Quick clips, Start Over, Video Store on Demand (whatever that is) and any significant moves to SDV. I'm not sure if CallerID is working yet since I don't get TW phone.

Now compare yourself to Oceanic. Did you get the Photo album feature or things like the interactive sports guide "SportsChoice" and the interactive Healthcare system?

http://ligos.com/images/sportschoice_sm2.jpg

Video Store on demand is the Time Warner movie VOD selection-In Greensboro in addition to the regular movie on demand vod we have-Thriller movies on demand-Comady movies on demand-International movies on demand-espanic movies on Demand-Kids and Teens Movies on Demand-Classic Movies on Demand-Moderrn Movies on Demand-HD Movies on demand_-Free Movies on demand-Adult Movies on Demand.With the exception of free movies these are pay for view movies.All have geat sub sections.For example if you like Rambo movies they have all the Rambos in order that yo can rent.Batman movies all in order for rental.Clint Eastwood wesrerns all listed waiting for you.Mike Meyers movies help yourself.Like I said it's what they are calling it here the Time Warner video store with over 1000 titles and moveing to 2500 titles by the end of the year/Prices vary by movie from 99cents up to 6.99 for a release thats now in theaters or a pre theater preview.All in all it's kinda neat.

I'm having a problem using my DVR remote with my Samsung TV. The Volume control on the remote only works in steps, when it is pressed each time. It does not work like it should, which would be to hold it down and have the volume increase or decrease. Is there anything that can be done so this remote will control the volume correctly?

I had just finished watching a couple of recorded shows early this morning (about 1:00 am) and checking for scheduled recordings when my box locked up. After a few minutes, I got a message that my box was not authorized and to call the local help line. I did and got a busy signal. I tried a warm boot and got the "not authorized" message again. I tried the help phone number again and got another busy signal. I gave up and went to bed.

When I go up, the box still had the "not authorized" message so I tried the help line again ... still busy. I tried TW's web site and AVSFourum and found nothing. I tried the help line again and got a recorded message saying that they had sent out an update last night that was causing some boxes to display the "not authorized" message, apologizies, and fix by unplugging the box for 30 seconds (cold boot).

I did, and the box worked, but my eSATA programs had disappeared. I did a warm boot (hold the power button on the box for 10 seconds). After a lengthy re-boot (over five minutes) that skipped the second block on the boot screen, I pushed the power button on the remote and the box came back on. My screen showed the usual box for "external drive ready" except there was a short message saying there was no text for the box (there wasn't). The A for OK was there so I pressed the A button and the box went away ... and my eSATA shows were back.

I did check the diagnostic screen for version, but it still shows 2.4.1-107 6/3/08 from the upgrade in early June. The other modules were also the same. I am guessing I blocked the upgrade last night with my reboot, so I will probably have to go through the whole thing again.

Last time they upgraded my MDN box, they also upgraded the ODN boxes. If anyone sees an upgrade, let us know.

Man, what a nightmare. I got a reply from my local office and they have "no information on a new guide" now. No one seems to know anything about the 1st quarter projection either. I think half the time you get answer to a question, it's made up. There seems to be zero consistency coming from our local division.

mikeroberts... same problem here (leawood, ks) last night at 1am. Both my SA8300HD's stopped and displayed the not authorized screen. btw.. I never got in on twckc's customer service line. it's STILL ringing busy. Very frustrating. You'd think they would have posted something on their website. I rebooted mine this morning and they came up just fine. no change in software version.. still: 2.4.1-107 June 3, '08

Nothing new here for me in SoCal...same 2.4.1-107 June 3, '08 version, and SA8300HD is operating normally, no funny messages or problems (yet). :)

just got an HD box for my new tv today. I'm in southern pines, nc... they gave out SA8240HDC.

it's crashed twice already tonight.

just got an HD box for my new tv today. I'm in southern pines, nc... they gave out SA8240HDC.

it's crashed twice already tonight.

Where did you place it? From personal experience, I know that this box is very sensitive to heat and its surroundings. I had one of these overheat and start smelling like burnt electronics even though it was on top of my family's CRT-based rear-projection TV with nothing surrounding the cable box. It crashed as well during this time. These symptoms made me suspect an overloaded power supply unit. The top of this television was cool as well. I had mine replaced with an 8300HDC (which is basically an 8240HDC whose analog inputs and analog to digital converter and video compressor have not been removed) and placed it on some 2x4s. This solved most of the crashes I experienced, and it has not smelled like burnt electronics. My guess is that since cooler air allows computer power supplies to put out more power and perform better, putting the set-top box on some 2x4s allows it to use more air to get rid of heat through convection. However, the area above the box still gets really warm.

In short, to eliminate many of the crashes, go all out to keep this box cool enough (except sticking this in the refrigerator or freezer. The condensation formed will short the box out).

Later hardware revisions might have a better PSU, but I do not wish to gamble by removing my 2x4s because the hassle of losing your recordings and going to a TWC office is too much.

i actually work a block or two from the TWC office here, so i got it at lunch time no problemo. was pretty smooth, actually.

any how, crashes occured when i tried to go into the info menu with the volume buttons, and when i tried connecting a eSATA drive. we'll see how it's stability goes with time.

I also work for a company that does a lot of electronics design and such, I know about heating and all that stuff. thanks for the info, though ;)

i actually work a block or two from the TWC office here, so i got it at lunch time no problemo. was pretty smooth, actually.

any how, crashes occured when i tried to go into the info menu with the volume buttons, and when i tried connecting a eSATA drive. we'll see how it's stability goes with time.

I also work for a company that does a lot of electronics design and such, I know about heating and all that stuff. thanks for the info, though ;)

Depending on which version of ODN runs on your 8240HDC, you might have to forget about eSATA. ODN stands for OCAP Digital Navigator, and is the software train of Navigator that runs on CableCARD-based set-top boxes. ODN version 2.4.9_3, which runs on all or most CableCARD-based set-top boxes in the Carolinas division of TWC (which excludes Greensboro because that area uses SARA instead of Navigator), is incompatiable with eSATA due to a bug. It also has bugs related to MDN. A newer version of ODN that is being deployed in other markets has fixed these bugs. I hope that TWC Carolinas will hurry up and deploy this bugfix soon.

As for the volume buttons and the info menu, I have not experienced this. I generally max out the volume on the cable box and have it fixed to stay maxed out in the devices submenu of the quick settings menu, and then have the remote programmed to control the volume through my television. This maxes out the signal to noise ratio to the television. You can likely find the instructions to program your remote at Universal Remote's subscription broadcast remote support website (http://www.universalremote.com/downloads.php#subscription_broadcast) by using the instructions that goes with the model number of the remote you have or is closest to it because TWC currently buys its remotes from Universal Remote and sometimes has them custom-built by having the design slightly modded for their specifications.

I registered to chime in on this thread... Navigator was uploaded to my 8300HD two days ago, on the 29th, and I suffer an average of three crashes a day. Mystro is so broken in many aspects -- even my father who has a Motorola PACE in the family room and SA3200HD in the bedroom hates Mystro. The PACE was uploaded with the new software today and when I told him, he was definitely unhappy.

This is really unacceptable... Echo was perfect and I rarely saw any problems. Bright House will be hearing from me during the day, even though I know it would be pointless in complaining.

Complaints include channels taking 2-3 seconds to change, inconsistent closed captioning across channels and even shows, some channels (particularly those that had scrolling captions) had the captions right in the middle of the screen. Font is also too small considering it's a 720P HDTV. Crashes and reboots every other time I pull up list of recorded shows or rewind a recording. Sometimes recordings won't show up in the list until I reboot the box.

I registered to chime in on this thread... Navigator was uploaded to my 8300HD two days ago, on the 29th, and I suffer an average of three crashes a day. Mystro is so broken in many aspects -- even my father who has a Motorola PACE in the family room and SA3200HD in the bedroom hates Mystro. The PACE was uploaded with the new software today and when I told him, he was definitely unhappy.

This is really unacceptable... Echo was perfect and I rarely saw any problems. Bright House will be hearing from me during the day, even though I know it would be pointless in complaining.

Complaints include channels taking 2-3 seconds to change, inconsistent closed captioning across channels and even shows, some channels (particularly those that had scrolling captions) had the captions right in the middle of the screen. Font is also too small considering it's a 720P HDTV. Crashes and reboots every other time I pull up list of recorded shows or rewind a recording. Sometimes recordings won't show up in the list until I reboot the box.

If it takes 2-3 seconds to change channels, swap out the box. Newer boxes change most channels nearly instantly in most cases. Occasionally, when tuning to a switched digital video channel where the box must request the channel from the headend to prevent the headend from wasting bandwidth on channels nobody is watching, even newer boxes take a few seconds to tune.

I have experienced similar problems with closed captioning and DVR functionality personally. Others complained about mixing closed captioning and eSATA, so I guess that the closed captioning code has some bug which I think is a buffer overflow. The software running on boxes without CableCARDs is known as MDN. A newer version of MDN is being tested in some markets, and is much more stable. However, its implementation of closed captioning is reported to fail, but when it fails, it just fails to show closed captioning in this case instead of crashing the whole box when it fails.

If you are completely fed up with MDN's closed captioning instability, you can trade your box with an 8300HDC. This box runs a Java-based version of Navigator known as ODN that is generally slower than MDN on the 8300HD, but is generally more stable as long as you keep your DVR cool. Its channel change performance is usually speedy, except when tuning to a switched digital video channel mentioned above. However, if your division of Time Warner Cable or Bright House Networks is using an older version of ODN, its implementation of HDMI is shaky, and ODN crashes with eSATA. A newer version of ODN being tested in some markets looks like it has fixed these bugs. By the way, ODN's implementation of closed captioning is totally bug-free.

It is possible to customize the appearance of closed captioning in Navigator somewhere in the setup menus. The analog options pertain to SDTV channels. The digital options pertain to HDTV channels. I just don't remember the details of how to get to these settings because I like the defaults.

As for why Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable are switching from Passport and Passport Echo to Navigator, they are trying to save money. Interactive program guide licenses are generally rented instead of sold to cable companies. This software rent costs these cable companies big bucks. They are now trying to save money by going in-house. Also, the version of Passport and Passport Echo that was rented does not support switched digital video (a.k.a. SDV) which was mentioned above. SDV will allow a significant increase in the number of HD and SD channels offered by preventing the cable head end from transmitting channels that are not being watched at all, making much more room for channels somebody wants. If Time Warner Cable and its partner Bright House had decided to rent the next version of Passport and Passport Echo, you would probably be complaining about a much higher cable bill. Also, doing things in-house should allow a cable company to deploy features it thinks of instead of having to pass them along to the vendor of the interactive program guide that has been deployed. This request will include a hefty payment of rent to rent the modified interactive program guide that will be recouped by raising your cable bill.

From what I read on this forum, the launch of Passport Echo was nearly as painful as the launch of Navigator. It took time until Passport and Passport Echo got better and better until it became really stable and functional. From what I have heard, Navigator was much worse to use when it was first launched compared to today's versions of Navigator. Time Warner Cable's software engineers have killed many of the bugs, but they still have loads of work to do, especially because they have to simultaneously maintain two versions of Navigator.

EDIT: I just tried changing channels and measure the time it took my 8300HDC to do it. It took about one second per channel change, which is comparable to other guides I have worked with (Passport, Passport Echo, and Dish Network) when changing digital channels. Apparently, digital channel changes are slower than analog channel changes because the digital box must wait for an I-frame, or a frame that depends on no other frames in order to decode; and then must wait for the next I-frame after that, and then can start decoding the B-frames and P-frames in between the two because the P-frames must depend on the previous I-frame before it can be decoded, and B-frames must depend on both the previous I-frame and the next I-frame before it can be decoded. In short, MPEG-2 decoding requires that many frames be put into memory before any one of them can be decoded.

However, two or three second channel changes mean that your box is underpowered. Even the first cable box I used, a Scientific Atlanta 3100HD, took too long to change channels even with Passport. I eventually traded it in for a Scientific Atlanta 3250HD.

If Time Warner Cable and its partner Bright House had decided to rent the next version of Passport and Passport Echo, you would probably be complaining about a much higher cable bill. Also, doing things in-house should allow a cable company to deploy features it thinks of instead of having to pass them along to the vendor of the interactive program guide that has been deployed. This request will include a hefty payment of rent to rent the modified interactive program guide that will be recouped by raising your cable bill.

Chance of cable bill increase next year for no particular reason: 100%

Chance of your local version of Navigator being "feature packed" and bug-free: 20% (and I'm being optimistic there)

The price goes up every year regardless. I'd rather have paid extra for SDV Passport two years ago and got a competent programming team for the price. I'd rather pay extra for something that works as would the majority of this forum I suspect.

the last time I hecked I had 2.4.9_3 on my 8300HDC. I swapped boxes last week when an unexpected re-boot took out the internal hard drive (and all ny saved shows). How do I check the version on this box? In the past I have pressed buttons and eventually got lucky I guess. I though it was Vol+, Vol- and select but that does't sem to work. I searched the forum and I know the info is here but all my searches returned lots of possibilities.

PS TWC should be paying me for putting up with Navigator.

I registered to chime in on this thread... Navigator was uploaded to my 8300HD two days ago, on the 29th, and I suffer an average of three crashes a day. Mystro is so broken in many aspects -- even my father who has a Motorola PACE in the family room and SA3200HD in the bedroom hates Mystro. The PACE was uploaded with the new software today and when I told him, he was definitely unhappy.

This is really unacceptable... Echo was perfect and I rarely saw any problems. Bright House will be hearing from me during the day, even though I know it would be pointless in complaining.

Complaints include channels taking 2-3 seconds to change, inconsistent closed captioning across channels and even shows, some channels (particularly those that had scrolling captions) had the captions right in the middle of the screen. Font is also too small considering it's a 720P HDTV. Crashes and reboots every other time I pull up list of recorded shows or rewind a recording. Sometimes recordings won't show up in the list until I reboot the box.
I feel your pain man. Titusville here. I have noticed a few other quirks with navigator. For example I like to watch PTI on ESPN, but I hate commercials. So what I used to do was watch a recorded program withthe box being on ESPN, Then after watching the recorded program I would rewing back to the beginning of PTI. But now you cant. When it changes to Sportscenter thats as far back as you can go. I HATE NAVIGATOR. Other times I'll have the box on a channel I am going to watch then start watching a recorded program and when I go back to live TV I cant rewind to the beginniing of the live show because its showing like I just changed to that channel.:mad:

the last time I hecked I had 2.4.9_3 on my 8300HDC. I swapped boxes last week when an unexpected re-boot took out the internal hard drive (and all ny saved shows). How do I check the version on this box? In the past I have pressed buttons and eventually got lucky I guess. I though it was Vol+, Vol- and select but that does't sem to work. I searched the forum and I know the info is here but all my searches returned lots of possibilities.

PS TWC should be paying me for putting up with Navigator.

Press and hold the select button until the message or mail light starts flashing. Then press down. This will take you to the diagnostics. For the 8300HDC, the version will be on the first page that shows up.

Geez, JNV11, you must have had a lot of caffiene yesterday to be up at 3:30AM posting a detailed and coherently written Guide to 'everything' Navigator!!! :D

Chance of cable bill increase next year for no particular reason: 100%

Chance of your local version of Navigator being "feature packed" and bug-free: 20% (and I'm being optimistic there)

The price goes up every year regardless. I'd rather have paid extra for SDV Passport two years ago and got a competent programming team for the price. I'd rather pay extra for something that works as would the majority of this forum I suspect.

I'll 2nd those comments!!

I found a new bug last night (well, new to me anyway). I ended up scheduling three shows that were competing for the same time slot this morning. There were already two shows airing at 11am (one scheduled series and one individual recording). I added one individual recording airing at 10:30am to 11:01am - having added 1 minute extra when setting up the recording. So Navigator decided that there was a conflict and would not be recording the scheduled series program at 11am so that it could continue with the extra minute of the 10:30am program I had just added. (Seems to me that the last program scheduled should be the one with the conflict, and Navigator should have warned me immediately when I was first setting up the new recording. I wouldn't have even known about the conflict if I hadn't seen the 'conflicts' bar added to the DVR menu the next time I went to the recordings list.)

I tried to remedy the conflict by changing the recording options on the 10:30am program to not record the extra minute (to 11:01am). But, no matter how many times I tried change the recording options, Navigator would not change the recording to end 'on-time' (at 11:00am), and the conflict remained. I would make the change in the recording options and save the change, but when I'd go back to confirm the update, the extra minute was still there every time. I finally just had to cancel the 10:30am recording completely, and set it up again from scratch. :mad:

If it takes 2-3 seconds to change channels, swap out the box.

I'll do that the next time I suffer a hardware failure, which probably won't be long. :P

If you are completely fed up with MDN's closed captioning instability, you can trade your box with an 8300HDC.

Actually, I don't think the problems I'm having are related to closed captioning but I could be wrong. It just tends to crash occasionally when I rewind or try to pull up a list of recorded shows. Think that could be the cause of the captions? I don't use an eSATA hard drive, btw.

It is possible to customize the appearance of closed captioning in Navigator somewhere in the setup menus.

First thing I tried. Unfortunately, even then, the font is way too small despite me setting it to "Large" - the issues with the positioning of captions persists as well.

As for why Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable are switching from Passport and Passport Echo to Navigator, they are trying to save money.

Yep, I have a friend who works for Bright House. He was actually one of the first to get an 8300HDC using Mystro and I got to try it out at his house. I remember the sheer crappiness of Mystro then. It's only *marginally* better, but IMO it's still a "beta" and shouldn't have been distributed to customers yet.

From what I read on this forum, the launch of Passport Echo was nearly as painful as the launch of Navigator. It took time until Passport and Passport Echo got better and better until it became really stable and functional.

I remember that. I was one of the first in the area to get a DVR (an SA8000) and I had to replace the box within 2 days because it lost the ability to record anything. If there was a hard drive failure, it didn't indicate any failure.

Time Warner Cable's software engineers have killed many of the bugs, but they still have loads of work to do, especially because they have to simultaneously maintain two versions of Navigator.

I'll grant them that... as frustrated as I am that I went from a perfectly functioning navigator to one that struggles to stay stable in a 24-hour period, I understand the software development and testing process and especially with the software being forked on multiple platforms, things can get a tad complicated. I still feel, though, that they should've waited a bit longer and ironed out a few of the more serious stability issues before rolling it out to the majority of customers.

EDIT: I just tried changing channels and measure the time it took my 8300HDC to do it. It took about one second per channel change, which is comparable to other guides I have worked with (Passport, Passport Echo, and Dish Network) when changing digital channels.

Yeah, ain't MPEG-2 fun? ;) I remember having to deal with these issues while video editing. Anyway, like stated above, I think I'm gonna wait until I absolutely have to trade in the box. I don't really watch a lot of live TV so it's a minor annoyance but an annoyance nonetheless.

My version is 2.4.1-98-ptv (Mt. Huron) compiled on Feb 20th, 2008. I'm guessing I'm a bit behind the current version. I know 'ptv' stands for the PowerTV operating system. MDN version is 3.9d30 (2.4.1) compiled on Sept 26, 2007. Interesting... Thank you for your excellent reply!

Indialantic (near Melbourne) here. :) I actually noticed that problem last night as well... lost the last 30 minutes of the movie 2010. All because a friend of mine wanted me to check out something on VH1 real quick. :P In fact, I tried to record 2010 while it was cached but it didn't take, only a range of a few minutes was actually recorded.

