Weird thing: TV shuts off at certain place in show

Factual Questions
1

Today I watched the whole first season marathon of Homeland, and something weird happened with my TV. FYI I have a DirecTV satellite and a Panasonic flat panel TV that sits on a table. It’s about 7-8 years old.

It was long about the third or fourth hour, a scene where this Saudi guy and his Anglo girlfriend go to a house in the country to wait for their contacts. She peers in a window and sees that the front door is booby-trapped with some kind of trip wire. She screams that they have to run.

Suddenly my TV shut off.

As though I had pushed the power button on the remote. But I didn’t. When pushed the power button on the remote repeatedly to try to turn the TV back on, the TV did not respond. I also pushed the power button on the TV itself but the TV did not come back on.

I couldn’t figure out what happened. The satellite receiver stayed on. It took me a few minutes to get my wits about me.

The TV and the satellite receiver are both plugged into a power strip/surge protector. I unplugged the TV from the slot it was plugged into and plugged it into another slot. Then I pushed the power button on the TV and it came on. The satellite receiver had been in operation all this time (about 5-7 minutes) and I wanted to rewind to see what I had missed.
**
Here comes the weird part. **

I rewound to *before *the place in the story where TV shut itself off, the couple just arrived at the house in the country and she looks in the window and sees the trip wire, AND MY TV SHUT OFF AGAIN in exactly the same place.

Once again, the TV did not respond to either power button. I unplugged the TV from the slot in the power strip where I had just plugged it in, and plugged it into yet another slot (but not the original place were it was plugged in the first time).

By this time, I just wanted to see what was happening, so I didn’t bother rewinding again. When the TV came back on, I just started watching from that point on and didn’t do any more experiments.

All I can say is: WTF?

Anyone have any thoughts?

P.S. I taped later episodes today because I wasn’t sure I could make it through the whole marathon, but I didn’t tape the episode where this happened, so I can’t go back and check this weirdness tomorrow.

2

Is the TV plugged in to it’s video signal via HDMI? HDMI has the ability to send a power off signal to various components. For example, when I turn off my TV, it will shut off my receiver. When my receiver is shut off, it turns off my DVD player. I have it set that way so I can turn off the TV and everything else powers off, but I can turn off the DVD player or receiver without the TV turning off, though, by adjusting certain settings in each device, I can make it do pretty much whatever I want.

Anyways, if you do have HDMI, I’m guessing something at that specific moment is sending a signal that your TV is interpreting at a power off signal. If it’s never happened before, I wouldn’t give it much thought. But, if you want (or if it happens again), into your TV’s settings and look for some sort of setting that appears to have to do with HDMI and shutting the TV off (HDMI POWER OFF maybe) and turn it off, then see if it happens again during that scene.
I can’t remember what the setting is called on my TV or receiver, but I’m sure it’s called something different on each device.
Also, just to be clear, anything (IME) with an HDMI connection will always send out the “I Just Turned Off” signal, you need to adjust the setting on the things you don’t want to react to that signal. In this case, your TV.
Of course, now that I think about it, do you ever turn off your Sat Receiver? If you do, does the TV turn off with it? If not, that this whole theory is likely useless, maybe something happens during that scene with the noise or light that effects your TV and shuts it off. Either something in the infrared band gets back to the remote sensor or the noise just does something wonky with the electronics.

3

I’d try it one more time. It is possible that the TV is starting to flake out and coincidentally happened in the same spot twice.

If it happens again I’d blame it on a bug in the TV,exacerbated by bad data from your DVR. The DVR could have recorded some bad information, which sends some unexpected data to the TV. This causes the TV’s internal software to crash, necessitating the hard power reset.

The other thing you can try is deleting that episode from the DVR and re-record it when it’s on again. I’ll bet the new copy won’t cause the crash.
What else can cause a TV to require a hard reset like that?

4

It does sound like a pretty basic software crash.

As ExcitedIdiot says, there is a reasonable chance that there is a bad slab of data in the feed that the TV is simply not properly coping with, and is causing it to crash. There is a less likely chance that the TV is actually buggy, and a well formed slab of data can crash it. Finally there is an even lower chance that there is a weird hardware flaw (either design or manufacture) that brings it about. In a sense there is no functional difference between these, just where the likely fault lives. No bug free TV should be affected by even pathologically malformed data, but it simply isn’t economic to make simple consumer products that robust.
As our TV systems get more and more complex, this is going to get worse, not better.

5

I guess it could have been a bad spot on whatever storage medium serves as the buffer. In fact, that makes the most sense.

I can’t recreate the scenario because, as I said in my OP, I didn’t start recording the program until about halfway through the marathon, so I didn’t record the offending episode.
**
Joey P** asked

I always turn off both the TV and the satellite receiver. I turn off the TV with its own remote and I turn off the satellite with ITS on remote. Don’t ask me why-- just got in that habit.

Interesting that after the TV shut off, it would not come back on until I repositioned the plug. Actually that might have been a function of simply unplugging and replugging. It might have come back on even if I had replugged into the same slot. I didn’t want to screw with that at the time-- I wanted to know if the house blew up! (I still don’t know.)

Thanks, all.

6

I had a possibly related issue playing a video on my computer. It happened to be a video in which I was speaking, so I was pretty interested in seeing it. At 7.5 minutes in, the video feed stopped, the screen went black and then returned to the start. I tried changing the buffer size, switching to full-screen and back, checked the web for similar issues, but the problem repeated faithfully and I couldn’t find anything specific. None of my friends who downloaded the video clip and played it on their own computers had any problem playing it to the end, nor have I had a similar problem with videos downloaded from other sites or YouTube. BUT when I sent the link to my brother he had the same problem only it occurred at 9.5 minutes into the video.

As alluded by previous posters, I figured there must be a spurious “off” signal embedded in the video that affects either my broadband connection, my router, or my computer, but I have no idea how to troubleshoot this.

7

Sounds like it went into overload protection.
I’d be really surprised to see a flat screen doing that. Well, maybe less surprised if a plasma did that.

8

It’s a Twonky. Run. :smiley:

9

What is overload protection?

10

Most power supplies will shut down if they sense an overload, although the majority of power supplies in electronic equipment (talking about switch-mode power supplies, which are without exception used in flat-panel TVs, even most CRT TVs since around 1990 will use one) will try to restart over a second or two after an overload; computers are one exception in that you may have to unplug the supply to get it to restart. Although I think this is highly unlikely* unless an actual failure occurred inside the TV; more likely, the computer part freaked out and the TV appeared to turn off but actually didn’t, thus the necessary hard reset.

Another possibility, but only relevant to CRT TVs is excessive high voltage or beam current, which is protected against by another form of overload protection, but unlikely in a TV that is otherwise working fine (and of course, such TVs don’t care at all about bad data, or they would shut off whenever you changed the channel to a empty channel; however, certain old monitors could be damaged by out of range scan modes and the few digital CRT TVs could possibly have the same software crashes).

*Just as a personal anecdote, I recently took apart a thrown-out LCD monitor which was rated at 18 watts (input), but I was able to draw about 50 watts (load, meaning perhaps 60 watts input) from the power supply when testing it before it shut down (cycled), so a simple higher than normal power draw probably wouldn’t trip it unless it was very marginal.

11

Could be faulty components inside the TV overheating and shutting off and it just happened to have been at those times.

I don’t recommend taking the back off the TV but if you did and say capacitors that were damaged, that is your problem. Youtube has several videos related to this subject.

If it continues, you may want to take it to a repair shop.