I just hung up with DirecTV customer service. After going round and round with them, I think I finally convinced them that this is a problem for many of us. A supervisor named 'Donna' was supposedly going to send the issue to the engineering department to be investigated.
The only 'fix' I have found for this issue is to turn off the Dolby Digital setting on my DVR receiver. It is a fix, just annoying. This only seems to be present when viewing on demand content. Live television and DVR content seems to play OK. It also doesn't seem to matter what on demand content it is. Premium movies, pay per view, regular broadcast channels. The only consistent thread is that it is on demand content.
I have bypassed my Yamaha receiver and plugged directly into my TV and experienced the same drop-out issue.
Hopefully if enough of us call customer service to make them aware of this problem, maybe it will get fixed. I mentioned how many posts there were in the technical forums regarding this issue and they had no clue what I was referring to. That just goes to show you that they don't monitor their own technical forums...
Please take a few minutes and call them so that we can get a fix.
Thanks,
Gilley Estes