I have a repeatable defect that I was wondering if others could confirm....to see this is very simple.

When I move forward through the day in the Guide, a strange thing happens when I hit 3:30 PM. As soon as I get to 3:30, all the data in the Guide from 3:30 on goes blank, and then after about 7 to 10 seconds it fills in again.

Once the data has reappeared it seems to “stick” in that I can go back to earlier in the day and move forward through 3:30 and it doesn’t seem to disappear a second time.

If I page forward to the next day, I can repeat the same problem for 3:30 PM that day, and the next day, and so on.

Anyone else seeing this? I'm on Navigator 2.4.1-107 on an HD box, TW in San Diego.

Well...this issue is now gone. I think I saw it wasn't happening any more the first time yesterday. Now when I scroll through the Guide in a day and hit 3:30 there is a slight lag in the scrolling, but all the Guide data stays intact, and the performance is pretty much normal. TW must have changed something on their end...maybe just a local issue or something.

My version is 2.4.1-98-ptv (Mt. Huron) compiled on Feb 20th, 2008. I'm guessing I'm a bit behind the current version. I know 'ptv' stands for the PowerTV operating system. MDN version is 3.9d30 (2.4.1) compiled on Sept 26, 2007. Interesting... Thank you for your excellent reply!

The current version I have is 2.4.1-107-ptv (Mt. Huron) June 3, 2008, 13:20:35...so yes, you are a bit behind.

I frankly don't quite understand why TW is taking so long to roll out the newer version to more sites...it is quite stable and pretty much trouble-free for me at this point.

There are still features from Passport I'd like to get back...but the current Navigator version I have works well enough that I don't think about it very often, if you know what I mean...it's mostly "just working."

The current version I have is 2.4.1-107-ptv (Mt. Huron) June 3, 2008, 13:20:35...so yes, you are a bit behind.

I frankly don't quite understand why TW is taking so long to roll out the newer version to more sites...it is quite stable and pretty much trouble-free for me at this point.

There are still features from Passport I'd like to get back...but the current Navigator version I have works well enough that I don't think about it very often, if you know what I mean...it's mostly "just working."
BTW I have the same version Gangis. Which is to expected since we both have BHN and are about 50 miles from each other.

Geez, JNV11, you must have had a lot of caffiene yesterday to be up at 3:30AM posting a detailed and coherently written Guide to 'everything' Navigator!!! :D

Actually, I was too stressed out to sleep, not hopped up on caffeine.

I am just frustrated that the darn 8300HDC with Navigator keeps resetting my 16:9 display format a that I set back to 4:3 when I go to non-HD channels.

I don't want 4:3, I want 16:9.

Any idea on how to prevent this from happening?

Thank you,
Mike

I am just frustrated that the darn 8300HDC with Navigator keeps resetting my 16:9 display format a that I set back to 4:3 when I go to non-HD channels.

I don't want 4:3, I want 16:9.

Any idea on how to prevent this from happening?

Thank you,
Mike
Keep the box on all the time? I havent powered my box down since it downloaded Navigator on Tuesday.

I am just frustrated that the darn 8300HDC with Navigator keeps resetting my 16:9 display format a that I set back to 4:3 when I go to non-HD channels.

I don't want 4:3, I want 16:9.

Any idea on how to prevent this from happening?

Thank you,
Mike

Tell the box that you have it hooked up to a 4:3 television somewhere in the settings. It will output 480i and 480p with no sidebars this way. It will not stretch 720p and 1080i in this manner.

so, i come home today, try to turn on my tv, only to find out the damn box isnt sending anything to my tv. so now i have to sit through a 30 minute (slight exaggeration) reboot. yay. love this new box.

so, i come home today, try to turn on my tv, only to find out the damn box isnt sending anything to my tv. so now i have to sit through a 30 minute (slight exaggeration) reboot. yay. love this new box.

Here are three known causes of frequent reboots:

Your box is overheating.
Your signal level is too strong or too weak.
Your box was built wrong at Scientific Atlanta.

I already discussed the first item. The second item requires a technician to show up to fix because he may need to install or remove an amplified splitter. The third cause can be fixed with a box swap.

I think Navigator SW is the fourth reason...my box started rebooting when the Navigator SW was first installed (replacing Passport). Now after the recent updated versions of Navigator, no more reboots.

Keep the box on all the time? I havent powered my box down since it downloaded Navigator on Tuesday.

Would not matter. This happens when I switch channels, not when I power up the box. If I have it set to 16:9 and never leave 720p or 1080i HDTV channels it does not change. The problem is when I go to 480i SDTV channels, the 8300HDC is automatically changing the display type for some reason - probably a glitch in the HDMI handshake.

Tell the box that you have it hooked up to a 4:3 television somewhere in the settings. It will output 480i and 480p with no sidebars this way. It will not stretch 720p and 1080i in this manner.

Sorry - I forgot to mention that I have a 16:9 HD 1080p projector, not a 4:3 TV screen and I use HDMI connection.

I want the native resolution from the cable box with the minimal processing - I let my processor do that work to send the 1080p to the projector. It is much better than the scaler/deinterlacer in the cable box or the projector.

I do not want the 480i and 480p streched horizontally (I want it to leave the sidebars) and I want the 720p and 1080i output in their 16:9 format. I would rather watch a "better" SD picture with sidebars than a stretched SD picture that looks worse.

Yeah, I'll see what happens over the next few days or so. Box was cold this last time.

just got my 800u and it's friggen awesome. unfortunately at some point my box got stuck in 480i, despite being set to 1080i only. corrected by changing back to auto, changing to another hd channel and removing all but 1080i.

:rolleyes:

and it's back on 480i... sigh. guess I've got to leave it on autoselect.

I want the native resolution from the cable box with the minimal processing - I let my processor do that work to send the 1080p to the projector. It is much better than the scaler/deinterlacer in the cable box or the projector.

I do not want the 480i and 480p streched horizontally (I want it to leave the sidebars) and I want the 720p and 1080i output in their 16:9 format. I would rather watch a "better" SD picture with sidebars than a stretched SD picture that looks worse.

Unless you want to have to keep pressing the * key to change the aspect all the time I would recommend just dropping 480i and keeping it at 480p, 720 and 1080.

If you're lucky it might also keep your settings for a few weeks before it auto selects 480i again.

No word from TWC on additions of basic function to Navigator yet? I fired off an email about something and got a "no news" reply. I was basically pointing out that I find it hard to believe there is no way to add/delete channels from the guide. This is a most basic function that even all TV's have built in!!!! I recently looked at Dish Network because they have by far the best equipment, but installation is ridiculous! FOUR coax runs to the main receiver!!! (2 sat inputs, 1 ota, 1 out to TV2). That was enough to turn me off. DirecTV is still way too expensive. After crunching the numbers, my TWC is a FAR better value. I just wish they'd get there act together with Navigator and make it the robust guide it should be. Personally, I feel the issues are a combination of hardware and software. They should have waited and just started deploying it when the next gen of set tops was introduced. The gradually phase out the old stuff. I think TWC knows they have a bulk of their subs by the short and curlys thus no big rush or reason to get this debacle fixed in a timely manner.

I just wish they'd get there act together with Navigator and make it the robust guide it should be. Personally, I feel the issues are a combination of hardware and software. They should have waited and just started deploying it when the next gen of set tops was introduced.

They did. They deployed it when the 8300HD was a "new" box. That's how fast they work and how desperately they wanted to reap a bigger profit by not licensing Passport.

I don't know what your HD situation is like but DirecTV is easily price competitive with TWC here, plus of course they have 100 HD channels versus our paltry 23.

No word from TWC on additions of basic function to Navigator yet? I fired off an email about something and got a "no news" reply. I was basically pointing out that I find it hard to believe there is no way to add/delete channels from the guide. This is a most basic function that even all TV's have built in!!!! I recently looked at Dish Network because they have by far the best equipment, but installation is ridiculous! FOUR coax runs to the main receiver!!! (2 sat inputs, 1 ota, 1 out to TV2). That was enough to turn me off. DirecTV is still way too expensive. After crunching the numbers, my TWC is a FAR better value. I just wish they'd get there act together with Navigator and make it the robust guide it should be. Personally, I feel the issues are a combination of hardware and software. They should have waited and just started deploying it when the next gen of set tops was introduced. The gradually phase out the old stuff. I think TWC knows they have a bulk of their subs by the short and curlys thus no big rush or reason to get this debacle fixed in a timely manner.
EVERYTHING can be done with a SINGLE COAX per Dish HD-DVR:
http://www.solidsignal.tv/dishpro_installation.asp

Dish Pro (DP) Plus Separator splits single coax to feed each SAT input.

Dish Super Home Node is a 4-Way Splitter that also inserts OTA signal.

Several alternative "Backfeed" configurations are shown on how to
distribute "TV2" analog UHF channel to rest of house.

After first trying to get satellite service and being told we were SOL by both majors because of too many trees, I resigned myself to getting HD service from Time Warner (North Carolina triangle area). They sent out an 8300HDC, and the technicians complained a lot about "low signal" but eventually got it working. But it needs to be rebooted manually roughly twice a day, sometimes more; if I don't do it, power on just gets a black screen and nothing gets recorded.

TWC told me to swap out the box, which I did -- same symptoms.

I ran a brand-new RG6 cable from the box directly to the splitter at the point where the cable comes into the house to rule out "low signal" -- same symptoms.

Any thoughts? Arrrgh! Strongly considering buying a TiVo HD but boy is that a lot of bucks.

I tried a Tivo HD, and was not impressed at all...sent it back within a week..very sluggish, slow guide, too many button presses for simple things.

I don't know if its the SDV testing or what, but i'm on TWC Southern Pines, NC and since the olympics started my box has rebooted itself several times, last night it did it 4 times between midnight and 1:30am. (Also once overnight, and once this morning already.) It hasn't been this bad before, I've had the box for awhile. I've been watching nothing but the Olympics.

FWIW, I see what I guess is a SDV testing channel, its a CNBC logo with "TEST01" as the channel name, and the channel is not working, just "to receive this channel, call.."

I ran a brand-new RG6 cable from the box directly to the splitter at the point where the cable comes into the house to rule out "low signal" -- same symptoms.

When we first got the TW phone service (Cary, NC), we had lots of disconnects. They ended up having to run a new line from the curb to the house. Old one was weaker cable style rated for 150 feet, and we had 149 feet of it. It just couldn't keep up. Things got MUCH better after they did that.

I'm surprised that they determined you had noise but sort of left it alone after that.

Am I the only one who is missing the last 10 days of posts on AVS Forums? Seems they all skip from 8/1 to today... I've refreshed and closed/re-opened the brower, but no change.

I don't know if its the SDV testing or what, but i'm on TWC Southern Pines, NC and since the olympics started my box has rebooted itself several times, last night it did it 4 times between midnight and 1:30am. (Also once overnight, and once this morning already.) It hasn't been this bad before, I've had the box for awhile. I've been watching nothing but the Olympics.




My box rebooted twice last night while watching NBC but was fine on any other channel. There has been a long standing problem with boxes rebooting around here when watching NBC17. I don't know if their signal is too low or what but navigator and NBC17 don't get along well. Hadn't had any problems until just before midnight last night. Was able to watch NBC fine all weekend.

Am I the only one who is missing the last 10 days of posts on AVS Forums? Seems they all skip from 8/1 to today... I've refreshed and closed/re-opened the brower, but no change.Yeah, me too. The whole site was down this AM. They must be having problems.

Am I the only one who is missing the last 10 days of posts on AVS Forums? Seems they all skip from 8/1 to today... I've refreshed and closed/re-opened the brower, but no change.
Obviously you missed this:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/announcement.php?f=166&a=123

After first trying to get satellite service and being told we were SOL by both majors because of too many trees, I resigned myself to getting HD service from Time Warner (North Carolina triangle area). They sent out an 8300HDC, and the technicians complained a lot about "low signal" but eventually got it working. But it needs to be rebooted manually roughly twice a day, sometimes more; if I don't do it, power on just gets a black screen and nothing gets recorded.

TWC told me to swap out the box, which I did -- same symptoms.

I ran a brand-new RG6 cable from the box directly to the splitter at the point where the cable comes into the house to rule out "low signal" -- same symptoms.

Any thoughts? Arrrgh! Strongly considering buying a TiVo HD but boy is that a lot of bucks.

Your problem sounds like a typical signal level related issue. For a test try bypassing the splitter at the entry to your house this will increase the signal level.

Check your signal level by using the diagnostic mode of the 8300 (hold down Pause until mail light comes on then press Page Up) it should be between +8 and -8db. On page 1 of the diagnostics see RF Parameters. Tuner 1. You can use Channel Up and Down to display signal level for each channel. If your signal level is still low have TWC fix it.

My TWC system uses a single 2 way splitter at entry. One side connects to the Cable Modem to other side to a TWC provided combo amplifier / 8-way splitter for the TV's and SA HD Cable Boxes. Per the TWC tech the amp/splitter provides no signal gain at the output. The outputs are at the same level as the input thus eliminating the normal loss from a splitter. If you need more than a 2-way splitter ask TWC to provide the amp/splitter. Mine is a Electroline EDA-UG 2802.

http://www.electroline.com/en/products/drop_amplifiers/eda_ug/index.html

If you have a Cable Modem you can see the signal levels at this address:

http://192.168.100.1/

Good luck.

After first trying to get satellite service and being told we were SOL by both majors because of too many trees, I resigned myself to getting HD service from Time Warner (North Carolina triangle area). They sent out an 8300HDC, and the technicians complained a lot about "low signal" but eventually got it working. But it needs to be rebooted manually roughly twice a day, sometimes more; if I don't do it, power on just gets a black screen and nothing gets recorded.

TWC told me to swap out the box, which I did -- same symptoms.

I ran a brand-new RG6 cable from the box directly to the splitter at the point where the cable comes into the house to rule out "low signal" -- same symptoms.

Any thoughts? Arrrgh! Strongly considering buying a TiVo HD but boy is that a lot of bucks.

There are three possible causes for 8300HDC crashes:

You are using HDMI and ODN version 2.4.9_3.
You are using eSATA and ODN version 2.4.9_3.
Your DVR is overheating.

For the first one, switch to component video until TWC finally loads ODN 2.4.10_11 onto these boxes which fixes the HDMI bug.

For the second one, remove the eSATA drive until TWC finally loads ODN 2.4.10_11 onto these boxes which fixes the eSATA bug.

For the third one, consider the environment is the 8300HDC located at. The 8300HDC has an underengineered power supply unit that is super-sensitive to heat, causing it to generate bad power whenever it is not cooled enough. My advice: Go all-out in making this box cool without sticking it in a freezer or refrigerator because those will cause condensation that kills electronics. These symptoms are familiar to me because I have had bad power supplies generate them in PCs, which I have both repaired and built. After I have placed my 8300HDC out in the open on top of a couple of 2x4s, it almost never crashed.

The power supply in the 8300HDC was probably designed for and performs well in the 8300HD, but it was unchanged in the rush job to create the 8300HDC to beat an FCC deadline that banned boxes which had integrated security (e.g. the boxes that did not need a CableCARD to perform decryption). It should have been beefed up to handle the additional load the CableCARD, the additional RAM (the 8300HDC usually has 128MB of main RAM, while the 8300HD usually has 64MB of main RAM), and the additional DOCSIS cable modem (OCAP requires a DOCSIS cable modem that is in the 8300HDC, but the 8300HD usually did not have one) that the 8300HDC has over the 8300HD.

Obviously you missed this:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/announcement.php?f=166&a=123

Thanks. :(

Your problem sounds like a typical signal level related issue. For a test try bypassing the splitter at the entry to your house this will increase the signal level.

Check your signal level by using the diagnostic mode of the 8300 (hold down Pause until mail light comes on then press Page Up) it should be between +8 and -8db. On page 1 of the diagnostics see RF Parameters. Tuner 1. You can use Channel Up and Down to display signal level for each channel. If your signal level is still low have TWC fix it.

My TWC system uses a single 2 way splitter at entry. One side connects to the Cable Modem to other side to a TWC provided combo amplifier / 8-way splitter for the TV's and SA HD Cable Boxes. Per the TWC tech the amp/splitter provides no signal gain at the output. The outputs are at the same level as the input thus eliminating the normal loss from a splitter. If you need more than a 2-way splitter ask TWC to provide the amp/splitter. Mine is a Electroline EDA-UG 2802.

http://www.electroline.com/en/products/drop_amplifiers/eda_ug/index.html

If you have a Cable Modem you can see the signal levels at this address:

http://192.168.100.1/

Good luck.

I do not know what EPG you are using, but that code does not work on a Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC running Navigator. To read signal levels, you need to go to the AXIOM diagnostic screen by first pressing and holding the VOL- and VOL+ buttones on the front of the box (the remote does not work for this), and then press the CH+ button when the mail light turns on.

After reading the signal levels, I suggest a reboot. I have often noticed instability after leaving these diagnostic screens in ODN 2.4.9_3.

AXIOM is the middleware that translates OCAP programs to native machine code on the fly.

Thanks both to John P and jnv11. Holding down pause didn't get me anywhere, but I can get into the diags by holding down vol+ and vol- at the same time until the message icon appears, then hitting ch+.

Under "Current FDC" it says Level: -4 dBmV, and under "Current RDC" it says Power: 38 dBmV.

QAM1 says Level -14 dBmV, S/N 33 dB
QAM2 says Level -16 dBmV, S/N 31 dB

The ODN version stuff is difficult to decipher - later in the same diags I can get an XAIT process list, which includes *both*:
TWC_ODN_2_4_10_11
TWC_ODN_2_4_9_3

Does any of *that* tell you anything?

Thanks.

Thanks both to John P and jnv11. Holding down pause didn't get me anywhere, but I can get into the diags by holding down vol+ and vol- at the same time until the message icon appears, then hitting ch+.

Under "Current FDC" it says Level: -4 dBmV, and under "Current RDC" it says Power: 38 dBmV.

QAM1 says Level -14 dBmV, S/N 33 dB
QAM2 says Level -16 dBmV, S/N 31 dB

The ODN version stuff is difficult to decipher - later in the same diags I can get an XAIT process list, which includes *both*:
TWC_ODN_2_4_10_11
TWC_ODN_2_4_9_3

Does any of *that* tell you anything?

Thanks.

You have a weak signal. Call Time Warner Cable to have a technician come to your house to fix this problem.

As for the TWC_ODN_2_4_10_11, I hope this means that TWC is getting a bug-fixed version of Navigator pushed down to our cable boxes soon!

Thanks both to John P and jnv11. Holding down pause didn't get me anywhere, but I can get into the diags by holding down vol+ and vol- at the same time until the message icon appears, then hitting ch+.

Under "Current FDC" it says Level: -4 dBmV, and under "Current RDC" it says Power: 38 dBmV.

QAM1 says Level -14 dBmV, S/N 33 dB
QAM2 says Level -16 dBmV, S/N 31 dB

The ODN version stuff is difficult to decipher - later in the same diags I can get an XAIT process list, which includes *both*:
TWC_ODN_2_4_10_11
TWC_ODN_2_4_9_3

Does any of *that* tell you anything?

