. When I send the search and play command, it responds with an ack. I
even see that the green LED comes on solid, and the hard drive is blinking steadily, just like the
unit behaves when playing the Alcorn McBride promo clips. What may be different between my
clips and yours?
The first thing that comes to mind, is whether you have your PIDS correct or not. At the time this
entry was placed in the manual, the DVMHD expects to see the video stream’s PID at 33 and the audio
stream’s PID at 36. NOTE: As of Version 2.19, PID’s are now auto-detected!
The DVMHD is blinking its green LED forever. It will not respond, to serial commands, even
though I can FTP to the unit.
It may be possible that one of the boards came loose in shipping. Some of the early DVMHD chassis
had loose slots, and a board could come slightly unseated if the box was dropped too hard during
shipping. You can power down the DVMHD, open the box and press all the boards into their slots.
Please remember to ground yourself with the unit before doing this as to avoid electrostatic shock to
the boards inside the unit. If you are uncomfortable with this or feel you need more instruction before
proceeding, please call Alcorn McBride Inc at the phone number listed in the Tech Support section of
this manual.
The DVMHD is blinking its green & yellow LED’s forever. It will not respond, to serial
commands, even though I can FTP to the unit.
This is a symptom of a firmware mismatch with the operating system on the hard drive and the
firmware on the printed circuit board. Download the latest operating system for the DVMHD from our
website (
www.alcorn.com) in the DVMHD section and copy it onto the MEDIA partition of your
DVMHD. You can do this with a Windows NT or Windows 2000 PC by putting the hard drive into
the PC. Or you can possibly connect to the DVMHD with an FTP client and copy the os.new file over
to the MEDIA partition.