Tag: Cable Card

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Comcast vs TiVO Roamio

As most of the world knows TiVO released their new DVR called the Roamio. Which in all shapes and forms appears to be the most awesome DVR yet. With the ability to do 6 tuners and stream live TV to the TiVO Mini, it alone will save me hundreds of thousands of dollars in stupid hardware rental fees from Comcast. So before I put down nearly $1000 for the new Roamio and a lifetime subscription I decided to ask Comcast if their Morgantown, WV system would support it. (I had seen some people on the interwebs saying there were issues with some cable systems not supporting all 6 tuners yet.)

So the first place I went was to twitter to ask them (@comcastcares) if they supported it and if there were any hoops I had to jump through to switch it from my Premiere to the Roamio. Well they wrote back and said to contact [email protected]. So I sent them an email asking about the support for the Roamio and whether it was required for a tech to come out to do the install.

So I got the typical boiler plate email back saying they would review my concerns.. Pretty typical.

Today I got a call from their Executive relations group while I was at work. So I called them when I got home and here is roughly how the conversation went:

ER: Hello, I was calling to address the email you sent us.

ME: Ok, well I am looking at getting a Roamio and was wanting to make sure it was supported before buying it.

ER: Well does it support 3 cable cards? We only have cable cards that support 2 tuners, so if it doesn’t have 3 cable card slots then it probably won’t work.

ME: No it only has one slot for a M-CARD. (Thinking to my self, yeah if I had to get 3 cards that is extra money to you.)

ER: Oh, ok. well we didn’t even know that TiVO had a DVR that did 6 tuners. (Thinking well, they have had a 4 tuner one for a couple of years now.) I have some calls in to our warehouses to verify if we have a cable card that supports that many tuners, but right now the only thing we support is 2 tuners.

ME: Ok, well from what I was reading it is just a firmware issue.

ER: Hmm, hmm, hmm, ok, ok, ok (don’t have a clue what he was doing) {he then repeats about checking with the warehouse people}

 

He then addressed my issue with doing a self install and said yes you can do it, but you have to call them to activate it. (Which I knew but was confirming it again.)

I then brought up the issue where the website says that for each customer owned piece of equipment you should get a $2.50 credit to your bill. I told him I had 2 TiVO’s and therefore I should see a $5.00 credit on it. To which he explained that I do get the credit but it isn’t reflected on the bill. He then told me that the cable card fee is actually the same as the other box fees ($9.95), but they subtract the $2.50 from it (which is the “cost of the box”)� to make it $7.45 (which is the cost of the “service”).� I told him that the Comcast website doesn’t say that and even the paper that comes with the bill doesn’t show that the Cable cards are $9.95..

The funny thing was that I told him that my friend sees the $2.50 credit on his bill. He immediately said “well different parts of the country does billing a different way.” I sort of laughed and said “well, he lives 2 miles away from me. So your hypothesis doesn’t work.” He couldn’t figure out why mine didn’t show it but others did.

He ended the call with saying he would call me back once he hears back from the warehouse and whether they would or ever support a TiVO with 6 tuners. I said “well I sure hope you do as it is going to save me hundreds of dollars a year in rental fees.” He didn’t really say anything after I said that.

 

So long story short, TiVO has released something that is far superior to anything Comcast could ever offer their own customers. So now they are going to probably give out false information to make sure that customers don’t purchase the new Roamio. Just another reason why Comcast is evil, and making billions a year from people from hardware rental fees. Shit I have had 2 Scientific Atlanta 3100 standard def boxes since 2001. The interface is slow, they put ads on the guide screen, and I have paid probably close to $1,500 in rental fees on them since then.

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Yet another comcast visit

Well hopefully this will be the last post for a while about the problems with comcast… (Will see after next week when they post my new bill)… As I mentioned last time, getting a cable card installed seems to require an act of god when it involves comcast. The new contractor came out 2 saturday’s ago with a 3 more cable cards. (side bar/ I don’t know what it is about cable people, by why the hell do they always smell like they smoked a carton of cigs before coming in to the house? I have used an entire can of febreze in my living room after this tech and the two previous ones left.)

Anyways back to the story, the tech showed up, and and proceeded to put the cable card in the TiVO. It starts to do the firmware upgrade like the ones the other guys brought.. After it was done, he talked to the Comcast phone guy and then we found out that once again this card “was not in the system.” Is comcast / tri-wire’s inventory system so f&()’d up that they are not doing proper inventory of their equipment, but yet they can charge me out the ass for it?