Thanks.
Oh, and real quick: the cable modem (on a different jack, also w/ a direct RG6 to the point of entry) says:

Signal

Downstream Value
Frequency 609000000 Hz
Signal To Noise Ratio 31.4 dB
Power Level -17.9 dBmV
The Downstream Power Level reading is a snapshot taken at the time this page was requested. Please Reload/Refresh this Page for a new reading

Upstream Value
Channel ID 1
Frequency 33008000 Hz
Power 43.3 dBmV

Something has been buggy with our Navigator this past week, ever since the olympics started. We got a new HD channel called Beijing HD - which is nice. The problem lies with our NBC HD channel sometimes showing up blank in the programming guide. When trying to watch this channel, the buffer gets all screwy and the box reboots within minutes. Happened to me 3 times last night while watching the men's swimming and I would've missed the awesome 4x100 final had I not gone to another room while my box was rebooting.

After the 3rd reboot, I avoided that channel and watched some DVR'd shows. A few hours later, I checked the guide and there was actually info showing up for that channel and I was able to watch with no more reboots. Anyone else notice this bug? I remember a few nights back that both BeijingHD and NBCHD were missing info in the program guide, so the bug appears to be related to the new channel.

Oh, and real quick: the cable modem (on a different jack, also w/ a direct RG6 to the point of entry) says:

Signal

Downstream Value
Frequency 609000000 Hz
Signal To Noise Ratio 31.4 dB
Power Level -17.9 dBmV
The Downstream Power Level reading is a snapshot taken at the time this page was requested. Please Reload/Refresh this Page for a new reading

Upstream Value
Channel ID 1
Frequency 33008000 Hz
Power 43.3 dBmV

The downstream power level should be as close to 0 dBmV as possible. -17.9 dBmV on the downstream is pathetic.

Note that it is possible for the signal level to be too strong. This can cause data corruption because a too-strong signal will blow out the receiving circuits on the cable box and the cable modem, causing them to flip bits. However, this is a problem you definitely do not have.

You really need to call TWC and ask for a technician to fix the signal levels.

The downstream power level should be as close to 0 dBmV as possible. -17.9 dBmV on the downstream is pathetic.
...
You really need to call TWC and ask for a technician to fix the signal levels.

Got it, thanks - TWC is coming Wednesday :)

Update:

With the server down, those uses who contacted The Better Business Bureau over issues with TWC/Navigator, please repost any issues with that and results if you hear from the BBB.

Jack

I don't know if its the SDV testing or what, but i'm on TWC Southern Pines, NC and since the olympics started my box has rebooted itself several times, last night it did it 4 times between midnight and 1:30am. (Also once overnight, and once this morning already.) It hasn't been this bad before, I've had the box for awhile. I've been watching nothing but the Olympics.

FWIW, I see what I guess is a SDV testing channel, its a CNBC logo with "TEST01" as the channel name, and the channel is not working, just "to receive this channel, call.."

Are you watching NBC17 channel 217? I'm seeing lots of reboots trying to watch the Olympics. It's not happening on other channels.

Jim

My box rebooted twice last night while watching NBC but was fine on any other channel. There has been a long standing problem with boxes rebooting around here when watching NBC17. I don't know if their signal is too low or what but navigator and NBC17 don't get along well. Hadn't had any problems until just before midnight last night. Was able to watch NBC fine all weekend.

I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WITH PROBLEMS WITH NBC17????

I've been complaining about this to TWC for months and they don't seem to be aware of the problem. Who else is having problems with NBC17?

Jim

I have 5 shows scheduled to record tomorrow and when I was scrolling through the guide to tomorrow, I noticed that only 2 of the 5 show are showing up in "red" . What gives........why are my other 3 not in red? Is this another glitch?

Tony

I have 5 shows scheduled to record tomorrow and when I was scrolling through the guide to tomorrow, I noticed that only 2 of the 5 show are showing up in "red" . What gives........why are my other 3 not in red? Is this another glitch?

Tony


I had the same problem over the weekend. What's weird is that when I went back to schedule the recording because it didn't look like it was scheduled, it showed up twice in my Scheduled Recordings list.

I had another odd situation last week. I was trying to record the Chiefs football game on Thursday, but the guide showed Big Brother on Channel 5 here in KC. I was able to schedule a recording by searching by category, finding Football, and scheduling it there. Even though it said it would be on Channel 5, and I was able to record it successfully, the guide showed Big Brother at that time. I was shocked to go to my recordings and see the program being recorded even though it wasn't appearing on the guide.

Jeez, this thing just keeps getting worse and worse.

I have 5 shows scheduled to record tomorrow and when I was scrolling through the guide to tomorrow, I noticed that only 2 of the 5 show are showing up in "red" . What gives........why are my other 3 not in red? Is this another glitch?

Tony
Sounds like it. I have 1 hour shows that are only recording 30 minutes. If I end up moving back to NH from Florida I will be looking at Dish and Direct. Between this shyt and comcrap compressing HD channels to an almost unwatchable level I am about to give up on cable altogether.:mad:

This doesnt make any sense......I had one series that wasnt showing up in red on the guide that came on at 9 tonight and even though the cell wasnt in red....in recorded the show

Just to wipe the slate clean.....I removed all my series and rescheduled them all.

Now tomorrow 4 are showing in Red but 1 still is not.......this crap is annoying.

Also - I have these series set to record all episodes on any day but it only seems to record the new ones. Does it somehow reference what you have in the recording log and not record a show it has recorded in the past? I was wondering why no repeats have ever been recorded when the options clearly say record all episodes new and old

They really need to add the "manual recording" option as well........for sports and what not just as you alluded to Jayhawk. I also when selecting my show to record again (even though its already in a series) showed up twice in the scheduled list.

Tony

Whenever I notice this situation on my DVR, it is a repeat of a show where the DVR either has an earlier recording already on disk or notices that the guide data states that this recording is the same episode as an earlier airing that is scheduled to record.

Have you checked to see if this is the case? If so, I usually do not want to record the repeat unless the first airing is messed up by a weather alert.

Whenever I notice this situation on my DVR, it is a repeat of a show where the DVR either has an earlier recording already on disk or notices that the guide data states that this recording is the same episode as an earlier airing that is scheduled to record.

Have you checked to see if this is the case? If so, I usually do not want to record the repeat unless the first airing is messed up by a weather alert.

Both times it happened to me were sporting events (Chiefs and Royals). I don't even think those are classified as new or repeat, but in either situation, no matching recordings were in my list of recorded programs.

On a side note, one of the most annoying things about Navigator is that I can't create a Season Pass/Whatever it's called, for the Royals. It just isn't an option. So, I have to manually record every game, even though they're always on FSN/FSN-HD. This is a major pain in my backside.

are you watching nbc17 channel 217? I'm seeing lots of reboots trying to watch the olympics. It's not happening on other channels.

Jim

YES! Mine just rebooted again. Its happened several times today.

I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WITH PROBLEMS WITH NBC17????

I've been complaining about this to TWC for months and they don't seem to be aware of the problem. Who else is having problems with NBC17?

Jim

Never had a reboot issue with 217, but I'm using 8300HDC.
There is someting messed up with a newly added channel, though - 1501 (USA HD), only shows blank screen.

Has anyone figured out why the SA8300HD (mine connected to eSATA drive) will suddenly reboot with no warning. I almost missed the 4x100 freestyle!

Has anyone figured out why the SA8300HD (mine connected to eSATA drive) will suddenly reboot with no warning. I almost missed the 4x100 freestyle!

There are two possible causes I know of:

You have closed captioning on. The closed captioning code in MDN Navigator is crash-happy and probably includes a buffer overflow.
Your local NBC station pumped up the bit rate of its HD channel to deliver better quality. Almost nobody has fed this high bitrate into Navigator before, so the buffer reserved for handling incoming data is overflowing because its programmers did not consider the worst case scenario while designing Navigator.

For the first case, turn off closed captioning.

For the second case, swap out your box for an 8300HDC, and make sure it stays cool. Scientific Atlanta sells the AXIOM OCAP middleware layer that Esmertec develops for it. Therefore, Scientific Atlanta would have known how to design for the worst case scenario after many years of programming SARA, its own in-house interactive program guide, and probably helped Esmertec select buffer sizes large enough to make AXIOM immune to this problem. The crashing due to closed captioning or high bitrate stations does not happen on the 8300HDC because those problems have been solved, leaving less code for the OCAP application programmers to write and debug.

For the second case, swap out your box for an 8300HDC, and make sure it stays cool.Be a little careful with this advice. You might have missed the fact that he's using an eSATA drive. Unless your market has received the latest release for the 8300HDC, you won't be able to use your external drive. At least not without more hassle than most people want to endure.

Your local NBC station pumped up the bit rate of its HD channel to deliver better quality. Almost nobody has fed this high bitrate into Navigator before, so the buffer reserved for handling incoming data is overflowing because its programmers did not consider the worst case scenario while designing Navigator.Funny you should say this. I wonder if anyone can confirm this. With all the pixelation I've seen with high-motion scenes, I've started to wonder if the bit rate might be lower than it should be.

There are two possible causes I know of:

You have closed captioning on. The closed captioning code in MDN Navigator is crash-happy and probably includes a buffer overflow.
Your local NBC station pumped up the bit rate of its HD channel to deliver better quality. Almost nobody has fed this high bitrate into Navigator before, so the buffer reserved for handling incoming data is overflowing because its programmers did not consider the worst case scenario while designing Navigator.

For the first case, turn off closed captioning.

For the second case, swap out your box for an 8300HDC, and make sure it stays cool. Scientific Atlanta sells the AXIOM OCAP middleware layer that Esmertec develops for it. Therefore, Scientific Atlanta would have known how to design for the worst case scenario after many years of programming SARA, its own in-house interactive program guide, and probably helped Esmertec select buffer sizes large enough to make AXIOM immune to this problem. The crashing due to closed captioning or high bitrate stations does not happen on the 8300HDC because those problems have been solved, leaving less code for the OCAP application programmers to write and debug.

Very interesting stuff. You seem to know a lot about the SA8300 & Navigator. Is there any reason you know of why the firewire ports don't work? Shouldn't that kernal of code be in the firmware just like the SATA code? Or does Navigator (and Passport prior but not SARA so much) deliberately cripple the 1394 ports at the software level?

Funny you should say this. I wonder if anyone can confirm this. With all the pixelation I've seen with high-motion scenes, I've started to wonder if the bit rate might be lower than it should be.

It is just that sports are a bad fit for 1080i. High bitrates only go so far with sports. 720p would be a much better fit for the Olympics. Interlacing causes many problems for compression, especially with high bitrates. 1080p60 is impractical because it requires too much throughput to be allowed. That is why there is so much pixelation. 1080i is much better for news, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and late night comedians. 720p is much better for sports and other high action videos. Why isn't NBC switching to 720p for the Olympics? This is why ESPN does 720p.

As for why I am guessing that the bitrates are pumped up, the same thing was announced on the Raleigh/Durham DMA board, and many 8300HDs (not 8300HDCs) started crashing in our area on our local NBC's high definition channel.

Very interesting stuff. You seem to know a lot about the SA8300 & Navigator. Is there any reason you know of why the firewire ports don't work? Shouldn't that kernal of code be in the firmware just like the SATA code? Or does Navigator (and Passport prior but not SARA so much) deliberately cripple the 1394 ports at the software level?

I have not used the FireWire/IEEE 1394 ports at all, so this is something I do not know.

As for how I know a lot of this stuff, I enjoyed computers enough to graduate with a master of science in computer engineering this May. However, I am still unemployed and still looking for a job! :mad: If I had started college onein 2002 instead of 2001, I would have gone into accounting instead and have lots of work in financial law enforcement, seeing the amount of corporations cooking the books getting caught in 2001 to 2002 and the amount of mortgage fraud that is killing our banks and fleecing borrowers today! This mortgage mess is killing the economy, causing many in my field to not have jobs, and I am not good at selling myself to potential employers!

Be a little careful with this advice. You might have missed the fact that he's using an eSATA drive. Unless your market has received the latest release for the 8300HDC, you won't be able to use your external drive. At least not without more hassle than most people want to endure.

Thank you for pointing my mistake out. :o

Be a little careful with this advice. You might have missed the fact that he's using an eSATA drive. Unless your market has received the latest release for the 8300HDC, you won't be able to use your external drive. At least not without more hassle than most people want to endure.

I'm losing track of this issue. Can someone please clarify what the "latest release" that works with eSATA drives should be? I have the 8300HDC running ODN 2.4.9_3. I understand there is a 2.4.10_11 out there, but not on my box. Yet I have an eSATA drive attached and have had no problems whatsoever in the week or two that since I first attached it.

In other words, I don't seem to be using the "latest release," and yet I'm able to "use [my] external drive" and without hassle as far as I can tell. Am I lucky? Or is 2.4.9_3 new enough to work?

I'm losing track of this issue. Can someone please clarify what the "latest release" that works with eSATA drives should be? I have the 8300HDC running ODN 2.4.9_3. I understand there is a 2.4.10_11 out there, but not on my box. Yet I have an eSATA drive attached and have had no problems whatsoever in the week or two that since I first attached it.

In other words, I don't seem to be using the "latest release," and yet I'm able to "use [my] external drive" and without hassle as far as I can tell. Am I lucky? Or is 2.4.9_3 new enough to work?

With your luck, you should go enter the next World Series of Poker and clean everyone else out. :D Nobody else has gotten their external drives working.

What drive and enclosure are you using? There are lots of people who want to use their drives but can't because 2.4.9_3 crashes with eSATA.

It is just that sports are a bad fit for 1080i. High bitrates only go so far with sports. 720p would be a much better fit for the Olympics. Interlacing causes many problems for compression, especially with high bitrates. 1080p60 is impractical because it requires too much throughput to be allowed. That is why there is so much pixelation. 1080i is much better for news, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and late night comedians. 720p is much better for sports and other high action videos. Why isn't NBC switching to 720p for the Olympics? This is why ESPN does 720p.Yeah, that's the age old debate isn't it. The thing is, things like football and NASCAR racing seem to get through without so much problems.

I'm losing track of this issue. Can someone please clarify what the "latest release" that works with eSATA drives should be? I have the 8300HDC running ODN 2.4.9_3. I understand there is a 2.4.10_11 out there, but not on my box. Yet I have an eSATA drive attached and have had no problems whatsoever in the week or two that since I first attached it.

In other words, I don't seem to be using the "latest release," and yet I'm able to "use [my] external drive" and without hassle as far as I can tell. Am I lucky? Or is 2.4.9_3 new enough to work?Man what a bulletin!! I just tried it again a couple of week ago and it would not work without rebooting the next morning. Please, don't toy with me. Be SURE you know what your release number is!!

Much of the stuff that I know can either come from experience or from research.

From experience, I know about buffer overflows and what they do. They corrupt programs and cause them to act weirdly and crash. They also often force well-designed operating systems to kill the offending program. They are also a security nightmare when abused to inject code into programs. I also know from personal experience that reimplementing something that is provided in the system library (a collection of functions that either ask the operating system to do something only it can do like read to and write from a disk, or access the network; or do something that is so frequently done that either the language already has this task implemented to reduce time programmers have to code and debug) is pretty stupid. I have done this many times until I found out about the Standard Template Library in C++, which has saved me huge amounts of time after I learned about it.

From research, I found out that PowerTV, the operating system that runs on Scientific Atlanta boxes, did not provide memory protection in order to allow cheaper CPUs. This seems to be a stupid move in the part of Scientific Atlanta in the long run. Sure, CPUs with memory management units cost more, but they cut debugging time and security vulnerabilities immensely. They help debug because the operating system can attach a debugger to the application that tried to perform an illegal memory access, which can then show the programmers what is going on at the time of the illegal access. You can find the information about PowerTV's lack of memory protection in an article in Dr. Dobb's Journal online. I also found out what AXIOM is: an OCAP middleware. OCAP middlewares translate Java programs to native machine code on the fly and also either convert OCAP library calls to operating system calls or handle the calls themselves. Since OCAP middlewares contain a standard library, they have to take care of many common tasks that the applications would otherwise have to do. This library probably also handles high performance calls like MPEG-2 decompression and drawing on-screen graphics in native code, both of which would be stupid to do by coding the tasks in Java.

From college, I learned that Java performs memory checking before the actual memory access, and that it throws an exception whenever an illegal access occurs. This exception allows many illegal memory accesses to be caught early in the debug phase, pointing exactly to the section of code that caused the illegal memory access. Therefore, these bugs which often slip through the debug process because their effects are often not apparent until much later in time after the bug occurs are caught early in the debug process.

Maybe in regards to the pixiation issue,

It is best to leave settings at 720P or have the box auto adjust for you.

Jack

Never had a reboot issue with 217, but I'm using 8300HDC.
There is someting messed up with a newly added channel, though - 1501 (USA HD), only shows blank screen.

Try rebooting. Lots of folks in Columbus had trouble with the new HD channels added last Friday, including (temporarily) USA-HD. The channels were intermittent for the first couple of days, both in viewing and in the guide. Rebooting seemed to fix the problem with the new channels showing up blank or with an error message of 'channel not available, try again later'.

Don't worry about those new HD channels TWC just added. They all come down on the 24th as they were only temporary Olympic channels. I can't believe they would add USA HD only to remove it a week later. TWC = The Worst Cable!

Maybe in regards to the pixiation issue,

It is best to leave settings at 720P or have the box auto adjust for you.

Jack

That will not work. The source needs to be in 720p because 720p compresses really well, even in high action scenes. High quality 1080i MPEG-2compression when dealing with high action requires lots of computational horsepower and a high bitrate to compress acceptably. Having the box convert it to 720p will not help because MPEG-2 compression is where the pixelization occurs.

The solutions to this are as follows:

Shoot and compress the material at 720p60 resolution.
Increase the bitrate beyond what is permissable with the ATSC standard.
Install an MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compressor at the TV station and have it send at maximum allowable bitrate for H.264.


The first one requires that the TV station be able to switch resolutions on the fly.

The second one might not be feasible because this might exceed the worst case bitrate maximums on some cable boxes.

The third one will require replacing lots of cable boxes because most current ones cannot handle H.264.

Don't worry about those new HD channels TWC just added. They all come down on the 24th as they were only temporary Olympic channels. I can't believe they would add USA HD only to remove it a week later. TWC = The Worst Cable!For years, TWC San Diego added Universal HD for events (the Olympics, US Open Tennis Championships, etc) only to remove it at the end of the event. They did this three or four times before finally adding Universal HD to an extra-cost package (the HD VIP Pak).

For years, TWC San Diego added Universal HD for events (the Olympics, US Open Tennis Championships, etc) only to remove it at the end of the event. They did this three or four times before finally adding Universal HD to an extra-cost package (the HD VIP Pak).

I understand the addition of Olympic specific channels for the duration of the Olympics and even throwing the subs a bone by letting them have Universal for it. My gripe is adding major networks we have been waiting for since day one like USA only to take it down. If you have a carriage agreement, this prove they obviously have the bandwidth for the channels, why tease us and then remove it.

I'm losing track of this issue. Can someone please clarify what the "latest release" that works with eSATA drives should be? I have the 8300HDC running ODN 2.4.9_3. I understand there is a 2.4.10_11 out there, but not on my box. Yet I have an eSATA drive attached and have had no problems whatsoever in the week or two that since I first attached it.

In other words, I don't seem to be using the "latest release," and yet I'm able to "use [my] external drive" and without hassle as far as I can tell. Am I lucky? Or is 2.4.9_3 new enough to work?

Can you confirm your version tonight and also your location?

