I need your expert help guys. I am going to post here what I posted on the DSTV forum. No help there and the problem persists. Plasma loses signal and the only way to get it back is to unplug it for a few seconds. This has happened twice today and once the problem in the image below also happened.
I decided to post this in its own thread as, when Googling last night, the threads here did not help much. I still don't know exactly what caused this, but here is what I did to get things sort-of back to normal. I am still not happy, but got to watch some TV again.
Yesterday afternoon I sat myself down in front of the TV with my laptop. I was going to Google a recipe for Camembert cheese in white wine. We had it and it was bloody good. Anyway, I switched the LG Plasma (50PG20), Integra amp (DTR 30.3) and HD PVR 2P on to watch some telly. Switched to Come dine with me on BBC.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught the picture going green and the "No Signal" displayed. The sound also went. First thought it was the amp acting up, so switched it off and on again. It did not work. Switched the plasma off and on, also with no effect. Fiddled with amp settings for half an hour as it seemed the amp is not letting the DSTV signal through. All components is connected to the amp via HDMI and then the amp to the plasma also via HDMI. No luck.
So I thought it is the usual suspect acting up, the PVR. Rebooted that and got greeted with "HDCP is not supported" Thought I was onto something. Searched this site and got various possible things to try. Went through all of this with no luck. Rebooted another couple of times only to be greeted with "HDCP is not supported". Got really frustrated and panicky. It has to be PVR as it is the source and it gives me an error message.
Decided to check other components. FM tuner on amp worked. Tried Blueray, "No signal". Tried Xbox, "No signal". All these run through the amp. Must be amp then? Or as suggested the HDMI cables. Decided to bypass amp and take PVR HDMI straight to plasma. I must state here that I switched all components off before unplugging HDMI cables. Read somewhere that I need to do it.
PVR HDMI straight into plasma, "No signal" on plasma. Tried HDMI 2 on plasma, same result. Now I am stating to panic. "HDCP is not supported" still on PVR and "No signal" on plasma. Which one is it. Switch plasma on and off with no effect. Decided to do same check with Xbox. Success, I have picture, but it is green, as when the picture disappeared first. Decided to try HDMI 2. Green
This is a plasma, not CRT of old, but I have not forgotten the basics from CRT. If you put it in "stand-by" and not use the power button, it does not degauss and you might end up with either a green picture or green blotches. To fix that, you unplug it from the wall socket for a couple of minutes to degauss and then it is fine again. Decided to unplug the plasma by the wall socket. Xbox is still plugged in on HDMI 2. 2 Minutes later and I plug it in again. Xbox picture is perfect, no green. Success. Now for the PVR, Plug that into HDMI1. "HDCP is not supported" goes away on PVR after another reboot and picture is back on plasma. No green. Great.
Plug everything back the way it was and all is OK. Blueray, PVR and Xbox playing fine through amp. So what happened that the plasma screwed up the whole system?? I did reset the plasma to factory before I unplugged it. It did not help. Somewhere something made the plasma froze, make the PVR show "HDCP is not supported" and make the amp not know what to do. The amp was also unplugged at some point. I have no answer and hope someone knowledgeable here can tell me what happened.
Now to tell you why I am not happy or comfortable about where I am now. Apart from the fact that I don't know why this happened, at some point I also changed the HDMI settings on the amp and the PVR. After I got everything to work again, I went to the amp to set it back to 1080i. I thought this was what was meant by "HDCP is not supported". Anyway, then I went to the PVR to set that to 1080i too. The minute I did that, the picture disappeared. Immediately I knew thta I had a compatibility issue. like in the old PC days when you set the screen card resolution to something higher than the screen could handle. How to get to that setting on the PVR with a black screen? Fetched an old AV cable, plugged that in from PVR to plasma. Checked the PVR setting and it was on 562 or something. Set it to 1080i and then switched back to HDMI. All OK. This is the first time that the screen went black after changing these settings.
Lastly, we watched Paradox at 8PM. Almost at the end of the movie, the screen went black and then came back. When it came back I was greeted with this.
I assumed decoder. Switching channels or rebooting did not fix it. Unplugging the plasma did. I don't want to believe it is the plasma causing all of this. Is it possible though? If so, why?
