A Defect with the HD-PVR will eventually fail for all

Wow, it’s been a rough month for my Media Center and this was the last thing I needed.  This morning when I switched to a channel that uses the HD-PVR, it gave me a “Weak signal” message and the blue bling light was going off and on.  Also it would on occasion show a frozen, but distorted video frame of the correct channel.  I assumed the satellite receiver was cutting in and out.  It was raining at the time so I thought maybe the picture is breaking up, so I switched over to the HDMI output on the Satellite receiver and it was crystal clear.  Uh oh.  Then I thought, maybe the SPDIF cable that feeds the audio to the HD-PVR got pinched.  When the digital audio goes out so does the video on the HD-PVR, but replacing the SPDIF cable didn’t fix it.  Then I noticed something odd.  The blue bling light was ever so slightly flickering.  I didn’t recall it ever flickering.  Then I noticed the power LED was doing it too.  So, I disconnected everything from the HD-PVR except the power, then power cycled it.  Still flickering.  I thought, it’s almost like it’s not getting enough power.  So, I tested the power adapter with my digital multimeter and it was putting out 5.16 Volts (it’s supposed to be 5VDC 2A output).  I guess that’s ok, but I still thought the power adapter was not right, so I borrowed the 5VDC 1.0A power adapter from my HDHomerun and the flickering was gone, but it would not start streaming, which is exactly what I would expect from an under powered device.  OK, so I decided to go to Radio Shack to get a replacement power adapter.  Threw the kids in the car and off we went!  When we got to Radio Shack they had one, for $40!  Ridiculous!  A power adapter like that is worth no more than $10.  So we went to Arby’s for some food then home.  OK, now I went digging into my parts and found an old USB hub with a power adapter that had the perfect output.  So I cut the plug off the suspect power adapter and spliced it to my replacement.  I tested with a multimeter to make sure it was positive on the inside and negative on the outside and plugged it in….  YAY!  It lives.  The HD-PVR was running perfectly once again.  So I thought, what happened to the old one.  I have nothing to lose, so I cracked it open with a vice and whoa Nelly!  What I saw just made me angry, so angry.  A capacitor had popped and another two were bulging.  And these are not the high quality metal cased Japanese ones…  oh no, these where the plastic wrapped cheapies commonly associated with Capacitor plague.  If you haven’t heard about it, here is my cliff notes version (go to wikipedia for the longer version): basically, a Chinese company stole the formula for the chemicals that go into the capacitor but they didn’t know what they were doing and got it wrong.  But, they were able to undercut everyone because they didn’t spend any money on research and development.  So, their crappy mix found it’s way into a massive number of electronics, making them all ticking time-bombs.  The whole thing just makes me so angry.  Anyway, it is highly probable that all of the adapters that come with the HD-PVR will have the same problem eventually.  If your power adapter looks like mine below, be aware of the symptoms.  It is also likely that it could cause streaming to stop intermittently as the capacitor loses its capacitance.  I very nearly bought an new HD-PVR before I figured this out.  I wonder if this is to blame for some of the problems I’ve (and others) had in the past with the streaming failing sometimes.  It’s possible that if you pick a high bit rate for encoding and it draws more current, that the bad capacitors will not be able to provide enough power causing the streaming to stop momentarily.  It could also explain why some people never see the problem and others are plagued by random failures.  Just speculation.  And, it doesn’t completely explain everything because I have had solid/reliable performance for the last 6 months leading up to this failure.