TV & Home Theater

[bobnohio]

Recently bought a Toshiba 55" fire edition tv. The picture will periodically lag or blur. I updated my router but that didn't help. Is there anything I can do to eliminate this problem or do I need to take the tv back and get a replacement?

[bobberuchi · Accepted solution]

You may need to call your cable company or internet provider.

I had a similar issue.  Long story short for me it was a matter of the cable going from the street to the house and the cable in the house was installed in 1988 when the house was new.  Back then dial up modem was the norm and 480i cable.

It could very well be your cable is not robust enough to handle it.

What I have also learned was you need to minimize the splits between where the cable enters your house and where it enters your modem.  Every split degrades the signal. Quality of the cable. Quality of the splitters. 

Also, if you can connect your TV to the Router via an ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi you will see dramatic performance. 

[bobnohio]

Thank you. I could have the same problems. I now have some options to try and fix this. My cable has several splits in the house and my cable/dvr is running to my tv through an hdmi hookup. Several opportunities for my cable to be degraded.

[bobberuchi]

If it is an old cable issue and you cannot fix it yourself. 

My cable company was Charter before being bought out by Spectrum.  When I was going through this the technician told me to get the linebacker program from Charter.  Essentially is is insurance to fix your lines.  $5 a month.

He said wait a few day then call for service again.  After servcie is done cancel linebacker.

At the end of it is all I had high quality cable all the way from the fiber on the street running direct to a splitter

One split went to the modem and the other went to a second splitter.  From the second splitter one went to my HDTV and the other to the rest of the rooms that had a TV.  This was before you HAD to have a cable box. 

Now I have a single splitter in the house.  one to the modem the other to a cable box.

For your wi-fi connections a really good router plays a big part.  I was getting sketchy connections on my old Cisco Router. I upgraded to a Netgear Nighhawk AC1900 dual band router.  I can now stream music to my phone while mowing the lawn and not lose connection. 

Regarding ethernet.  My ROKU physically sits 10 inches from my router. There were lots of buffering delays.  I hooked an ethernet cable to the ROKU and that went away completly. 

[bobnohio]

Ethernet cable made a big improvement.