So we pulled that card out and went through the others he had. The next one the phone guy said “should work”. Well put it in and then let it update the firmware. The guy on the other side pushed the right signals and my second TiVO is finally activated. So the tech got up and left, (and I had to completely soak the couch with febreze as it smelled so bad).

So now what can I bitch about with Comcast? The fact that they have had the ESPN’s screwed up for weeks now. The audio is so out of sync that you can’t watch anything that has close ups of people talking.

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Comcast TV Funhouse

Since we last met, here is what is happening in the world of Comcast…

  1. They have started the compression of HD channels even more.. Now instead of having 2 HD’s per 6MHz, they are bunching 4 HD’s in the same 6MHz. Which makes watching anything with fast motion on it look horrible.
  2. The problem with the cable card flashing, has appeared to be fixed. Funny that the Corporate Escalation people don’t know it is fixed yet, or maybe the magic gremlin just hopped in the TiVo and did it.
  3. I decided to get rid of the Comcast SA 8300 HD/DVR box. The reason behind this one is that about 3 weeks or so ago, Comcast decided to move all of the HD channels from the 700’s to the 800’s (to be “grouped together better”, yeah what ever.) Well when this happened, my TiVo and ReplayTV DVR’s auto updated the scheduled recordings with the new channels numbers. However the crappy SA8300 box didn’t. So to my surprise when I got home and found it hadn’t recorded anything in a week or so I was pissed. See when you pay over $2600 a year to COMCAST for a service you should expect it to work as they say it should. So I decided to quit paying them the $15.95 a month for the DVR service and just switch to the TiVo. Well today was the day for the tech to come out and do the box/cable card swap. As usual Comcast has the wrong address on my account so the tech called me because they wanted to come early, well they were 3 miles away from my house on the other side of town. So after we got that straighten out they showed up. It was a contractor and a new employee he was training.

    So in goes the first cable card, and it comes up needing a firmware upgrade. So we let it go, it kept flashing saying it was going to take an hour, but ended up only taking about 20 minutes. After the update, he called the Comcast number, where we hear that the card that we just spent 20+ minutes updating, is “not in their inventory” and therefore can’t be used. F’ing great. So luckly they had brought 3 cards with them. That is where the luck ended, as the other 2 cards “were not in inventory” either. So basically some one dropped the ball at the warehouse and was watching tv when they should have been doing work. So they left saying that they were going to try to find some more cable cards so they could come back.

  4. After they left, I bitched and it got escalated to Corporate again. Well the tech called back around 4 and said that since I called corporate that there was nothing he could do. I told him it wasn’t his fault that some one else screwed up, and I can’t tell if his phone died, or he just hung up.. Anyways, Comcast Corporate called me about an hour after that and wanted to talk. So I talked to her and they said they were going to try to get some one out on Tuesday. I told them that I had already scheduled it for Saturday as I wasn’t going to waste my time again and take off work to sit around while they play “lets try this one”.
  5. So as it sits now my adventure with TiVo has in total been 6 techs since June, and 9 cable cards… Out of the 9 cable cards, only 2 of them have ever worked.
  6. Hopefully after all of this is done, I will save over $200 a year on my Comcast bill. Or I may save more if I just drop them and go with Dish network.
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Comcast appointment #whoknows

I had another Comcast tech appointment today. See last weekend TiVo called me to work on the problem with the Comcast Cable card and the “flashing” that was occurring on about 25 channels. I talked with them for a while and then they conferenced in Comcast Phone support. The first thing out of Comcast’s “mouth” was “We need to have a tech come out and look at the lines in your house”. I was pissed, I spent the weekend before that with one of their tech’s who basically did absolutely nothing besides changes the ends in the house and replace the cable card. Neither of which fixed the “flashing” problems. So the phone guy, said he couldn’t do anything until a tech came out and did a in detail inspection of the lines. Haha what a freaking joke. So I had them schedule the appointment for 10AM today, preparing to waste the whole day on waiting for them to show up.

