Media unit erratic behaviour

[rtrethew]

This is on a 2013 Alhambra 2.0 TDI CR SE Lux with no changes to the standard equipment.

Just before Christmas the media unit stopped working entirely. All other electrics fine, but media unit just dead. For about a fortnight it didn't work at all - no radio, satnav, reversing camera etc. Then this week it randomly began working on occasional trips, and when it works it's fine - everything operates as it should - but then the next trip, nothing again. And it doesn't turn on and off during a trip, it just either works for the whole thing or not (more often not).

Google searches suggest this might be a battery issue? Or I'm guessing some kind of loose connection (though the fact that when it is working it it doesn't just stop even when driving over rough surfaces suggests that might not be the issue)? Have taken the dash tray out, but can't check connections without removing facia and just haven't had time to do something like that.

Also haven't had time to take it in anywhere yet, but I'm wondering if I ought to get a battery health check and see whether that's a potential cause to rule out first. Would very much welcome advice.

 

[Tell]

You are not playing a media file by any chance ?. I mention that since the mib2 standard I found didnt like audio tracks it caused it to reboot. First I thought it was the satnav SD card corrupted. Tried it with another. Same issue reboots. Then pinned it down to an album and tracks. These system arent like PCs things can get loaded into the wrong area and cause reboots. In this case it was a home brew album that someone had made from vinyl but embedded a massive jpeg image on each track. The unit load the track into memory and because they are primitive coding implementation you got a bit of memory leakage as it wacked the data outside the declared memory range so the system rebooted. Rescaling the image to 512x512 fixed it. Think I just deleted all the embedded images and put cover.jpg in the directory.

512×512 is the recommended album art size. It was a standard on music server implementation at that time. Evident the coders used the approach but didnt put a check in on what to do if it's larger. You'd expect it to ignore albums art size that it couldn't process due to declared memory usage. It just read it in and plastered it across the internal memory causing the system to rreboot. You can't get descent programmers these days .

May not be that. Suggest you pull all SD cards from the unit and any usbs, do a long press on, on/off to forced a reboot. See whether it comes up. Try for a bit if it works with not music files or navigation. Then try the navigation SD. If that plays up change the navigation SD in case it's a corrupted file on it. If navigation is working then its the music file which is the issue I had. You have to unpick that.

Ofcourse it could be a loose fuse if not. The unit not correctly clipped in at the back. Especially if its been removed. There will be videos on that. They have a lock clip that holds it down as I recall. Had to take out a mib2 standard when something fell into it. Needed keys and unlocked that quad lock or whatever its called. Slid forward and opened it up. Worth checking it's plugged right in at the back all the way. Retrofitters whip these units in and out when they work on them on the bench.... might be a retrofitter after that to look at it.