I have TWC in NYC and just got 2.4.10_11 last Tuesday, so I finally reengaged my eSATA drive. Working great so far. No reboots, and no more stuck 1/4 picture issue either. And I think I can flip between my HDMI inputs and not end up in 480i mode when cycling back to the cable input, but I haven't had enough data to confirm that.

I was browseing a Comcast board and it seems that the Comcast Tivo is haveing as many problems as Navigator.There was numerous complaints about picture freezing,shows not recording and the search engine not searching properly.It was almost like reading ths board in the type of complaints listed.It would seem that Cocast is haveing as much of a problem porting the gold standard Tivo to their boxes as TWC is haveing with Navigator.The only plus with Comcast is that if you hate their Tivo you can drop back to Passport or I Guide.TWC does not have that option. Sara 1.89.17.1 Greensboro NC

Yeah, that's the age old debate isn't it. The thing is, things like football and NASCAR racing seem to get through without so much problems.

Fox is also 720P

I was browseing a Comcast board and it seems that the Comcast Tivo is haveing as many problems as Navigator.There was numerous complaints about picture freezing,shows not recording and the search engine not searching properly.It was almost like reading ths board in the type of complaints listed.It would seem that Cocast is haveing as much of a problem porting the gold standard Tivo to their boxes as TWC is haveing with Navigator.The only plus with Comcast is that if you hate their Tivo you can drop back to Passport or I Guide.TWC does not have that option. Sara 1.89.17.1 Greensboro NC

Why don't these companies wise up. If Comcast was going to have a high end DVR Tivo solution they should look at using an independent box with new hardware. I firmly believe these problem, both Navigator and others are a combination of software/hardware. I don't see TWC resolving Navigator issues for years and it's already been out for over two. This coupled with everything else has TWC driving me away.

I was browseing a Comcast board and it seems that the Comcast Tivo is haveing as many problems as Navigator.There was numerous complaints about picture freezing,shows not recording and the search engine not searching properly.It was almost like reading ths board in the type of complaints listed.It would seem that Cocast is haveing as much of a problem porting the gold standard Tivo to their boxes as TWC is haveing with Navigator.I would point out that Comcast isn't doing any of the work of porting TiVo to their Moto boxes--TiVo is.

I would point out that Comcast isn't doing any of the work of porting TiVo to their Moto boxes--TiVo is.

Which proves my point that the hardware is half if not the full issue. If Tivo programmers can't make it work on that platform, yet the independent Tivo boxes are rock solid, that has to tell you something.

Which proves my point that the hardware is half if not the full issue.

Except that argument falls apart when you use Passport. Even the years old version we had was more feature enabled and stable than Nav.

Fox is also 720PNASCAR is covered by FOX and NBC (1080i).

NASCAR is covered by FOX and NBC (1080i).
UMMM wrong on that Fox is 720p.

UMMM wrong on that Fox is 720p.If you go to the beginning of this discussion, I was trying to argue that the Olympics should not be showing so much pixelation because other high-motion sports on 1080i stations manage to render themselves clearly without pixelation. My examples were football and NASCAR. First I was corrected that FOX is 720p. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the person correcting me thought that NASCAR was only carried by FOX. So I responded that NASCAR is carried by both FOX and NBC (which is 1080i). I know quite well that ABC and FOX are 720p. I'm sorry to have caused so much confusion.

Except that argument falls apart when you use Passport. Even the years old version we had was more feature enabled and stable than Nav.

Yes, but at what feature set, updates, etc. You can't tell me that the ONLY people to figure out how to program these boxes are Passport Echo programmers or in my case SARA. Sure, they both work, but in many cases left features to be desired.

I was browseing a Comcast board and it seems that the Comcast Tivo is haveing as many problems as Navigator.There was numerous complaints about picture freezing,shows not recording and the search engine not searching properly.It was almost like reading ths board in the type of complaints listed.It would seem that Cocast is haveing as much of a problem porting the gold standard Tivo to their boxes as TWC is haveing with Navigator.The only plus with Comcast is that if you hate their Tivo you can drop back to Passport or I Guide.TWC does not have that option. Sara 1.89.17.1 Greensboro NC

CW,

If possible, could you provide the link to that board, please?

Jack

Yes, but at what feature set, updates, etc. You can't tell me that the ONLY people to figure out how to program these boxes are Passport Echo programmers or in my case SARA. Sure, they both work, but in many cases left features to be desired.Passport left very few features to be desired--I was perfectly happy with the last few versions that TWC rolled out (over about a year) before I moved away to a Cox neighborhood. I used SARA for about a month and I swear another week would have killed me. Frustration with its horrible inadequancies had my blood pressure so high that I would have stroked out.

Yes, but at what feature set, updates, etc. You can't tell me that the ONLY people to figure out how to program these boxes are Passport Echo programmers or in my case SARA. Sure, they both work, but in many cases left features to be desired.

You are forgetting that TWC was in control of the version of Passport we got. Passport was updated plenty of times after the updates dried out on TWC two or three years ago. TWC chose to let the software grind to a halt but that didn't mean extra features did not continue to be added.

Right now the only things that Nav has over Passport in this area are CallerID and black sidebars. Everything else is either a downgrade in functionality or just a poor substitute for the basic features we already had.

If TWC had kept up to date with the software distributed by both SARA and Passport I'm pretty certain that not only would both be rock solid but the feature sets would easily eclipse the poor additions promised with Nav. Especially since in many cases TWC still hasn't delivered on those promised features.

Passport left very few features to be desired--I was perfectly happy with the last few versions that TWC rolled out (over about a year) before I moved away to a Cox neighborhood. I used SARA for about a month and I swear another week would have killed me. Frustration with its horrible inadequancies had my blood pressure so high that I would have stroked out.

Just curious - did Passport have the features I would really like to have in Navigator:

- 30 second skip
- ability to remove channels from view as well as from the searches
- ability to set up recordings based on searches, even if there are no results currently (i.e. so you can set a recording of a pilot of a new show two weeks in advance, for example); note that manual recording by time slot only is just a workaround for this - what if you know the show name but not the time

Can you confirm your version tonight and also your location?

I have TWC in NYC and just got 2.4.10_11 last Tuesday, so I finally reengaged my eSATA drive. Working great so far. No reboots, and no more stuck 1/4 picture issue either. And I think I can flip between my HDMI inputs and not end up in 480i mode when cycling back to the cable input, but I haven't had enough data to confirm that.

Heh, three people asking me to confirm my version. Clearly I've been lucky to have this work since it really shouldn't be. Well, I cannot confirm the version at this moment, but I can double-check when I get home tonight. However, I did check the diagnostic screen before I hooked up my eSATA drive and it absolutely was 2.4.9_3. I wrote it down to be sure, and that is what it was when I hooked the drive up. Has it now changed? I'll check again tonight.

As for what drive I used, it's this one:

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DriveQ.cfm

I've been taping the Olympics every day and night, no problems, no reboots while I've watched, no discernable problems. I don't know how to explain it.

I'm waiting for 2.4.10_11 so that I can switch back to HDMI from component. Evidently I need that version to make sure my drive continues to work. For now, I'm just glad it works, and I'm holding my breath.

Is there a way to force TWC to update me sooner rather than just wait for them to get around to it? If I'm playing with fire, I'd better grab the water hose.

Jack I will try to find the link and post it.I found the site while I was web surfing and did not make a note of it.It was mostly Comcast viewers moaning about Comcast Tivo.I will see if I can find it again and post it.

Heh, three people asking me to confirm my version. Clearly I've been lucky to have this work since it really shouldn't be. Well, I cannot confirm the version at this moment, but I can double-check when I get home tonight. However, I did check the diagnostic screen before I hooked up my eSATA drive and it absolutely was 2.4.9_3. I wrote it down to be sure, and that is what it was when I hooked the drive up. Has it now changed? I'll check again tonight.

As for what drive I used, it's this one:

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DriveQ.cfm

I've been taping the Olympics every day and night, no problems, no reboots while I've watched, no discernable problems. I don't know how to explain it.

I'm waiting for 2.4.10_11 so that I can switch back to HDMI from component. Evidently I need that version to make sure my drive continues to work. For now, I'm just glad it works, and I'm holding my breath.

Is there a way to force TWC to update me sooner rather than just wait for them to get around to it? If I'm playing with fire, I'd better grab the water hose.

Recording Olympics day and night may explain it. The thing dies when it is idle for a while, so if you are continuously recording it will work - that is exactly the workaround for the issue. I keep mine running by scheduling weather channel to record 24/7.

However, I did check the diagnostic screen before I hooked up my eSATA drive and it absolutely was 2.4.9_3. I wrote it down to be sure, and that is what it was when I hooked the drive up. Has it now changed? I'll check again tonight.And just to be sure we're comparing apples to apples, please check the release reported by the diagnostics you access from the remote control (the 9-page version), not from the STB front panel.

As for what drive I used, it's this one:

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DriveQ.cfm
Interesting. I wonder if maybe this thing works because is doesn't spin down. Can't tell from the doc. Strangely, all three sizes of the drive are out of stock.

Recording Olympics day and night may explain it. The thing dies when it is idle for a while, so if you are continuously recording it will work - that is exactly the workaround for the issue. I keep mine running by scheduling weather channel to record 24/7.

Yep, agreed. Sounds like he accidentally implemented the work-around.

xnappo

Yep, agreed. Sounds like he accidentally implemented the work-around.

xnappoYou may be right, but he says

and have had no problems whatsoever in the week or two that since I first attached it.The olympics hasn't been on for a week.

Just curious - did Passport have the features I would really like to have in Navigator:

- 30 second skip
- ability to remove channels from view as well as from the searches
- ability to set up recordings based on searches, even if there are no results currently (i.e. so you can set a recording of a pilot of a new show two weeks in advance, for example); note that manual recording by time slot only is just a workaround for this - what if you know the show name but not the time

not in the version we had. There was manual recording so you could just set up a recording based on any time and date but no automated keyword record.

(edit: 30 second skip was added this year according to testers.

[PLAY][PLAY] : 30 second skip
[PAUSE][FFWD] : move forward in slow motion
[PAUSE][RWND] : move backward in slow motion
[PAUSE][Right Arrow] : manual step forward frame by frame
[PAUSE][Left Arrow] : manual step backward frame by frame

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19859928-Testing-Aptiv-30-DC-Users-want-to-test )


You can see a list of features that Passport had that we mostly never received here:

http://www.pioneerdigital.com//passportecho/passportecho.asp#

While trying to find some info on the latest version I found this old fact from their May update last year:

A new version of the company’s Caller ID app that can run on Passport DCT and Passport Echo on the Motorola platform (it has been available on Passport and Passport Echo for the Scientific-Atlanta platform for over five years). The app, which Aptiv says is compatible with any backend caller ID solution, displays a banner at the bottom of the screen with the phone number, option line number, and name of the incoming caller. It allows end-users to display a call history of up to four phone lines by accessing preferences in the settings menu.

Yeah, five years Caller ID has been available on Passport and we never saw it and some areas still haven't even seen it on TWCs own platform even now.

And just to be sure we're comparing apples to apples, please check the release reported by the diagnostics you access from the remote control (the 9-page version), not from the STB front panel.

Hmm...I thought that was what I was getting from the STB front panel (the 9-page version). Here is what I did:

Hold Select for 5 seconds until the mail light blinks.
While it is blinking, press the down button.

I did this from the box, not from the remote. What other method are you talking about?

[I](edit: 30 second skip was added this year according to testers.

[PLAY][PLAY] : 30 second skip
[PAUSE][FFWD] : move forward in slow motion
[PAUSE][RWND] : move backward in slow motion
[PAUSE][Right Arrow] : manual step forward frame by frame
[PAUSE][Left Arrow] : manual step backward frame by frame


The [PLAY][PLAY] function was how you accessed slow motion in the last version of Passport we had (which was flushed for Navigator in March of this year). It was very difficult to get exactly right and the one thing Navigator does better is slow motion (a second press of the PLAY button). I'm surprised they added the 30 second skip feature... I thought that was basically outlawed by the content providers, that they drew a line in the sand with that one. :confused:

You may be right, but he says

The olympics hasn't been on for a week.

Yeah, I'm just going off memory. I think I actually installed it a little over a week ago, and thus it was before the Olympics began but only a few days. Since the Olympics started I've been recording the 10am-afternoon block and the 8pm-midnight block, but that's it. It's hardly 24 hours. Just steady and regular usage on a daily basis.

I've noticed that since I switched to the HDMI connection, I can no longer pull up the diagnostics & info screens. Anyone else? Do I need to change any menu items to do this?

SA8300HDC Sara 1.90.5.110 (as of February, haven't been able to check since)

Yeah, I'm just going off memory. I think I actually installed it a little over a week ago, and thus it was before the Olympics began but only a few days. Since the Olympics started I've been recording the 10am-afternoon block and the 8pm-midnight block, but that's it. It's hardly 24 hours. Just steady and regular usage on a daily basis.

Are you in NYC? (I'm just guessing that if so, UES = upper east side)

That said, I like phousley's conjecture that your particular drive does not spin down and thus is immune to the bug in 2.4.9_3.

Alternatively, if you are in NYC it is possible that the update got pushed through just after you got the box (mine updated to 2.4.10_X last Tues).

For diagnostic screen, I use the hold select until mail icon and then down arrow via remote control.

There are two diagnostics screens on Scientific Atlanta boxes with ODN Navigator and a CableCARD: Navigator's diagnostics and the AXIOM OCAP middleware diagnostics.

To get to Navigator's diagnostics, press and hold Select until the mail light blinks. Then press down. This must be done on the remote control because the box lacks the down button.

To get to the AXIOM OCAP middleware's diagnostics, press and hold VOL- and VOL+ on the box itself until the mail light turns on solid. Then press CH+. I suggest a reboot after doing this because Navigator often goes unstable when you access the AXIOM OCAP diagnostics. This does not work on the remote.

I would not know how to get into the Samsung box's hardware diagnostics.

The [PLAY][PLAY] function was how you accessed slow motion in the last version of Passport we had (which was flushed for Navigator in March of this year). It was very difficult to get exactly right and the one thing Navigator does better is slow motion (a second press of the PLAY button). I'm surprised they added the 30 second skip feature... I thought that was basically outlawed by the content providers, that they drew a line in the sand with that one. :confused:

I only activated the slow-mo in our version by accident most of the time so it looks like Aptiv listened to some feedback to make it more usable. Things must have changed in the past few years to add the skip or maybe it was just TWC who didn't want us to have it.

Given the transport situation of Nav controls I doubt we'll ever see it. The configuration they have now with the 15 minute jump, the slow-mo etc. would mean adding a skip would require remapping the controls again and that will just result in utter chaos.

To get to Navigator's diagnostics, press and hold Select until the mail light blinks. Then press down. This must be done on the remote control because the box lacks the down button.No, I just tried it. You can indeed bring up the Navigator diags from the front panel. Surprised me too.

No, I just tried it. You can indeed bring up the Navigator diags from the front panel. Surprised me too.What did you use instead of the cursor DOWN button? "CHAN -"?

Yeah. It brought up the diag screen AND changed the channel.

Incidentally, I can confirm the odd habit of the DVR crashing when you turn on closed captioning (SA8300HD w/Navigator 2.4.1-92). I don't know if there's basically a time limit on how long you can use CC before you crash the box - maybe you gradually fill up the buffer until it runs out of memory and "overflows" - but I'm going to try to limit it to situations where I really need it.

Thanks for the instructions. I definitely started out on the box, but I may have pushed down on the remote. Can't remember, I'll do it again this evening.

Yes, I'm on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I tried for a useful, literal handle :)

We were just upgraded to version 2.4.10_11. Besides fixing the sleep bug, what other improvements are there? None seem to be visible?

Just curious - did Passport have the features I would really like to have in Navigator:

- 30 second skip
- ability to remove channels from view as well as from the searches
- ability to set up recordings based on searches, even if there are no results currently (i.e. so you can set a recording of a pilot of a new show two weeks in advance, for example); note that manual recording by time slot only is just a workaround for this - what if you know the show name but not the time
I still have Passport and as others pointed out, the first two are not there. The third item is there, but not advertised or readily documented. In fact, I taught a VP assistant this trick during a phone call on some other issues when we got a new version of Passport a couple years back. Anyway, when you hit the 'c' button to search the guide, if you hit it a second time it allows you to type in "key words". The listing will show a magnifying glass next to it. If the words you typed in showed up in the title OR description it would get recorded. I missed a show I wanted to watch when repeated. I caught the end of it and saw the description in the guide. I typed in a unique phrase from it 2 or 3 words long and about 5 months later I had it recorded (forgot about it). Works with actors listed, etc. Closest thing to TIVO type usage. But as I said, found accidently and since I think I have found it in a list of undocumented features. /Dan

Incidentally, I can confirm the odd habit of the DVR crashing when you turn on closed captioning (SA8300HD w/Navigator 2.4.1-92). I don't know if there's basically a time limit on how long you can use CC before you crash the box - maybe you gradually fill up the buffer until it runs out of memory and "overflows" - but I'm going to try to limit it to situations where I really need it.

It is not a time limit. The buffer seems to overflow and crash the box in really chatty programs like news programs, but seems fine when playing a movie or something without much talk.

OK, never mind. I just checked and I'm now running 2.4.10_11. I assure you that was not the case on the day I set up the external hard disk, but it is now. I'm not sure when the change happened so I cannot offer any further information.

The good news, of course, is I have the latest software. And I can stop worrying about my external hard disk. For what it's worth, I used to use it as a backup device for my laptop before converting it for Navigator use. It's a solid unit that I recommend.

We were just upgraded to version 2.4.10_11. Besides fixing the sleep bug, what other improvements are there? None seem to be visible?

This release fixed a bug that sometimes caused the screen to stay zoomed out in the upper right corner after leaving the guide. This bug only occurred when someone used HDMI.

It is not a time limit. The buffer seems to overflow and crash the box in really chatty programs like news programs, but seems fine when playing a movie or something without much talk.

I use captions all the time in both news and entertainment shows and have never seen a crash.

For curiosity I've got News14 running now with captions to see if I can crash the box.

update: I've been running the captions for an hour on several news channels and dramas on digital and analog programming. I've been using translucent type, yellow type and different fonts and the box is still up and running as normal.

Got it, thanks - TWC is coming Wednesday :)

Update: TWC guys came today and confirmed low signal strength -- they're going to send an install team to run RG6 directly to the point of entry. Meanwhile they think the HDMI connection is the real problem causing the crashes and switched me over to component. It's too early to tell if that helped....

ap

I use captions all the time in both news and entertainment shows and have never seen a crash.

For curiosity I've got News14 running now with captions to see if I can crash the box.

update: I've been running the captions for an hour on several news channels and dramas on digital and analog programming. I've been using translucent type, yellow type and different fonts and the box is still up and running as normal.

archiguy is using MDN 2.4.1-92. You are using MDN 2.4.1-107 whose closed captioning code is somewhat fixed and is less prone to fail. When it does fail, it juts fails without crashing the rest of the box with it.

OK, never mind. I just checked and I'm now running 2.4.10_11. I assure you that was not the case on the day I set up the external hard disk, but it is now. I'm not sure when the change happened so I cannot offer any further information.

The good news, of course, is I have the latest software. And I can stop worrying about my external hard disk. For what it's worth, I used to use it as a backup device for my laptop before converting it for Navigator use. It's a solid unit that I recommend.Thanks for checking. You really had us going there. You're still quite lucky that you happened to get the update at the exact right time to allow you to use the external drive.