Like normal, 10AM came and past, around 11:15AM I get a call from a Comcast 866 number. It was one of their people calling to say that they ran out of cable cards in the area, and the warehouse was closed, and if I wanted it replaced I would have to schedule it during the week when the warehouse was open. I told them that I couldn’t and replacing it wasn’t going to fix the problem. I then explained what was going on and that the only real reason the tech was supposed to come out was to meter the equipment. She then said “Well the tech is running behind and won’t be there till after 12PM, is some one going to be there then?” I said I would and she hung up.

About 12:30 or so the Comcast guy showed up. Basically said “I know there is a problem with the cable card’s and I can’t fix it.” We then talked for a while about what the problem was and he said that there has been people calling in reporting it, but not one really took it seriously until Milan Puskar called in. It seems he had 15 TiVo’s at his place and ALL of them were doing the exact same thing as everyone else who had been calling in. That is when they finally started looking in to it. Go figure it takes a millionaire to get Comcast off of their ass to start looking in to the problem. The tech said that it is happening all over Morgantown and Fairmont from what he can tell, and every one is having the problems on the same channels.

He basically said there was nothing he could do except for pass it up to the supervisor for handling.

Here is a video I made of what it is doing. It is called “Flashing” by some of the Comcast phone people. I call it “Cable not working”. The funny thing when the tech left, was he said he hated working on cable cards because they don’t work. I was like hmm then make the channels unencrypted and you wouldn’t have this problem.

Since Comcast has not publicly admitted to what the problem is any place that I can find, here is something that I got from some one at comcast:

Only encrypted programs would be affected.  More specifically, only programs associated with segments that are part of more than twelve packages would be affected.  This is because the ECMs required to carry the entitlement IDs for up to twelve packages will fit into a single MPEG packet.  If more than twelve entitlement IDs are required, however, two MPEG packets are needed to fully encapsulate the ECMs. Not all two-packet ECM programs are affected by this problem.

The customer impact is further narrowed by the fact that only devices that specifically check the payload flag of the adaptation_control for ECM packets will be affected.  At present, and based on customer reports, this seems to be only TiVo devices.

Basically, there is an issue with decryption.  This will cause tiling, missing channels and not authorized errors.

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Comcast, TiVO and Frontier Communications

I have been a Comcast customer for a while now, and have not really had problems with their service until recently. It has all started with the switch to the “full digital” cable system. I had problems with their dta’s (here and here). Now I am having problems with their Billing department and cable card “services”.  Back in June I decided to get a TiVO to be an “hd tuner” for the bedroom HDTV. This is when the fiasco with their cable card started. I was told by Comcast reps online that the Cable Card was free, since it would be the first one on the account. This was awesome, till I got the bill and found out they were charging me for it. I talked to them again, and they removed the charge.

Well in November when I got the 2 dta’s, something happened and they started charging me $6.99 a month for the cable card, that was supposed to be free. So I contacted Comcast, and they said “sorry” and took the charge off. Well December rolled around and the charge was back. Since then I have been having a fight with Comcast over false advertising and the failure to properly document their prices in public view. It has gone back and forth about 11 times. Just recently they sent me the Morgantown Price sheet, which is not available any where online that I could find, so here it is Rate Card Morgantown. What they fail to tell you is that if you have ANY of their cable boxes (hd, sd, hd/dvr) you can NOT get a cable card for free, contrary to what I was told in June which lead to the decision to buy the TiVO. So now I am stuck paying $3.00 a month for a cable card. Which means my cable bill is now even more expensive than it was before. I am going to file an FCC complaint over all of this as well, to say that the order of “devices” dictates the price of the service is pure bull shit.

Then while I am bitching to them about the prices, it appears that either something changed on the TiVO side or the Comcast side and I started having problems with about 24 digital channels. When I would tune to say  BBC America, it would be normal for a couple of seconds and then freeze for a couple seconds, then be normal, ad nauseam. So I spent a couple of hours on a friday night clicking through all 250+ channels that I get. Out of them I found out which ones had the problems. I then went and mapped every channel to the QAM / RF channel it was allotted. And guess what they were all around the same general area. What is weird, was BBC America was one that I was having problems with, then all of the sudden they turned off The Weather Channel on the analog side, BBC America started working and The Weather Channel started having problems. For those interested, here is the list that I and some other people are having problems with:

I ended up calling Comcast to come out and replace the cable card, because I thought that was the problem. Well the guy showed up, and was not exactly the friendliest person I have met from Comcast. He seemed like it was a “stupid call”. So he started looking around and I showed him what was happening with the TiVO. He then said he would be back. When he came back in the house, he had some new cable and some tools. He proceeded to cut every end off of every cable in my bedroom and pull out all the cable and replace it with his “new” cable. Well that did not work. So he asked where the cable came in to the house. I took him to where every cable home run’s back to. He got so confused that I had to explain what was going on. It then seemed like he was pissed for some reason. Once again pulled out the snips and cut every end off of every cable and the put new ones on. Still didn’t fix the problem. So I asked if he had brought a cable card to replace the one in the TiVO. He hadn’t brought one. He left and went back to the local office and picked up a card and came out and replaced it. Well the channels are still messed up. So he said it had to be  the TiVO’s problem because the Comcast boxes “were working fine” and took off.

So now I was like hmm, this freaking sucks as I know the finger pointing game is going to start, but I got on TiVO’s chat and started talking to them. They had me reboot the TiVO a couple of times, but that did not fix any of the problems. He suggested that I call their phone support as they would have some better things to have me try. I did and they had me read off some signal levels and look at the “RS Uncorrected” and “RS Corrected” counters. He did not like the numbers on there and basicly said that it was a Comcast problem and the signal was dirty coming in to the house. But he also said he was going to go talk to some one else and call me back in an hour. An hour went by and he did call me back. This time he said he talked to some supervisors and they would like to replace my TiVO because they thought one of the tuners may be bad in it. He told me he would ship me a new TiVO since mine was only a few months old and that they would leave my current one active until I made the swap so that I could get all the shows off of my current one and on to the new one. I thought that is good, at least they aren’t like Comcast and just replace it and you lose everything.

Well today, I got stuck at home because of 3/4 inch of ice all of the driveway, and UPS showed up with the “new” TiVO. To my surprise it wasn’t new, it was a refurb. Not only that there were no cables in the box, so I could not power it on and the current one on at the same time to copy any thing over. This made me extremely pissed. Not only had they lied to me (the tech guy stressed more than once that he was going to make sure I got a new TiVO and not a refurb) but now I couldn’t even test it.

Well here is where the power of Social networking comes to help. One little bitch, and with in a couple of minutes some one from TiVO is asking for details. Then about 3 hours later, I got a call from the Executive relations people. He said he was sorry for the confusion and would be sending me a cable pack to get the current refurb one running. He also said that if the refurb that was sent did not work, he would send me a brand new one.

Fast forward about 40 minutes, and I was talking to Justin and found out that he is having problems on his TiVO with the exact same channels that I am. So now it is definitely a Comcast or TiVO problem and not a problem with my box, unless his which is a different model also developed the same problems at the same time.  Needless to say, I called the TiVo guy back and left a message that I think there is a bigger problem than just my box.

So you are probably thinking by now, if you have read this far, what the hell does this post have to do with Frontier Communications? Well not really anything, other than something weird happened last night and they are a “service provider” in the area, not that I am a client. I have not had a land line phone in the house since about October 2007 when I canceled the Verizon line in favor of using Packet 8 VOIP, which I have been using since June of 2004. Well I had left the phone in the kitchen hooked up to the old “Verizon” line even though it was dead. Don’t know why, just did. Well while I was putting memory in my laptop last night, the kitchen phone started ringing. It took me a minute to figure out what it was, because I hadn’t heard that phone ring in probably 4 years. I went in and picked it up and there was some one on the other side asking for some one who obviously doesn’t live here. After saying “sorry wrong number”, I hung up and then picked the phone up again. Freaking weird to hear a dial tone on it. So I called my self and my other phones rang. Now I had the phone number of this new “phantom” line. This was pretty weird. So I disconnected the phone from the line, as I didn’t want to hear it ring again if I had some one elses phone mapped to my house.

Once again a little Social networking and with in a few minutes I had a contact at Frontier Communications who was asking for information. I gave her the details and told her that the dial tone is a “weird” dial tone type. Needless to say I have not heard back from her yet, but last time I checked, the dial tone still exists, so I bet they are trying to figure out where the “wires” got crossed.  Some friends suggested I make some overseas calls, and some 900 number calls, or act like I am the people they are calling. But the weird part is the phone has not ringed at all today. So maybe they just assigned a phone to my house and the number is not assigned to any one and the other night was just a fluke?

All in all, I hope TiVO and Comcast get their system/signals worked out as it sucks to be paying such a high price for a service and not be able to use it completely.