Tag Archives: cable tv

Photo-A-Day, Technology

Cable Box Blues

Cable Box Blues
Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00899

This post may be a little “Inside Baseball”. I am writing this on Friday and including events from tomorrow in today’s post. Time travel is fun.

Much of what happened today I mention in the vlog below. But here goes the saga.

About two weeks ago the DVR started acting strange and we were unable to access our cable. I tried some troubleshooting with the Xfinity Agent and it was determined that I needed a new box. So last Friday I went to the Xfinity store and exchanged our current box with a new one. I asked the man behind the counter if our recordings would transfer over. He said that they would. We can access our DVR recordings through the Xfinity Stream app and watch recorded shows on our ROKU tvs and iPads and whatever.

I picked up the new box and brought it home. I got it all set up and turned on all of the streaming apps that you can access through Xfinity. I checked our recordings on the DVR and they were there. Great! We had a bunch of content to catch up on. Then the box just stopped working and gave me an error that I needed to tighten the cables and restart. Well, the cables were completely tight and I restarted the box several times. No dice.

I got on the phone with Xfinity customer care and they scheduled an appointment for a tech to come over today and check things out. The tech was very nice and he discovered that there was a lot of noise on our lines. He cleaned everything out and replaced a ton of wiring so that the signal worked. However, the box that I had gotten did not work. So, he gave me a new box off his truck. He connected it and we got it set up. I went upstairs and Allison started watching TV. First the tv froze and we rebooted the box. Then it started making noises and flashing all the lights and went into a perpetual reboot.

Jump to tomorrow, Friday, and I go to Xfinity first thing in the morning and swap out that box to yet another “new” box. I bring that home and set it up. That is all chronicled in the video below. I get everything set up and check the saved programs on the DVR and it is totally blank. Noting in scheduled either. There had to be some mistake because even last night Allison watched shows through the Xfinity Stream app that had been recorded to the cloud. I checked the Xfinity Stream app and it was not there either.

So I got on with an agent via the Xfinity Agent app and got to the point where I could explain everything to the person from India. He connected me with someone stateside who was in customer care on the phone. I explained everything again and she set me up with a tech named Dave who would help me around 2pm. Dave called around 2:15 and tried to help. He homed things up to the next level and that person was really no help at all. Basically after everything the entirety of our DVR was gone.

while this is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things it was inconvenient and no one could tell me what happened.

Allison and I suspect that somehow the cable box resetting over and over somehow wiped out the cloud recordings. Since we got no actual explanation of what happened this is our best guess. I did get a couple of credits on our bill for the hassle and the TV is working so I guess that is an overall win.

Television

Can’t Stop the ‘Boosted’ Signal

I have stuck by the notion that I am smart enough to program a VCR so why would I need a DVR. There have been many incidents with the VCR.

1. Taped the wrong channel. (I swear Channel 4 was NBC, back in 1985)
2. Taped over a saved program. (Who labels the tape)
3. Power went out and reset the channels. (Autoprogram had to be run again)
4. Forgot to set the VCR. (Did you set the VCR, No, Did You?)
5. VCR tape was full (What do you mean one tape won’t last 2 weeks)

Waiting a MomentSo it was decided that we would get a DVR cable box. This way we could see all the stations that we like in HD plus we could have a DVR to automatically record every episode of shows that we want to see. The VCR becomes a backup when we are overloaded with TV shows on the same night (i.e. Monday)

You may have noticed that I’ve been having some trouble with our cable signal for the past week or so. I tried all sorts of things, I even called ComCast to schedule an appointment to look at the line. But I promptly canceled that service call because searched for and found an inexpensive way to fix the problem. The problem was the signal. The signal was way to weak to power all the TV’s, HD, Wi-Fi and Digital feeds. So the signal needed to be boosted. I searched for Signal Booster and I found the Motorola 484095-001-00 Signal Booster. The product is $35, a steal for the signal boost it gave us.

Every TV in the house looks better and the response time changing channels has also improved dramatically. For example the Sci-Fi Channel was practically snow on our bedroom TV. Now it is very clear and actually watchable. In the living room, where we installed the DVR, we finally have HD and it is awesome.

The worst part is that now I want a larger TV. Doh!