Standing by to disregard...

archiguy is using MDN 2.4.1-92. You are using MDN 2.4.1-107 whose closed captioning code is somewhat fixed and is less prone to fail. When it does fail, it juts fails without crashing the rest of the box with it.

It never happened under 92 either. I use captioning every day but I've never seen it fail using any form of CC.

It never happened under 92 either. I use captioning every day but I've never seen it fail using any form of CC.

What I did that caused MDN 2.4.1-92 to crash is as follows:

Record an HD news or other very chatty program which is closed captioned in real-time instead of being pre-captioned. This program must put up loads of closed captioning text on the screen at once. NBC Nightly News often meets this requirement.
Turn on closed captioning.
Tune to an HD channel.
Play the chatty HD program back.
Crash during the playback of the chatty HD program.

Because my mother needs CC due to being an English as a second language person, this forced me to get my box swapped out. I gambled on ODN and won on the CC stability, but I lost the feature to allow me to limit recordings to one time block to help eliminate repeat airings that often show up after midnight.

I noticed that MDN 2.4.1-92 did not crash when I tuned the channel in the background to an SD channel and then played the chatty HD program. It only crashed like this when the channel buffered in the background was an HD channel.

Now, since you use MDN 2.4.1-107, you cannot verify this.

If you have had problems with reboots on your Time Warner digital box during the Olympics on please email me at jim.holcombNOSPAM@yahoo.com (remove the NOSPAM please) so I can forward it to my contact at TW.

I'm primarily interested in results from the Raleigh, NC area but if others around the country are seeing the problem I'll pass that along also.

Please include the model of box you have, software version, and any other information you feel comfortable with sharing with a total stranger. :)

Thanks,
Jim

It is not a time limit. The buffer seems to overflow and crash the box in really chatty programs like news programs, but seems fine when playing a movie or something without much talk.

In the crash I had yesterday, I had turned on CC for an SD program (not live, just an ordinary TV drama) for about the last 20 minutes, finished the show, and right after I deleted the program, the box crashed. There was an HD program (Olympic coverage on UHD) tuned in the background (so it was buffering that program). There was probably also another HD program buffering on the other tuner, but I can't remember now. Will try to duplicate again today to furnish more "data" on when this happens. I do have an external drive hooked up.

This release fixed a bug that sometimes caused the screen to stay zoomed out in the upper right corner after leaving the guide. This bug only occurred when someone used HDMI.

It also seems to fix a bug with the HDMI retaining the handshake.
With the prior version, if I switched my TV source to HDMI2 (PS3) and then back, the box would switch to 480i mode until I switched to an SD channel and then back to an HD channel.

I'm pretty happy with the 8300HDC now that the above two issues have been fixed in addition to the external drive issue.

OK, never mind. I just checked and I'm now running 2.4.10_11. I assure you that was not the case on the day I set up the external hard disk, but it is now. I'm not sure when the change happened so I cannot offer any further information.


That makes much more sense. I'm also in the upper east side TWC market so I suspect your box was updated just shortly after you first checked the version early last week. That's lucking out on timing. I switched to the HDC box back in January right before they pushed out the 2.4.9_3 update that freezes the external drive. Guess your luck evens out mine.

That makes much more sense. I'm also in the upper east side TWC market so I suspect your box was updated just shortly after you first checked the version early last week. That's lucking out on timing. I switched to the HDC box back in January right before they pushed out the 2.4.9_3 update that freezes the external drive. Guess your luck evens out mine.

As they say, it's better to be lucky than good.

Particularly when it comes to cable boxes...

In the crash I had yesterday, I had turned on CC for an SD program (not live, just an ordinary TV drama) for about the last 20 minutes, finished the show, and right after I deleted the program, the box crashed. There was an HD program (Olympic coverage on UHD) tuned in the background (so it was buffering that program). There was probably also another HD program buffering on the other tuner, but I can't remember now. Will try to duplicate again today to furnish more "data" on when this happens. I do have an external drive hooked up.

I have noticed some earlier posts mentioning that MDN crashes when mixing eSATA and closed captioning. My guess is that many people do not notice this problem if they do not use eSATA because the corrupted eSATA code never gets used in these cases.

Update: TWC guys came today and confirmed low signal strength -- they're going to send an install team to run RG6 directly to the point of entry. Meanwhile they think the HDMI connection is the real problem causing the crashes and switched me over to component. It's too early to tell if that helped....

ap

Update again: the machine is still doing its hanging/black-screen thing. I suspect it's the external SATA hard drive and am just hoping for a software update relatively soon. Anybody got an idea when 2.4.10_11 is likely to be pushed out in the RDU area?

mines MDN without external drive and as i have posted before i get crashes while using CC also. usually its when i start watching a recorded program. if CC is on when the program starts, for the first 10 seconds or so CC will be missing from the screen, then it will crash. this is the situation that causes most of my crashes. after the crash i can start the same recorded program, CC will show on the screen and the box doesn't crash.
i have begun turning CC on after starting the program and it has greatly reduced the crashes.

I've also had this happen if i pause a recorded program. when i start it back up CC will be missing from the screen for about 10 seconds then it will crash. this only has happened a few times.

most rarely, i have had the box crash immediately upon tuning a channel with CC on. same scenario, 10 seconds no CC on screen then crash.

Update again: the machine is still doing its hanging/black-screen thing. I suspect it's the external SATA hard drive and am just hoping for a software update relatively soon. Anybody got an idea when 2.4.10_11 is likely to be pushed out in the RDU area?


Do you have an 8300HD or 8300HDC? 2.4.10_11 has already been pushed to some 8300HD boxes in the RDU area. No time frame on when it will be pushed to the 8300HDC.

Do you have an 8300HD or 8300HDC? 2.4.10_11 has already been pushed to some 8300HD boxes in the RDU area. No time frame on when it will be pushed to the 8300HDC.

I think you are mixing up which boxes get what software. The 8300HDs TWC bought have 64MB of main RAM. Since 2.4.10_11 is an ODN version number, ODN stands for OCAP Digital Navigator, and the AXIOM OCAP middleware that allows the running of OCAP requires 128MB for acceptable performance, TWC cannot run ODN 2.4.10_11 on an 8300HD. Instead, TWC runs MDN on these boxes. The version of MDN that runs in the RDU area is the current one: MDN 2.4.1-107. The 8300HDCs either can run ODN 2.4.9_3 (which I use now and is acceptable in my case because I neither use HDMI nor eSATA) or 2.4.10_11 (which is the version TWC should be rushing to deploy IMHO).

I think you are mixing up which boxes get what software. The 8300HDs TWC bought have 64MB of main RAM. Since 2.4.10_11 is an ODN version number, ODN stands for OCAP Digital Navigator, and the AXIOM OCAP middleware that allows the running of OCAP requires 128MB for acceptable performance, TWC cannot run ODN 2.4.10_11 on an 8300HD. Instead, TWC runs MDN on these boxes. The version of MDN that runs in the RDU area is the current one: MDN 2.4.1-107. The 8300HDCs either can run ODN 2.4.9_3 (which I use now and is acceptable in my case because I neither use HDMI nor eSATA) or 2.4.10_11 (which is the version TWC should be rushing to deploy IMHO).


You are right. Sorry about that. Didn't notice that the version for ODN and MDN were different. Silly me... thinking TW would do something the same. Thanks for straightening me out.

So who's going to get a TiVoHD once the tuning resolver comes out that will allow it to get the SDV channels TWC is/has implemented?

You can get a "factory renewed" TiVoHD with lifetime service and the breakeven point is less than 3 years vs. a Navigator box plus you get all the additional TiVo goodness like transferring shows between TiVos, wishlits, etc.

And most importantly no A, B, C, D buttons the purpose of which I have never understood!!

So who's going to get a TiVoHD once the tuning resolver comes out that will allow it to get the SDV channels TWC is/has implemented?

You can get a "factory renewed" TiVoHD with lifetime service and the breakeven point is less than 3 years vs. a Navigator box plus you get all the additional TiVo goodness like transferring shows between TiVos, wishlits, etc.

And most importantly no A, B, C, D buttons the purpose of which I have never understood!!


Exactly! Just like the stupid "colored" buttons on DirecTV. One reason I'm leaning toward Dish is the much better equipment. I do, however, like the fact that DirecTV now has the On Demand channels (Hopefully Dish adds this soon!). The only downside to the Tivo for cable users is you lose all the On Demand content. I do forecast many people switching to get away from Navigator though!

So who's going to get a TiVoHD once the tuning resolver comes out that will allow it to get the SDV channels TWC is/has implemented?

You can get a "factory renewed" TiVoHD with lifetime service and the breakeven point is less than 3 years vs. a Navigator box plus you get all the additional TiVo goodness like transferring shows between TiVos, wishlits, etc.

And most importantly no A, B, C, D buttons the purpose of which I have never understood!!

Their purpose of the letter buttons is to provide the programmers a set of buttons for any use they can think of, like the unlabled buttons on a cell phone that are given different labels by the screen depending on the situation.

It would be great if one of them was assigned to be a thirty second skip, because there are no other buttons on the remote that could take this job.

Exactly! Just like the stupid "colored" buttons on DirecTV. One reason I'm leaning toward Dish is the much better equipment. I do, however, like the fact that DirecTV now has the On Demand channels (Hopefully Dish adds this soon!). The only downside to the Tivo for cable users is you lose all the On Demand content. I do forecast many people switching to get away from Navigator though!

If I'm not mistaken, both Dish & Direct require a high speed internet connection for on demand (that how the content gets to your box)

Has their ever been an official explanation as to why TWC-Wisconsin is NOT offering more HD content, or even more channels for that matter? It's too vague to say that Bev Greenberg doesn't care about HD content, maybe that is true, but I think that there are other factors involved as well. I am wondering what they are:

Is it a licensing issue with more channels? That they can't do it because of potential problems with Navigator, while improving, still having issues on some boxes? Today, we got about 15 useless Spanish channels on an optional service, I mean WTF is that crap? Where's Chiller TV? I have been waiting for that channel since its initial launch on Direct TV. How come NO cable companies even have it?

It's like TWC-Wisconsin just adds 2-3 channels every 6 months while other divisions are doubling that and tripling that in less time. We have SDV activated and the bandwidth, so what's the hold up in little TWC techno backward Wisconsin? Watch what happens. TWC-Wisconsin will add 3-4 channels (at most) by the end of the year, NONE of which will be what anyone wants, than think that they have done their part for the customer for another 6 months.

Jack

Wow, I just noticed that. No messages between 8/1 and 8/11.

Wow, I just noticed that. No messages between 8/1 and 8/11.

Since you are new here, you probably did not know about the big hardware failure that wiped out all messages in that timeframe. There were messages during that time, but they are lost.

If I'm not mistaken, both Dish & Direct require a high speed internet connection for on demand (that how the content gets to your box)

I'm aware of that and would be keeping my Digital Phone and Roadrunner as both have been outstanding. The cable is what has been sorely lacking and for me the guide and menu system is a big deal. Sure, they have added some good HD content, but not on par with either satco. Navigator would be the final nail in the coffin. Now, if they cap Roadrunner limits that cripples satellite On Demand, then there will be a problem.

Right now, I'm still debating Dish vs. Direct. Dish has superior equipment with features I want, but DirecTV has On Demand similar to what cable offers (IE: TNT, HBO, TBS On Demand). I guess I'll compare for a while longer and see if one gains a clear advantage over the other.

An interesting thing has just started happening. For no reason the MDN version number has started to appear on screen and alternates position between the left and bottom right.

I didn't do anything as far as I can tell. I was just flipping channels when I noticed it. The semi-transparent image appears on all channels and all screens. Even on top of the recordings list and other dialog boxes.

I grabbed some quick photos.

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7796/img1603uf6.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7796/img1603uf6.7aec7e01de.jpg (http://g.imageshack.us/g.php?h=502&i=img1603uf6.jpg)

http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/6640/img1605zi6.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/6640/img1605zi6.f5bf73aab3.jpg (http://g.imageshack.us/g.php?h=296&i=img1605zi6.jpg)

edit: It seems to be a hidden feature. If you want to know the version number of Nav hold down "last" on your remote. The version number will appear. Hold it down again and it vanishes. It will also disappear if you power off and on.

I'm aware of that and would be keeping my Digital Phone and Roadrunner as both have been outstanding. The cable is what has been sorely lacking and for me the guide and menu system is a big deal. Sure, they have added some good HD content, but not on par with either satco. Navigator would be the final nail in the coffin. Now, if they cap Roadrunner limits that cripples satellite On Demand, then there will be a problem.

Right now, I'm still debating Dish vs. Direct. Dish has superior equipment with features I want, but DirecTV has On Demand similar to what cable offers (IE: TNT, HBO, TBS On Demand). I guess I'll compare for a while longer and see if one gains a clear advantage over the other.

I had the same dreaded thought about Navigator. I was "upgraded" from Passport to Navigator on a 8300HD about 3 month's ago. I've had exactly 0 problems, I'm even using HDMI. No lockups, reboots, missed recordings, nothing lost during the upgrade. Sure there are a few things in the interface that I don't like, but there were also some things in Passport I didn't like.

Rebooted 4 times tonight during the Olympics. Argh!

Problem #1: (no program data)
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/1994/twcproblems001eh3.jpg

Problem #2: (related... I am @ live tv at this point, the buffer is screwed.)
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/920/twcproblems002iv7.jpg

v. 2.4.1-107

TW Cincinnati

So - I am getting all geared up for the Phelps race and the possibility of Olympic History. I get the beer ready.......pizza is on its way. Just as the teams are getting introduced, my doorbell rings for my pizza. Great timing I think....I will just pause it and watch the race while Im dining over my hot pizza. As I hit play and watch the first 2 legs....its a tight race.......the 3rd leg begins and the US is trailing Aus by a 1/2 second or so.....but its Phelps turn. He dives in and..........BAM......Reboot........you have got to be F-IN kidding me! I wait the 5-6 minutes for the reboot to finish and what do you know the race is over and they are now at a commercial. Im just sitting there shaking my head as all I can do is watch the replay of a pretty close race.
I chalk this up as just bad luck and am getting amped for the 100m final because I already know Bolt breaks the WR. Just as he crosses the line.....BAM.....again......REBOOT. This seriously is an abolsute joke. I was so close to calling TW tonight and just cancelling.
I dont know that the problem is but if someone could shed some light it would be greatly appreciated. As the poster above me shows on his attached screen shot......my guide also showed "no program data" only on that channel which is 905 for me. Not sure how or why this would cause a problem but this is absolutely ridiculous.
Anyone understand why this is happening or how to resolve these reboots?

Tony

TW Cincinnati

So - I am getting all geared up for the Phelps race and the possibility of Olympic History. I get the beer ready.......pizza is on its way. Just as the teams are getting introduced, my doorbell rings for my pizza. Great timing I think....I will just pause it and watch the race while Im dining over my hot pizza. As I hit play and watch the first 2 legs....its a tight race.......the 3rd leg begins and the US is trailing Aus by a 1/2 second or so.....but its Phelps turn. He dives in and..........BAM......Reboot........you have got to be F-IN kidding me! I wait the 5-6 minutes for the reboot to finish and what do you know the race is over and they are now at a commercial. Im just sitting there shaking my head as all I can do is watch the replay of a pretty close race.
I chalk this up as just bad luck and am getting amped for the 100m final because I already know Bolt breaks the WR. Just as he crosses the line.....BAM.....again......REBOOT. This seriously is an abolsute joke. I was so close to calling TW tonight and just cancelling.
I dont know that the problem is but if someone could shed some light it would be greatly appreciated. As the poster above me shows on his attached screen shot......my guide also showed "no program data" only on that channel which is 905 for me. Not sure how or why this would cause a problem but this is absolutely ridiculous.
Anyone understand why this is happening or how to resolve these reboots?

Tony

The same thing is happening in my area and getting commented on in my local forum, the Raleigh-Durham forum. However, only the CableCARD-less boxes are crashing like this in my area. The boxes with CableCARDs do not crash like this. What model box do you have?

For Tony,

Who had excessive Navigator reboots during the Olympics,

Call your cable company and speak to a supervisor so that you can bypass the level one CSR dolts on the phone. Explain everything that happened and see if you can get some serious credit on your bill for this Navigator b.s. (Be nice, but very, very firm.) If they won't help, contact the Customer Retention Department if you wish to keep your services. If they still say no, hang up and call back until you get someone in charge who can give you the fair compensation you deserve.

I wouldn't be done yet, but when you are through talking to them, hang up and than call and/or file a complaint online with your local Better Business Bureau and also call or file a complaint with City Hall over TWC's deception and fraudulent advertising of Navigator as well as their inefficient and poor customer service department. With several department heads helping to take action, you will hopefully get some compensation.

Jack

I am going to call them today

My cable Box is the SA 8300HD

I will check my Navigator version this afternoon and post back.

I appreciate the tips!

Tony

My cable Box is the SA 8300HD

I will check my Navigator version this afternoon and post back.


Yes, it's very important to have those two pieces of information, along with your location (that's easy - put it in your member profile!) if your question is to be understood and the response relevant. Everyone participating in this thread needs to include those.

I am going to call them today

My cable Box is the SA 8300HD

I will check my Navigator version this afternoon and post back.

I appreciate the tips!

Tony

If you do not use eSATA, swap that box out for an 8300HDC as soon as possible. The 8240HDC and the 8300HDC do not crash on the high bitrate Olympics my NBC station puts out, but the 8300HD without the CableCARD is reported to crash on this high bitrate video.

In my market, the local NBC station pumped up the HD data rate to give its customers some high quality HD Olympics. Lots of 8300HDs started crashing after that. Since I earlier swapped out an 8300HD because it crashed sometimes when mixing closed captioning, HDTV, and DVR functionality which to me, an unemployed computer engineer, looked like a buffer overflow in the closed captioning code, my guess is that the people who wrote the Navigator software failed to plan for worst-case scenarios like lots of closed captioning text and high bitrate video and therefore this code fails upon trying to handle worst-case scenarios. Even the latest version of MDN Navigator, MDN 2.4.1-107, crashes in our area when viewing our NBC station.

However, the 8300HDC and the 8240HDC with CableCARDs do not crash on this video. Since these boxes run ODN Navigator (a port of MDN Navigator to the Java-based OCAP platform), they use Scientific Atlanta's AXIOM OCAP middleware to translate the Java to native machine code. I think that Scientific Atlanta used its experience with writing SARA, the interactive program guide that it wrote in-house, to help guide Esmertec, the company that was commissioned to write AXIOM, handle worst-case scenarios like this. Therefore, the programmers who write ODN Navigator did not have to and could not worry about these issues, because Scientific Atlanta forced the use of a solution that handles worst-case situations correctly by providing it in AXIOM's libraries.

If you do not use eSATA, swap that box out for an 8300HDC as soon as possible. The 8240HDC and the 8300HDC do not crash on the high bitrate Olympics my NBC station puts out, but the 8300HD without the CableCARD is reported to crash on this high bitrate video.

In my market, the local NBC station pumped up the HD data rate to give its customers some high quality HD Olympics. Lots of 8300HDs started crashing after that. Since I earlier swapped out an 8300HD because it crashed sometimes when mixing closed captioning, HDTV, and DVR functionality which to me, an unemployed computer engineer, looked like a buffer overflow in the closed captioning code, my guess is that the people who wrote the Navigator software failed to plan for worst-case scenarios like lots of closed captioning text and high bitrate video and therefore this code fails upon trying to handle worst-case scenarios. Even the latest version of MDN Navigator, MDN 2.4.1-107, crashes in our area when viewing our NBC station.

