Issues playing video files from ATSC receivers

Hi,

I'm having some trouble playing back recordings from my ATSC receiver on a 128 GB USB 3.2 drive
The recording itself works fine when I just hit play, but the second I try to fast forward or rewind to skip commercials, everything falls apart. The video starts stuttering, the audio gets out of sync, and it just... glitches. It’s hard to describe, but it kind of speeds up for half a second, stops, then speeds up again. Basically, I can't even think about touching the >> << buttons without the whole thing breaking. If I just let it run without rewinding, though, it looks perfect—you wouldn't even know it was a recording instead of a live broadcast.

The receiver is a Dropbox (Slovakia) model I picked up at Elmira about six months ago for $77. Honestly, I suspect the FW might be buggy and maybe needs an update. Any thoughts?

One more thing: when formatting the USB, it gives me the choice between FAT32 and NTFS. What's the actual difference, and which one should I go with?

The manual doesn't say how to delete old recordings; I've just been formatting the entire USB to clear them out. There has to be a simpler way, but I can't find anything in my menu...

The instructions I got are super sparse—just one page of basic setup and software info. If anyone else has this same device, please let me know if you have any tips. Anything helps.

Thanks,

wiredmarlin47 said:I have another question here; when I'm formatting the USB drive, it gives me the option between FAT32 and NTFS. I suppose there's a difference somewhere, but which one would be considered better?

Well, FAT32 doesn't support any single files larger than 4GB, though I suspect the receiver might just split recordings into smaller chunks to stay under that limit, if that's even how it works.

So is FAT32 like an MP3 for files? Does it just chop things up and kill the quality to save space?
Is NTFS basically the uncompressed version then?

On my end, formatting a USB drive on an ATSC receiver using FAT32 takes about 45 seconds, but switching over to NTFS finishes in just 10...

How does it work on your ATSC receiver when you're recording? When you want to clear space, are you forced to wipe the whole drive, or can you just delete one specific file and keep the rest?

The recording quality remains identical in both scenarios, since we aren't actually performing a true recording here; it’s more like just slapping a stream directly onto a USB drive. When using FAT32, the only real constraint is the maximum size allowed for a single file, which doesn't imply any sort of compression occurs—it simply means the entire 'recording' gets chopped up into smaller segments. As for deleting anything, I suppose I'll just handle that on my PC.

I'm tired of constantly unplugging and plugging my USB back into the PC just to wipe it... it’s such a hassle. I’ve also noticed that after a few hours, FAT32 seems to cut out and start recording to a new file. I don't really get the point of splitting everything into chunks if it uses up just as much memory as NTFS anyway.
I'll play around with it a bit more to see what the actual difference is between FAT32 and NTFS, aside from the constant file splitting. Thanks for the input!

No, I suppose the receiver handles the chopping just as a precaution. There aren't really any other meaningful differences between the systems, aside from perhaps the specific limitations regarding individual file sizes.