However, the 8300HDC and the 8240HDC with CableCARDs do not crash on this video. Since these boxes run ODN Navigator (a port of MDN Navigator to the Java-based OCAP platform), they use Scientific Atlanta's AXIOM OCAP middleware to translate the Java to native machine code. I think that Scientific Atlanta used its experience with writing SARA, the interactive program guide that it wrote in-house, to help guide Esmertec, the company that was commissioned to write AXIOM, handle worst-case scenarios like this. Therefore, the programmers who write ODN Navigator did not have to and could not worry about these issues, because Scientific Atlanta forced the use of a solution that handles worst-case situations correctly by providing it in AXIOM's libraries.

WNCN's bitrate isnt all that high. Looking at the filesizes, WUNC as well as TNT and Discovery HD Theater have been running higher bitrates so I wouldnt be so quick to jump to conclusions.

Time Warner is being sued over their set tops. This could go either way as the FCC has indicated the ban on integrated security. If this case is won, it could set precedent throughout the industry and would allow people to use Tivo boxes and such freely with ALL content provided by the cable company. It would allow users an option to the Navigator software as well.

Here's the Link (http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6587342.html)

Time Warner is being sued over their set tops. This could go either way as the FCC has indicated the ban on integrated security. If this case is won, it could set precedent throughout the industry and would allow people to use Tivo boxes and such freely with ALL content provided by the cable company. It would allow users an option to the Navigator software as well.

Here's the Link (http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6587342.html)

I think that's a waste of time to be honest. Of all the things to sue TWC over they pick something which is prevalent amongst nearly all cable operators.

Plus of course TWC is working towards an OCAP future which would make off the shelf AV components compatible with the cable system, so the argument is already being rendered irrelevant.

WNCN's bitrate isnt all that high. Looking at the filesizes, WUNC as well as TNT and Discovery HD Theater have been running higher bitrates so I wouldnt be so quick to jump to conclusions.

You could be right about the bitrate being low. However, NBC17ENG did post something about pumping up the bitrate for the Olympics in the Raleigh/Durham forum only to have that post wiped out by the AVSForum hardware failure. Also, even if the bitrate is still low, it is creating a worst case scenario that only MDN Navigator fails at handling. If it created an illegal ATSC stream, people all over the place would be complaining about crashing TVs, TiVos, and HTPCs all over the Raleigh forum and filling NBC17ENG's private message inbox with demands to fix it.

There is some worst case scenario that MDN Navigator fails to handle.

My opinion on software design is that you must design your software to handle every legal combination of inputs correctly before you write a single line of code. If you do not design for the absolute worst case and design your code around that, you are wasting everyone's time. I would generally rather have a spartan program that handles everything legal rather than a pretty program that fails at some rare combination of inputs.

EDIT: I am not defending my assumption that a high bitrate might be crashing out MDN Navigator. I am just stating that there is some worst case scenario or corner case that MDN Navigator is failing on. My opinion on software development above also should have stated that if you do not design for the worst case and work around that, you could also fail to discover that your project is infeasible well before the first line is written, but would discover this much later.

I am going to call them today

My cable Box is the SA 8300HD

I will check my Navigator version this afternoon and post back.

I appreciate the tips!

Tony

Great Tony,

Please also contact your local City Hall and the BBB as well. It's time for TWC subscribers in problematic areas do things like this to get compensated for the b.s that they have gone through.

Jack

So my HD DVR rebooted 2 times again last night, so I just said forget it and went upstairs to watch on my normal (non HD - DVD) which is a SA 8000. Sure enough, about 30 minutes into it..........Reboot on that one too.........15 minutes after that....another reboot

I called TW and talked to 2 supervisors......both acted like this is the first they have heard of the problem and said they would send a tech to my house. I told them that it wasnt just me, hundreds of others were having this issue. They didnt have an answer and offered no additonal help.

What a joke

Tony

So my HD DVR rebooted 2 times again last night, so I just said forget it and went upstairs to watch on my normal (non HD - DVD) which is a SA 8000. Sure enough, about 30 minutes into it..........Reboot on that one too.........15 minutes after that....another reboot

I called TW and talked to 2 supervisors......both acted like this is the first they have heard of the problem and said they would send a tech to my house. I told them that it wasnt just me, hundreds of others were having this issue. They didnt have an answer and offered no additonal help.

What a joke

Tony

Tony - where are you located?

Jim

So my HD DVR rebooted 2 times again last night, so I just said forget it and went upstairs to watch on my normal (non HD - DVD) which is a SA 8000. Sure enough, about 30 minutes into it..........Reboot on that one too.........15 minutes after that....another reboot

I called TW and talked to 2 supervisors......both acted like this is the first they have heard of the problem and said they would send a tech to my house. I told them that it wasnt just me, hundreds of others were having this issue. They didnt have an answer and offered no additonal help.

What a joke

Tony

As I stated before, the MDN software that runs on your Scientific Atlanta 8300HD and your Scientific Atlanta 8000 is currently fatally flawed for now because its most basic function - to allow you to watch cable TV - is broken, and therefore you should replace them with CableCARD-based boxes. The ODN software running on CableCARD based boxes might not work with HDMI or eSATA in case your local system still uses the obsolete version ODN 2.4.9_3, but with component video and no eSATA, even this obsolete version is able to do this most basic function. If your division is more up-to-date, it would have deployed 2.4.10_11, which is free of any major bugs.

You can fix this today by swapping both of the DVRs that TWC broke with their MDN Navigator with CableCARD-based DVRs before your local office closes.

EDIT: Even though ODN 2.4.10_11 is relatively bug-free, it is still feature poor from what I have heard. As far as I know, it still lacks one feature from MDN I really liked: the ability to restrict a series recording to a certain time.

I just wish that TWC would just abandon MDN, recall all legacy boxes, replace them with CableCARD boxes, and grant a one month credit on the DVR fee for those who had to give up their recordings. This would do many positive things: first allow all the programmers who develop Navigator to focus on ODN. This will allow them to start adding features by using the ODN 2.4.10_11 as a good code base. Second, this allows TWC divisions to not need to field test so many versions of Navigator before deploying or refusing versions.

As I stated before, the MDN software that runs on your Scientific Atlanta 8300HD and your Scientific Atlanta 8000 is currently fatally flawed for now because its most basic function - to allow you to watch cable TV - is broken,


On what do you base such a statement? You seem to be saying that MDN simply doesnt work on 8300HD hardware... period... In my experience, thats not the case. My 8300HD is working perfectly. Ive missed no recording and havnt seen any reboots other than the first couple days after deployment. I realize that my case is a datapoint of one but on what do you base indicting every 8300HD with MDN as 'fatally flawed'? Certainly tbenson has a problem that needs to be addressed... but 'fatally flawed' is a bit 'over the top'.

On what do you base such a statement? You seem to be saying that MDN simply doesnt work on 8300HD hardware... period... In my experience, thats not the case. My 8300HD is working perfectly. Ive missed no recording and havnt seen any reboots other than the first couple days after deployment.

Have you used closed captioning?

Have you used closed captioning?

Actually, after the posts of the last couple days I did turn CC on and watched the olympics on WNCN for 3-4 hours. No problems whatsoever. I left it on the rest of the day and saw no reboots.

I am in Cincinnati

I have not had a single reboot all summer until the beginning of the Olympics. Its only been the Olympics on NBC

Tony

If you look at FroRules screenshot at the top of this page....he is obviously in Cincy too and he is having the same problem. It always happens to me when the guide depicts a blank entry or cites "no program data" in that channel. Again see above to see what Im talking about

On what do you base such a statement? You seem to be saying that MDN simply doesnt work on 8300HD hardware... period... In my experience, thats not the case. My 8300HD is working perfectly. Ive missed no recording and havnt seen any reboots other than the first couple days after deployment. I realize that my case is a datapoint of one but on what do you base indicting every 8300HD with MDN as 'fatally flawed'? Certainly tbenson has a problem that needs to be addressed... but 'fatally flawed' is a bit 'over the top'.

In my mind as a computer engineer, something that is not designed to handle all legal cases is not ready to release.

When writing software, design to handle all legal cases thrown at your program or do not write a single line of code, especially in the most basic function it must perform.

You must be lucky that the output of your NBC station does not trigger the failure in your box. However, MDN has shown in my market that it cannot handle every legal input in its most basic function - to allow people to watch digital cable. A failure in such a critical component is a total failure in my mind.

It might get patched in the next MDN update. However, with MDN's history with apparent buffer overflows and that the PowerTV OS does not provide memory protection, I have lost faith in the ability of MDN's programmers to root all of them out or add features without adding more buffer overflows. Since Java does run-time software-based memory protection in parts of its duties of translating Java bytecode to native machine code, I feel that this instant feedback to developers that comes from software-based memory protection will result in these bugs getting caught in ODN's code well before it gets out of alpha testing and point to the exact areas causing the memory overflows.

You must be lucky that the output of your NBC station does not trigger the failure in your box. However, MDN has shown in my market that it cannot handle every legal input in its most basic function - to allow people to watch digital cable. A failure in such a critical component is a total failure in my mind.




You guys are in the same market... he's just down the road from you in Apex...

Problem #1: (no program data)


Had the same problem here last night... had no guide information for NBC or it's sub channels.

You guys are in the same market... he's just down the road from you in Apex...

Maybe WNCN dialed back the worst case parameters after all of the posts about the crashes showed up in the Raleigh/Durham forum. However, there were plenty of them before the AVSForum hardware failure wiped them out.

Actually, after the posts of the last couple days I did turn CC on and watched the olympics on WNCN for 3-4 hours. No problems whatsoever. I left it on the rest of the day and saw no reboots.

Same here. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Apart from the horrible interface flaws and whatever mess TWC creates at it's headend, my 8300 is almost as solid as it was when I had Passport. If it reboots it does so for random reasons and not tied in to NBC or use of captioning.

Same here. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Apart from the horrible interface flaws and whatever mess TWC creates at it's headend, my 8300 is almost as solid as it was when I had Passport. If it reboots it does so for random reasons and not tied in to NBC or use of captioning.

As far as I know, 2.4.1-107 contains a major bug fix for closed captioning. 2.4.1-92 was totally broken in this regard when mixing closed captioning, DVR, and HDTV. I learned from personal experience with MDN 2.4.1-92. MDN 2.4.1-107 either fixes the problem or fails gracefully in regards to closed captioning as far as I can tell from the posts on this forum. Some posts have claimed that it is fixed, while others stated that closed captioning just quit working, but did not force a reboot.

As for the Olympics, my question is why is it that when someone has a box crashing on the Olympics and reporting on it, why is it always one of the non-CableCARD boxes with MDN? Some NBC stations might trigger it while others might not. Some of the aggressive NBC stations might have dialed back the aggressive settings that produced high bitrate and picture quality compression but crashed the MDN boxes, thinking that high bitrate compression is not worth it if the customers experience crashes due to this. My guess is that WNCN might fall into the latter group if MDN does not crash anymore here.

Please correct me if I am wrong and you spot it, but back up your claims with some evidence if this is possible. Disagreements often produce debates that sort out what is true and what is not. However, unintentional falsehoods do no one a favor.

As for the Olympics, my question is why is it that when someone has a box crashing on the Olympics and reporting on it, why is it always one of the non-CableCARD boxes with MDN? .

ahhhhh... perhaps because 90+% of the SA8300's in the field are HD's with MDN and not HDC's with ODN?

I dont doubt that there is some kind of fw problem here... but 'fatally flawed' is a bit over the top. It would seem from your comments that you pronounce 107 fatally flawed when you havent even used it?!

You also proclaim as fact that MDN and 107 arent designed to handle all legal inputs... what evidence leads you to that conclusion? Currently there is no failure analysis evidence to indicate what is the source of the crash yet you assume that it was bad code not handling a legal input. TiVo had a 'poisonous channel' but which caused it to crash but effected nobody elses equipment. Turns out it was a PSIP violation in the local channel stream.... so it was a bad reaction to an illegal input... is that a fatal flaw? In my thirty plus years experience as an electrical engineer I have seen people zoom in on an issue that they are absolutely convinced is caused by one thing and be completely blind to looking at the big picture and follow the evidence.

I spoke to the Time Warner manager this evening and it seems the problem has been identified as a problem with the guide having those 4 hour blocks. It only affects the MDN or non-cable card boxes. No ETA on the fix or when it will be pushed out but they are working on it.

I haven't watched much of the Olympics on UHD but it seems like that would have the same problems. It's on channel 1502 here in the Raleigh area.

Short term the fix is to get one of the ODN boxes and that's what I'm doing. If any of you have any other information to pass along let me know.

Jim

thanks for the TW update Jim. Doesnt really matter now I guess.....once the fix is rolled out, the Olympics will be over. This better not do this during college football season - those are usually 4 hour blocks as well!

Tony

PS. My version is 2.4.1-107

In my mind as a computer engineer, something that is not designed to handle all legal cases is not ready to release.

When writing software, design to handle all legal cases thrown at your program or do not write a single line of code, especially in the most basic function it must perform.

I've designed/written software since 1969. If you take the time to design & code for every possible case, the software never makes it to market. For one thing you can never think of all the cases. Those that you can think of, you have "weigh" each one and determine if it ranks high enough to spend valuable time & energy.

Please correct me if I am wrong and you spot it, but back up your claims with some evidence if this is possible. Disagreements often produce debates that sort out what is true and what is not. However, unintentional falsehoods do no one a favor.

What are you talking about? You want me to back up my claims? What do you want to do come around and sit in front of the TV for a few hours watching NBC with CC? I'm not claiming anything I'm stating my observation with the 8300 I've been using for three years.

If you don't believe me, don't, I don't really care. It's not in my interests to make up the fact that my 8300 does not crash or fail under the circumstances you are talking about. This forum is based largely on user experience it does nobody any favors if reports are just made up.

You think Nav is "fatally flawed" on every box. I'm just providing feedback to the contrary like SCSIraid.

If I was going to make things up it would be slightly more interesting. Like my 8300 can tune in to Dish Network and records shows using nanomachines! True story.

What are you talking about? You want me to back up my claims? What do you want to do come around and sit in front of the TV for a few hours watching NBC with CC? I'm not claiming anything I'm stating my observation with the 8300 I've been using for three years.

If you don't believe me, don't, I don't really care. It's not in my interests to make up the fact that my 8300 does not crash or fail under the circumstances you are talking about. This forum is based largely on user experience it does nobody any favors if reports are just made up.

You think Nav is "fatally flawed" on every box. I'm just providing feedback to the contrary like SCSIraid.

If I was going to make things up it would be slightly more interesting. Like my 8300 can tune in to Dish Network and records shows using nanomachines! True story.

I am sorry about making anyone angry. This is not my intent. Anyways, some TWC manager found the problem. See jimholcomb's earlier post which shows what the flaw was. We can guess some and back it up with evidence we dig up, but we are not TWC insiders. As for my guess about the MPEG-2 decoder being flawed, I was wrong. I apologize for my mess. Sometimes, we are fooled by coincidences that misguide us.

The set of coincidences that fooled me are as follows:

Closed captioning crashed on me personally when mixed with DVR and HDTV in a certain manner.
Someone reports that eSATA on MDN crashes when mixed with closed captioning.
Since the closed captioning crashes only occurred to me when there was a massive amount of text on the screen at once, this suggested a buffer overflow.
PowerTV provides no memory protection to allow the use of cheaper CPUs. Therefore, many buffer overflows that would normally be caught by the OS. Therefore, it is much easier to ship a program with buffer overflows than on an OS that supports memory protection.
The WNCN engineer announced that the bit rate was being turned up.
Since I was burned by what appeared to be a buffer overflow, I first thought that this must be another case of one of those errors.
I jumped to a bad conclusion and misguide everyone. Everything snowballs to hell.

As for the situation with legal and illegal cases, legal cases are all critical cases and all optional possible cases you wish to handle, and illegal cases are impossible cases and optional possible cases you do not want to handle. The reason I adopted the attitude about designing to handle all legal cases is that Murphy's Law always seemed to strike me until I adopted this attitude for coding while I was in college. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong with my code until I did this.

My declaration that MDN is fatally flawed is therefore proven wrong and I withdraw it.

If you do not use eSATA, swap that box out for an 8300HDC as soon as possible. The 8240HDC and the 8300HDC do not crash on the high bitrate Olympics my NBC station puts out, but the 8300HD without the CableCARD is reported to crash on this high bitrate video.


My 8300HDC (!) got stuck in fast-forward today while recording Olympics in background and playing another recording. Had to soft-reboot it, lost the entire recorded piece. Half hour later while watching Olympics (which was still recording) the box crashed and rebooted :-( (2.4.9)

I've designed/written software since 1969. If you take the time to design & code for every possible case, the software never makes it to market. For one thing you can never think of all the cases. Those that you can think of, you have "weigh" each one and determine if it ranks high enough to spend valuable time & energy.
I agre to a point but I think using HDMI to watch the Olympics in HD and have the use of the basic DVR functions should have been on the list. I do not use CC and I have no external drive. The fact that I lose all buffered video when I swap tuners, often cannot rewind anything because the picture disappears and I still have reset the output resolution every time I turn on the TV, among other things, shows me this software doesn't cover the basics (SA8240HDC 2.4.9_3). I have filed a complaint with the BBB and requested credit for every month of DVR service for each of my (3) boxes from the time they got Navigator until the time they function to my satisfaction. I suggest everyone with complaints do the same. TWC is not making any serious effort to fix Navigator. They are also making no effort at customer satisfaction (30 minute hold time, No way to contact local office, automated system that is very flawed and piece meal). I was a very very happy TWC customer and I am satisfied with my Roadrunner and the selection of cable TV channels. I am just tired of TWC using it's monopoly (in my area) to charge me for software that doesn't work. and at the current rate of updates it is years from working).

SA8300HD with MDN 2.4.1-92 in Columbus, OH

So far, surprisingly, I've had no problems with my box and the Olympics on NBC HD. I've recorded a 4 to 6 hour block every night. I've been able to watch (play) while still recording, and have been able to jump to live TV on various channels and/or watch other recorded programs and still 'Resume Play' on the still-recording program without incident.

The only problem has been with common buffer loss for a period of time after the recording ends. After watching the recording, and resuming to Live TV on NBC HD, there is usually no buffered programming since the recording ended, or a reduced buffer that started at some point after the recording ended and where I resumed Live TV.

With the recording of long blocks of HD programming, I did learn another thing about Navigator that I'm not happy with. It is performing like Passport did, where it will delete programs to make space for what it 'thinks' (estimates) it needs in order to record the entire block. The deletions for space occur immediately when the recoding starts, whether you intend to record the entire program or not. And, if you start recording the program mid-way through, Navigator still assumes that it needs space for the entire program (one of Passport's negative features that Navigator continues). Why can't it just delete previously recorded programs as space is actually needed during recording, rather than deleting programs ahead of time based on some assumption that may or may not be true? :mad:


Note also: TWC Mid-Ohio did add 4 new HD channels on 8/8/08, including USA (temporarily for the games). For the first couple of days, these channels were available only intermittently. And they still seem to go down every now & then (blank screen with message that the channel is temporarily unavailable). I rebooted the box on 8/10, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

Note also: TWC Mid-Ohio did add 4 new HD channels on 8/8/08, including USA (temporarily for the games). For the first couple of days, these channels were available only intermittently. And they still seem to go down every know and then (blank screen with message that the channel is temporarily unavailable). I rebooted the box on 8/10, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

Yea, TWC really screwed the pooch and PO'd ALOT of people here with the imminent takedown of USA HD. Many were waiting for this channel only to have it pulled. TWC is going to be fielding alot of calls here when they do remove it because they never advertised locally that it was temporary.

In our division the services work well, but the management is horrendous! The channel placement is a mess, inquires and suggestions are ignored, and the switch to subcontractors has made even basic installs/service calls a nightmare.

So, my new Dish was installed last Saturday (8/16) and so far so great! :)

All the previous discussions about this were lost in the 'Great AVS Server Crash' of 2008, so I'll recap.

I added one of the new Dish Turbo HD-only packages (Silver), with a 2-room DVR and local channels for $40/mos. I have returned my 2nd TWC DVR, which drops $15 from my TWC bill. Installation went very smoothly. This is a satellite trial for me, so for now, I'm keeping my TWC (including RR and Phone). Currently, Dish does not offer HD locals in Columbus yet, so I still need TWC for the time being. If Dish performs well (ie: weather outages minimal), I may increase my services with them and drop more services from TWC. The Dish remote is very nice and easy to use, and also allows me to change the Inputs on the TV, so I don't need to dig out the TV remote when I want to swap between TWC and Dish.

Having the exercise room connected to the main DVR is much nicer than having a second separate DVR in that room, since I would sometimes finish exercising in the middle of a program and have to resume another day. Now after working out, I can resume the program in the living room right away.

Having both services (cable and dish), I now have two DVR's in the living room, and have quadrupled my storage capacity. Plus, I now have 4 available tuners for those times when multiple favorite shows air at the same time. I have not yet purchased an HDTV Off-Air Antenna, but plan to do so to see how it performs as a 5th tuner (also accessible by the Dish DVR) and as a backup for satellite locals during bad weather.

The HD picture quality on Dish is just as good as on TWC. I have the Dish ViP722 DVR connected to my HDTV via component cable, while my TWC 8300HD DVR is connected via HDMI. I can see no difference in picture quality on HD channels. (I was a little concerned with PQ at first, but then I found that the box was defaulting to 480p and a quick setting change to 720p resolved any concerns I had.) The PQ of the SD channels though seems to be a little better on cable. One very nice improvement is that I can switch channels between SD channels (locals) and HD channels on Dish and the change is nearly instant. There's none of the HDMI handshaking problems, and no 5-7 seconds of garbled static while the HD channel tunes-in, which I've always experienced with the 8300HD (I've never had the 8300HD connected via component, so not sure if it would perform better than it does with HDMI).

The Dish DVR is OUTSTANDING! It is very full featured and customizable in numerous ways; very user friendly; and so far completely reliable. For the first three months, I've got the HBO/Starz package (11 HD channels) for free, and Cinemax (4 HD Channels) for 1-cent for 12 months, so I'm recording every movie I'm interested in for later viewing. The DVR started with 55 available HD hours or 350 SD hours. But, it seems those are conservative estimates. So far, I've recorded over 20 hours of HD programming and about 20 hours of SD programming, and still have an estimated 44 hours of HD recording time available.

The Dish guide is also customizable in several ways. My favorite feature is changing the guide 'view' from 4 channels and 1.5 hours, to 7 channels and 3 hours. It's also super simple to switch between showing all channels to showing just HD channels: You just click on the Guide button 3x to see only HD channels. And, that option stays in place each time you return to the Guide, until you change it again. (Of course, you can create and name multiple Favorite lists, too, but I haven't bothered.)

The Keyboard and Keyword search feature is also excellent, and it saves a history of your searches so you can easily search again later without re-typing. The search starts with the program you are currently viewing, but you can easily clear the entry and type in any program title or keyword (title or description). Plus, if you search for a program that is not found in the coming week, you can use the DishPass feature, and the DVR will record any future instance of the program for you.

Note: The dish was installed on a post behind my house, and I have a very clear view of the SW sky from my back yard (no trees nearby). The dish itself is labeled "Dish 1000". I had previously only seen the "Dish 500" labels, like at my folks house, and I'm not sure what improvements Echostar may have made to the hardware. (Edit - I found this info: "DISH 1000 allows you to receive programming from three orbital locations; 110°, 119°, and 129° using a dish antenna size similar to DISH 500.") The installer dug a hole and used cement to ensure the pole remained steady. And, since I am keeping my cable for now, he drilled a small hole in the wall for the cable to come into the house rather than using any of the already available cable jacks. The installer was a contractor from an Ohio company called Digital Dish, but the truck had a Dish Network logo on it.

Question: When you tell the guide to show only HD, does it still show the SD channels that have no HD equivelent ala DirecTV?

Also, was the installer able to do a "one wire" hookup via your existing cables?

Question: When you tell the guide to show only HD, does it still show the SD channels that have no HD equivelent ala DirecTV?
Not with the standard button function, no. But there are custom options to allow you to set up multiple favorite lists. With the standard set up, I just hit the Guide button twice to go back to 'all channels' so I can see the SD choices. Plus, aside from locals and a few standard DishNet channels and shopping channels, with my Turbo HD-only package I don't have access to any SD channels that I don't also have HD access to. (Oddly, even though it's supposed to be an HD-only service, I can still access the SD versions of the HD channels that I am subscribed to.)

Also, was the installer able to do a "one wire" hookup via your existing cables?
I'm not sure if that was an option since I maintained my existing cable outlets, but he did use just one wire into the house from the dish to the receiver. That cable has a splitter about half-way that feeds another cable off to the 2nd TV. I was actually very surprised that the cable is two-way, and that a separate cable out from the box to the 2nd TV is not needed.

The box can easily change from single- to dual-room modes with a button on the box. With single-room set up, you can access both tuners and use PIP, and both rooms see the same thing (and both remotes have the same control over what's being viewed). With dual-room set up, each room has separate access to one tuner and the DVR, but no PIP. I set up the box with single-room mode, since I can't be in two rooms at one time and I don't need both TV's to be able to see different sources. The remote in the 2nd room uses a radio frequency instead of infra-red, since it has no box to aim at.

I am sorry about making anyone angry. This is not my intent. Anyways, some TWC manager found the problem. See jimholcomb's earlier post which shows what the flaw was. We can guess some and back it up with evidence we dig up, but we are not TWC insiders. As for my guess about the MPEG-2 decoder being flawed, I was wrong. I apologize for my mess. Sometimes, we are fooled by coincidences that misguide us.

well obviously something is clearly screwed up with the captioning somewhere because I've seen the same comments you have, but as both myself and SCSI have noted it's not reproducible on every box 100% of the time which means there must be other factors at play as well.

Since none of us here work on the Nav team (or are owning up to it at least ;) ) we can't say exactly what is wrong with the software or the hardware for sure. We can only go from what people report here and try to figure it out from that. Which means that if one person reports something differently here then more often than not you have to take it account.

I've started to wonder if somewhere along the way the 8300 got a minor internal hardware revision and that's making a difference. For the record my 8300 is Rev. 2.2 Sept 2005 build.

I am absolute fed up with this @#$%^&ing sleep mode. Watching the Olympics today and wanted to replay something that had just happened. You guessed it; it had quit buffering. For the life of me, I cannot understand what the hell they were thinking when they implemented sleep mode. It's definitely caused more problems than it's cured.

I am absolute fed up with this @#$%^&ing sleep mode. Watching the Olympics today and wanted to replay something that had just happened. You guessed it; it had quit buffering. For the life of me, I cannot understand what the hell they were thinking when they implemented sleep mode. It's definitely caused more problems than it's cured.

It has cured some?

So, my new Dish was installed last Saturday (8/16) and so far so great! :)

...
The Dish DVR is OUTSTANDING! It is very full featured and customizable in numerous ways; very user friendly; and so far completely reliable.
...


And it has the 30-second skip, my favorite feature missing in Navigator. I'd buy it right now if it did not entail switching to satelite (and if it worked with SDV). It would be really nice if Echostar (Dish spin-off owning the DVR technology) developed a DVR based on the Dish DVR you have, which would work with cable, kind of like TivoHD, but with On Demand stuff working as well. Nothing directly anounced along those lines, but they did sign a tru2way™ host device license agreement with CableLabs, introduced SlingModem, and said something like "We are firmly committed to becoming a vendor of choice in the cable industry". See the press releases on their site (www.echostar.com). A while ago they anounced TR-50, an off-the-air-only DVR (apparently based on the Dish DVRs) the big selling point of which was that there would be no monthly fees, so cable DVR would be a logical next step. On the down side, TR-50 is still not released.

I am absolute fed up with this @#$%^&ing sleep mode. Watching the Olympics today and wanted to replay something that had just happened. You guessed it; it had quit buffering. For the life of me, I cannot understand what the hell they were thinking when they implemented sleep mode. It's definitely caused more problems than it's cured.

You need to pressure TWC to rollout 2.4.10_11 in your area. It fixes the sleep issue, eSATA, HDMI and lots of other issue with the HDC box. While I'd like to see more features, the bugs seem to be resolved.

And it has the 30-second skip, my favorite feature missing in Navigator. I'd buy it right now if it did not entail switching to satelite (and if it worked with SDV). It would be really nice if Echostar (Dish spin-off owning the DVR technology) developed a DVR based on the Dish DVR you have, which would work with cable, kind of like TivoHD, but with On Demand stuff working as well. Nothing directly anounced along those lines, but they did sign a tru2way™ host device license agreement with CableLabs, introduced SlingModem, and said something like "We are firmly committed to becoming a vendor of choice in the cable industry". See the press releases on their site (www.echostar.com). A while ago they anounced TR-50, an off-the-air-only DVR (apparently based on the Dish DVRs) the big selling point of which was that there would be no monthly fees, so cable DVR would be a logical next step. On the down side, TR-50 is still not released.

Agreed! Love the 30-second skip feature! (Passport didn't have it either!) And the FFWD/REV speeds up to 300-times normal speed (essentially 5-minute jumps)! :) Navigator's FFWD/REV speeds are soooo sloooooow!

That 'off-the-air-only' DVR would be awesome!! Connected via an HD antenna, or maybe basic cable in place of antenna, it would be a great option for an exercise room.

You need to pressure TWC to rollout 2.4.10_11 in your area. It fixes the sleep issue, eSATA, HDMI and lots of other issue with the HDC box. While I'd like to see more features, the bugs seem to be resolved.Yeah, I've been anxiously awaiting the new release. My 500Gig drive next to the DVR (that used to work fine until this current release) looks so sad.

I'm aware of all the bug fixes in the new release, but your reply implies that the sleep mode has been removed entirely. That is, does it continue to buffer live TV after 3 hours of inactivity? This is my complaint because any sports event that lasts more than 3 hours is affected by it unless you tickle it once in a while.

My 8300HDC (!) got stuck in fast-forward today while recording Olympics in background and playing another recording. Had to soft-reboot it, lost the entire recorded piece. Half hour later while watching Olympics (which was still recording) the box crashed and rebooted :-( (2.4.9)
Keeps rebooting every day since. Today - while watching NBC live, not recording anything. HDMI, 1080i, CC on. 8300HDC 2.4.9_3.

Just noticed browsing through diag pages, SDV got enabled recently, probably during one of those reboots.

Keeps rebooting every day since. Today - while watching NBC live, not recording anything. HDMI, 1080i, CC on. 8300HDC 2.4.9_3.

Just noticed browsing through diag pages, SDV got enabled recently, probably during one of those reboots.Aha!! ODN release 2.4.9_3 has a bug that makes it not work with external drives. It goes into sleep mode after 3 hours of inactivity (even when off) and will freeze up when it tries to wake up. You'll have to wait for 2.4.10_11 to be able to use your external drive again.

Edit: Pardon me. I thought I was back on the external drive thread. If you aren't using an external drive, standby to disregard.

Aha!! ODN release 2.4.9_3 has a bug that makes it not work with external drives. It goes into sleep mode after 3 hours of inactivity (even when off) and will freeze up when it tries to wake up. You'll have to wait for 2.4.10_11 to be able to use your external drive again.

Edit: Pardon me. I thought I was back on the external drive thread. If you aren't using an external drive, standby to disregard.

I'm not, it's sadly sitting next to the TV waiting for better times :-(

Keeps rebooting every day since. Today - while watching NBC live, not recording anything. HDMI, 1080i, CC on. 8300HDC 2.4.9_3.

Just noticed browsing through diag pages, SDV got enabled recently, probably during one of those reboots.

Here are the possible causes I can think of:

2.4.9_3 has known problems with HDMI. Try going to component and reboot with no HDMI connected. You will need to wait until ODN 2.4.10_11 is deployed before HDMI is safe. The technician I spoke to on the phone on Tuesday stated that ODN 2.4.10_11 will be deployed soon after the Olympics are over, and I am in the same market as you are according to your profile.
Your signal level is too weak or too strong. Check this by going into the AXIOM diagnostics by pressing VOL- and VOL+, and then pressing CH+ when the mail light goes on. Then find the FDC signal level and the QAM signal levels. They should be between -8 dBmV and 8 dBmV, with 0 dBmV being ideal. If any of these are out of this range, call for a truck roll to have this fixed. The 8300HDC is reputed to be sensitive to bad signal strength.
Your box has cooked itself from overheating. The 8240HDC and 8300HDC boxes often have a power supply designed for the 8300HD (w/o CableCARD). Since these boxes now have the added load of powering a CableCARD, a DOCSIS cable modem, and double the main RAM, this power supply is prone to overheating due to having to power a higher load than it was designed for. A workaround is to swap out the cooked box and go all out in cooling this thing short of putting it in a refrigerator or a freezer. For example, after my first 8240HDC cooked itself even though it was placed out in the open on top of a cool surface, I went to my basement to put my next box, an 8300HDC, on some 2x4s to allow it to take advantage of convection. This box almost never crashed even though the load on the power supply must have been greater than on the 8240HDC because the 8300HDC includes a twin MPEG-2 encoder chip, the dedicated RAM for this twin MPEG-2 encoder, and twin analog tuners that were removed in creating the 8240HDC from the 8300HDC. I think that the engineers who modded the 8300HD to create the 8300HDC failed to take into account the additional load the CableCARD uses due to the rush Scientific Atlanta was forced into in order to meet the FCC separable security deadline which banned the sale of boxes with integrated security like the 8300HD in the United States, and the quality control failed to catch this mistake before this design was rushed to be implemented at the factory.

I have seen no problems whatsoever with closed captioning with ODN, so I doubt that this has anything to do with your problem.

One tip I keep forgetting to add is in order to lower the load on the power supply and cause your box to generate less heat, set the AC outlet to always off if this was possible, but if that is not an option available with your version of Navigator, set it to on with set top. That way, the power supply does not have to constantly drive the relay that enables the outlet on the back of the cable box, at least when it is off. I have noticed that my box seems a tiny bit cooler when I have the outlet set this way.

Your box has cooked itself from overheating. The 8240HDC and 8300HDC boxes often have a power supply designed for the 8300HD (w/o CableCARD). Since these boxes now have the added load of powering a CableCARD, a DOCSIS cable modem, and double the main RAM, this power supply is prone to overheating due to having to power a higher load than it was designed for.I keep having to remind you that you are the only one to report an overheating problem with the 8300HDC. I've had 3 boxes and none of them were hardly over room temperature. This system has plenty of problems, but IMHO overheating isn't one of them.

I keep having to remind you that you are the only one to report an overheating problem with the 8300HDC. I've had 3 boxes and none of them were hardly over room temperature. This system has plenty of problems, but IMHO overheating isn't one of them.

I am not the only one to report an overheating problem with OCAP boxes in this forum. See this old post from January (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12936803#post12936803) where Satch Man quoted a TWC technician complaining about overheating OCAP boxes.

I thought little of this until the first 8240HDC I had started crashing a lot and then started stinking like burnt electronics. Once the box started malfunctioning like that, I did not trust it anymore because I was worried that this overheating might have caused permanent damage, forcing a box swap.

I am not the only one to report an overheating problem with OCAP boxes in this forum. See this old post from January (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12936803#post12936803) where Satch Man quoted a TWC technician complaining about overheating OCAP boxes.

I thought little of this until the first 8240HDC I had started crashing a lot and then started stinking like burnt electronics. Once the box started malfunctioning like that, I did not trust it anymore because I was worried that this overheating might have caused permanent damage, forcing a box swap.

My 8300HDC has been in an enclosed cabinet for almost a year now, and never had a heat issue; it is warm (but not hot) to the touch. It was very stable for several months, until 2.4_9_3 was forced on me, and since then it has eSATA and HDMI bugs that have nothing to do with heat. I have it recording 24/7 as eSATA workaround for months, and it's OK. Also, I have been watching a lot of Olympics on NBC and Universal, not a single reboot.
If these boxes were habitually cooking themselves, my guess is that we'd be hearing from a lot more people. As for the old post you mentioned, that's technician's generalized rambling; no person actually said that their box overheated, or that it even was getting too hot to touch.

You need to pressure TWC to rollout 2.4.10_11 in your area. It fixes the sleep issue, eSATA, HDMI and lots of other issue with the HDC box. While I'd like to see more features, the bugs seem to be resolved.
How do you pressure TWC to do anything? Everyone I talk to there says the same thing about when the next update will occur, "I don't know". I was told for two months it would be mid July but now, since that didn't happen, nobody seems to know. Wait 30 minutes on hold for tech support and they don't know, wait 10 minutes on hold for customer service and they don't know (and don't seem to understand the problems), ask the tech when he's at my house and he doesn't know (but tells me he hopes it is soon cause he has the same problems). I have emailed, complained to the BBB and phoned TWC on a regular basis to complain and ask questions. I have never raised my voice or used bad language but they really don't seem to care.

About two years ago, TWC either upgraded the 8300HD software or the 'head' software or whatever you call it, which resulted in the DVR not working. I exchanged the box thinking it was a box problem, but had exactly the same problem. Eventually technical support told me that it would take a month or two before the different software versions would be able to sync up with my DVR and that until then it would be inoperable. Customer service refused to credit or refund me anything for the loss of this 'service'!

I just got a 8300HDC box a few days ago through TW in NYC. It was set up with component cables and I switched to HDMI, and it seems that the picture was better with the components. Is that possible or am I just imagining it?

I just got a 8300HDC box a few days ago through TW in NYC. It was set up with component cables and I switched to HDMI, and it seems that the picture was better with the components. Is that possible or am I just imagining it?

Here are the reasons that I can think of for this:

You customized the component video brightness, contrast, and white point on the component input, but they were not copied to the HDMI port settings. Set them up again.
Some TVs have badly designed presets for HDMI.
Crappy HDMI cables corrupt signals.
Some people are used to bad presets and think that good settings look bad. Some calibrators have calibrated televisions and gotten complaints that their screens look worse than before the calibration, but the calibrated screens are actually more accurate. The customers are just used to trashy settings.
Some TVs might do much more processing on component video to mask component video's problems (e.g. there is no way for your TV's video processor to know if it sampled at the right point on the component video, and miniscule amounts of noise are always present in analog video), but do much less processing on HDMI signals because they are perfect as long as they are sampled correctly, the clock is recovered correctly on the receiver, and there is not enough noise to flip bits).
There are some posts showing that some versions of Navigator fail to pass through the resolutions the monitor can accept and therefore perform unnecessary resolution conversion. I cannot verify this because my monitor does not accept HDMI because it was built before HDMI was invented.

I just got a 8300HDC box a few days ago through TW in NYC. It was set up with component cables and I switched to HDMI, and it seems that the picture was better with the components. Is that possible or am I just imagining it?Maybe. Most people will tell you that HDMI is superior because there is no digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion. But this article argues that the answer is not quite so simple.
http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm

I've run my SA8300HD on component and HDMI and don't find any appreciable difference. Others have reported the same.

HDMI is overblown, and seems more about DRM (and related various handshaking issues that can crop up), than about improving our viewing experience.

I've run my SA8300HD on component and HDMI and don't find any appreciable difference. Others have reported the same.

HDMI is overblown, and seems more about DRM (and related various handshaking issues that can crop up), than about improving our viewing experience.
Pic quality might be about the same but you have to route 5 cables instead of ONE

Pic quality might be about the same but you have to route 5 cables instead of ONEYeah, that was the deciding factor for me. When I got my new set, I needed to clean up my cabling. The single HDMI was much tidier. Also, many newer sets are providing fewer component ports.

What can be said of HDMI is that it presents the opportunity to create an interface that yields superior results to analog component video; for that to happen, equal care has to be taken with the design of both ends. There are components that are excellent HDMI sources and displays that are excellent HDMI sinks--to get outstanding results, you have to have both. Eventually, I'd hope that excellence in both HDMI display input and HDMI video output implementation will be common in mid-range and better equipment. At this point, consistent interoperability is difficult enough--too many HDMI devices don't work reliably with some displays, while working just fine with some others and vice-versa.

I love the convenience of HDMI, though. I have seven devices from seven different OEMs cobbled together with only HDMI cabling for both video and audio: Mitsubishi 1080p LCD panel, Onkyo AVR, Belkin HDMI switch, TiVo Series3, Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Toshiba HD DVD player. Everything's worked perfectly for over a year (knock wood :)).

About two years ago, TWC either upgraded the 8300HD software or the 'head' software or whatever you call it, which resulted in the DVR not working. I exchanged the box thinking it was a box problem, but had exactly the same problem. Eventually technical support told me that it would take a month or two before the different software versions would be able to sync up with my DVR and that until then it would be inoperable. Customer service refused to credit or refund me anything for the loss of this 'service'!

I would speak to a supervisor till you get what you want, or contact the Better Business Bureau for your area, or switch to a different service such as Dish or U-Verse. Are things better now? If not, consider the above options.

Jack

Yeah, that was the deciding factor for me. When I got my new set, I needed to clean up my cabling. The single HDMI was much tidier. Also, many newer sets are providing fewer component ports.

Same here. When you are trying to route those 5 RCAs through stands, under other components and wires it's a hassle.

Plus you get HD audio. Well, when studios actually bother to include that on Blu-Ray discs of course.

Those were the two main reasons I use HDMI when possible, even though the handshake on the 8300 is arcane and prone to annoyances. I don't remember a difference between HDMI and when I used component for it either. Since my TV also accepts DD over HDMI it also meant that the audio out to receiver problem was never an issue.

I still use 1080p component for my 360 and that looks just fine.

Here are the possible causes I can think of:

2.4.9_3 has known problems with HDMI. Try going to component and reboot with no HDMI connected. You will need to wait until ODN 2.4.10_11 is deployed before HDMI is safe. The technician I spoke to on the phone on Tuesday stated that ODN 2.4.10_11 will be deployed soon after the Olympics are over, and I am in the same market as you are according to your profile.
Your signal level is too weak or too strong. Check this by going into the AXIOM diagnostics by pressing VOL- and VOL+, and then pressing CH+ when the mail light goes on. Then find the FDC signal level and the QAM signal levels. They should be between -8 dBmV and 8 dBmV, with 0 dBmV being ideal. If any of these are out of this range, call for a truck roll to have this fixed. The 8300HDC is reputed to be sensitive to bad signal strength.
Your box has cooked itself from overheating. The 8240HDC and 8300HDC boxes often have a power supply designed for the 8300HD (w/o CableCARD). Since these boxes now have the added load of powering a CableCARD, a DOCSIS cable modem, and double the main RAM, this power supply is prone to overheating due to having to power a higher load than it was designed for. A workaround is to swap out the cooked box and go all out in cooling this thing short of putting it in a refrigerator or a freezer. For example, after my first 8240HDC cooked itself even though it was placed out in the open on top of a cool surface, I went to my basement to put my next box, an 8300HDC, on some 2x4s to allow it to take advantage of convection. This box almost never crashed even though the load on the power supply must have been greater than on the 8240HDC because the 8300HDC includes a twin MPEG-2 encoder chip, the dedicated RAM for this twin MPEG-2 encoder, and twin analog tuners that were removed in creating the 8240HDC from the 8300HDC. I think that the engineers who modded the 8300HD to create the 8300HDC failed to take into account the additional load the CableCARD uses due to the rush Scientific Atlanta was forced into in order to meet the FCC separable security deadline which banned the sale of boxes with integrated security like the 8300HD in the United States, and the quality control failed to catch this mistake before this design was rushed to be implemented at the factory.

I have seen no problems whatsoever with closed captioning with ODN, so I doubt that this has anything to do with your problem.

One tip I keep forgetting to add is in order to lower the load on the power supply and cause your box to generate less heat, set the AC outlet to always off if this was possible, but if that is not an option available with your version of Navigator, set it to on with set top. That way, the power supply does not have to constantly drive the relay that enables the outlet on the back of the cable box, at least when it is off. I have noticed that my box seems a tiny bit cooler when I have the outlet set this way.

Thanks.

Really don't want to go component. HDMI's been working well ever since I got 8300HDC, much-much better that 8300HD w/ Passport or Navigator. Virtually no problems at all.

AXIOM diag shows FDC level at +3, QAM at -1. Flipping through the pages, discovered an interesting fact: the applications page lists both 2.4.9_3 and 2.4.10_11 modules. So they already downloaded the new firmware but have not activated it yet?

The box is reasonably warm on the left side, nothing alarming. Power outlet is set to "with set-top". Waiting for Olympics to finish and for 2.4.10 to arrive...

Thanks.

Really don't want to go component. HDMI's been working well ever since I got 8300HDC, much-much better that 8300HD w/ Passport or Navigator. Virtually no problems at all.

AXIOM diag shows FDC level at +3, QAM at -1. Flipping through the pages, discovered an interesting fact: the applications page lists both 2.4.9_3 and 2.4.10_11 modules. So they already downloaded the new firmware but have not activated it yet?

The box is reasonably warm on the left side, nothing alarming. Power outlet is set to "with set-top". Waiting for Olympics to finish and for 2.4.10 to arrive...

The ODN 2.4.10_11 software is loaded on the servers, but are not loaded on the boxes yet. TWC's engineers seriously fumbled while implementing the SDV Olympic channels and do not want to have another epic fail during the Olympics nor want to deal with the crush of people who will want box swaps due to failed upgrades during the Olympics. I think that the leading cause of box swaps during a software replacement is signals that are too weak or too strong to be read by the cable box without errors, therefore causing the box to erase its old software package and not be able to load a new software package.

I just got a 8300HDC box a few days ago through TW in NYC. It was set up with component cables and I switched to HDMI, and it seems that the picture was better with the components. Is that possible or am I just imagining it?

Just in case, since you apppear to be fairly new here:
There is a bug in Navigator version 2.4.9_3 that sometimes causes the box to downgrade HD signals to 480i; this happens only when connected via HDMI and it will certainly make the picture look a lot worse than component.
Also, there is a related bug (HDMI-only as well) that makes the picture sometimes "stick" in the right upper corner after invoking guide.
According to several people in this thread, both of these bugs (as well as some others) are fixed in version 2.4.10_11.

Same here. When you are trying to route those 5 RCAs through stands, under other components and wires it's a hassle.

Plus you get HD audio. Well, when studios actually bother to include that on Blu-Ray discs of course.

Those were the two main reasons I use HDMI when possible, even though the handshake on the 8300 is arcane and prone to annoyances. I don't remember a difference between HDMI and when I used component for it either. Since my TV also accepts DD over HDMI it also meant that the audio out to receiver problem was never an issue.

I still use 1080p component for my 360 and that looks just fine.

In my case, my TV doesn't pass 5.1 audio out (to the receiver) from HDMI sources (only from cable/antenna), so I have to run the optical audio to the receiver anyway to get 5.1 w/the SA8300HD. Component is one cable/three connections, so it's essentially two cables rather than one for me, and not dealing w/any of the HDMI issues on the SA8300HD (which have been around on Passport from years back) has been a blessing. :)

I would speak to a supervisor till you get what you want, or contact the Better Business Bureau for your area, or switch to a different service such as Dish or U-Verse. Are things better now? If not, consider the above options.

Jack

The DVR service just came back one day. Here in Manhattan satellite is not an option, though I am trying to get FIOS into the building. I now have an 8300HD running Passport in the bedroom and an 8300HDC running Navigator in the living room waiting for an LCD next month and I am shuddering at the problems reading here suggests I may have. The wife is in for another '3day f'ing and blinding session' which is what happened when the first LCD came before I finally got it working with HDMI!

Looks like 2.4.10_11 got pushed to my 8300HDC box in the Charlotte area.

I plugged my external drive in, let's hope it works.

Are there change logs for these things? Anything I should be aware of?

Looks like 2.4.10_11 got pushed to my 8300HDC box in the Charlotte area.

I plugged my external drive in, let's hope it works.

Are there change logs for these things? Anything I should be aware of?


I doubt you will find change logs since TWC never officially acknowledged that there are problems. The official company line is "Customers need to adjust to this new and exciting technology". If they actually cared, they'd update the website more than once every six months and keep everyone up to speed.

I doubt you will find change logs since TWC never officially acknowledged that there are problems. The official company line is "Customers need to adjust to this new and exciting technology". If they actually cared, they'd update the website more than once every six months and keep everyone up to speed.

Cosign!

The problem is like I said before, this board represents compared to general TWC subs, a very small percentage of their customer base. There are certainly customer complaints about how some of TWC divisions conduct business, but it's not mainstreamed enough to force TWC to change their current policies. The general public doesn't even bother to look for deception from the sales people, because TWC's "ace in the hole" to general subs is, "It's new, so it will take some time to get used to it." "We are working on it. (yea, for 2 and a half years, with the speed of waiting for a lunar eclipse!) 75% of the CSR's don't know crap. They are just reading from the script, accepting anything their main New York headquarters tells them.

Jack

Appears that the Comcast/Tivo endeavor has come out of the dark. Reading through some forums and even the thread here on AVS shows many users reporting the latest firmware update has fixed many issues they were having. Many reports of great usability and function are popping up. Good news if your a Comcast sub!

Looks like 2.4.10_11 got pushed to my 8300HDC box in the Charlotte area.

I plugged my external drive in, let's hope it works.

Are there change logs for these things? Anything I should be aware of?

Let us know if it works, Clay. Also, since this is an "update", have they fixed the REW button glitch that jumps you back forward when you hit PLAY again? Please....? Out of all of the Navigator bugs, omissions and failures, that's the one that drives me most insane.

Not that it would matter to me with an "HD" box (running 2.4.1-92), but it would at least give me some hope. If they can't even address that simple, two-lines-of-code bug, then what the heck are those diabolical TWC engineers doing back at their secret lair...?

Let us know if it works, Clay. Also, since this is an "update", have they fixed the REW button glitch that jumps you back forward when you hit PLAY again? Please....? Out of all of the Navigator bugs, omissions and failures, that's the one that drives me most insane.

Not that it would matter to me with an "HD" box (running 2.4.1-92), but it would at least give me some hope. If they can't even address that simple, two-lines-of-code bug, then what the heck are those diabolical TWC engineers doing back at their secret lair...?
Oh I hate that when I am REW something and that does that. Someone suggested hitting pause and that does work but I find I am having to "train" myself to do that.

Out of all of the Navigator bugs, omissions and failures, that's the one that drives me most insane.Man, if that's the one, is must be a short drive.:D:D

As for how I know a lot of this stuff, I enjoyed computers enough to graduate with a master of science in computer engineering this May. However, I am still unemployed and still looking for a job! :mad: If I had started college onein 2002 instead of 2001, I would have gone into accounting instead and have lots of work in financial law enforcement, seeing the amount of corporations cooking the books getting caught in 2001 to 2002 and the amount of mortgage fraud that is killing our banks and fleecing borrowers today! This mortgage mess is killing the economy, causing many in my field to not have jobs, and I am not good at selling myself to potential employers![/QUOTE]


Hang on guy, I've been in the business for almost thirty years. Things have gotten a lot better since 2002 but employers still give the edge to experience. Get into any IT job, even if it is below your potential. Once you have a bit of experience under your belt, your education will make the difference in your hiring potential. :)

Man, if that's the one, is must be a short drive.:D:D

Indeed. Navigator has shortened the commute to crazyland. :p

On my Navigator,

TWC has turned off the SDV for now because my Milwaukee area has had problems with it. I am not getting duplicate test channels anymore. I still have a non-C DVR box, and it has worked well, even with Navigator. No other new news to report, except I just heard that our division has reached an agreement with Big Ten Network to carry Wisconsin sports games on expanded standard service (Channel 63 or 72) depending on your Wisconsin community. USA HD was dropped after the Olympics and no one knows why?

Still waiting for Start Over for Navigator. For those divisions that have this feature, how often do you use it? I suppose with a DVR, Start Over is kind of minimal. At least Navigator's stability is getting better.

Jack

Can anyone tell me how old this version of navigator is? 2.4.1-98 PTV
The reason I want to know so I can ask Brighthouse (a partner of TWC) when they will be upgrading it. Iam getting tired of the tuners switching to the one at the beginning or end of recording. In other words when 1 tuner is set to record the DVR will automatically switch to that channel sometimes at the beginning and sometimes at the end of the recording. So if I am watching a program as its broadcast and say I have it delayed 5 minutes from pausing it I lose the buffer when it switches tuners. Also I noticed last night that it doesnt buffer the channel you have it on when you are watching a recorded program. With passport say I had the channel of live TV on NBC, if I watched a recorded program after I deleted it NBC would be buffered and I could rewind and watch what was on. Now that isnt possible. I hate this Navigator

Central Ohio finally got the new ODN release 2.4.10_11 last night. I'm so happy, I can hardly hold my bladder. Guess I'll have to update my sig.

Can anyone tell me how old this version of navigator is? 2.4.1-98 PTV
The reason I want to know so I can ask Brighthouse (a partner of TWC) when they will be upgrading it. Iam getting tired of the tuners switching to the one at the beginning or end of recording. In other words when 1 tuner is set to record the DVR will automatically switch to that channel sometimes at the beginning and sometimes at the end of the recording. So if I am watching a program as its broadcast and say I have it delayed 5 minutes from pausing it I lose the buffer when it switches tuners. Also I noticed last night that it doesnt buffer the channel you have it on when you are watching a recorded program. With passport say I had the channel of live TV on NBC, if I watched a recorded program after I deleted it NBC would be buffered and I could rewind and watch what was on. Now that isnt possible. I hate this Navigator

That version has been out since February. The latest version was released in July. 2.4.1-107 is the latest MDN version. Latest ODN version is 2.4.10_11.

That version has been out since February. The latest version was released in July. 2.4.1-107 is the latest MDN version. Latest ODN version is 2.4.10_11.
OK heres a dumb question. What does PTV, MDN, and ODN stand for?

OK heres a dumb question. What does PTV, MDN, and ODN stand for?


MDN - Mystro Digital Navigator - 8300HD or HDC boxes
ODN - OCAP Digital Navigator - 8300HDC boxes
PTV - Power TV?

MDN - Mystro Digital Navigator - 8300HD boxes - no cablecards
ODN - OCAP Digital Navigator - 8300HDC boxes - cablecards
PTV - Power TV?
PTV is after the firmware number in the diagnostics with MT. Huron in parenthesis (sp?). I have the 8300 HDC but I also have Brighthouse which is partnered with TWC. And my box has Mystro. I am just trying to get this information so when I call BHN I have all my ducks in a row so to speak. I just really dont like this version of Navigator.

PTV is after the firmware number in the diagnostics with MT. Huron in parenthesis (sp?). I have the 8300 HDC but I also have Brighthouse which is partnered with TWC. And my box has Mystro. I am just trying to get this information so when I call BHN I have all my ducks in a row so to speak. I just really dont like this version of Navigator.

So you have MDN running on an 8300HDC? I guess that should work. The HDC has more resources than the HD and those additional resources are needed for the OCAP implementation of ODN. However, if your cableco hasnt implemented OCAP then they would have no choice but to do MDN (or Passport) on HDC's. I will update my earlier post.

So you have MDN running on an 8300HDC? I guess that should work. The HDC has more resources than the HD and those additional resources are needed for the OCAP implementation of ODN. However, if your cableco hasnt implemented OCAP then they would have no choice but to do MDN (or Passport) on HDC's. I will update my earlier post.
Yeah they just got rid of Passport and when the box reboots it says Mystro. Knowing BHN they most likely havent implemented OCAP. They are too busy advertising how many HD channels they are going to add by years end LOL. They dont add the good ones I can tell you that. Still no USA in HD or FX in HD but we have Disney channel and ABC Family channel in HD :rolleyes:

Yeah they just got rid of Passport and when the box reboots it says Mystro. Knowing BHN they most likely havent implemented OCAP. They are too busy advertising how many HD channels they are going to add by years end LOL. They dont add the good ones I can tell you that. Still no USA in HD or FX in HD but we have Disney channel and ABC Family channel in HD :rolleyes:

Yep, there are alot of PO'd people here because they thought they finally added USA HD, but removed it as of yesterday only to be replaced by a message saying "We hope you've enjoyed our additional HD channels and we are working to bring you more. TWC Home of Free HD, etc. etc."

Our division gave NO indication these were temporary channels just for the Olympics so the lot of us were thrilled to see USA HD in the program guide a few weeks ago. People here are bored with the addition of "Non-HD channels" like Disney which is almost always in 4:3 format or Lifetime with stretch-o-vision. Of course, I'd give up about 30 of the HD channels we have in order to have USA, Fx, and Sci-Fi HD!

I can't wait (sigh) until the drop Navigator on people here. That ought to go over real swell! I'm waiting on going the State Fair because there are always reps from TWC there pushing product and I'm interested to see what they have to say about Navigator, I'll report here with any info.

MDN - Mystro Digital Navigator - 8300HD or HDC boxes
ODN - OCAP Digital Navigator - 8300HDC boxes
PTV - Power TV?

PowerTV is the operating system that Scientific Atlanta develops for its cable boxes.

Yeah they just got rid of Passport and when the box reboots it says Mystro. Knowing BHN they most likely havent implemented OCAP. They are too busy advertising how many HD channels they are going to add by years end LOL. They dont add the good ones I can tell you that. Still no USA in HD or FX in HD but we have Disney channel and ABC Family channel in HD :rolleyes:

All the cable card boxes from BHN are running ODN. I have one. As for USA HD & FX HD, TWC does not have a carriage deal for those channels. BHN generally does not negotiate national deals themselves, they are included with TWC.

This post shows what TWC has deals for: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=7244431&postcount=1

I'm just curious...right now my 8300HDC is showing 8db signal on QAM1 and 6db signal on QAM2. I'm not familiar with signal strength numbers so can someone tell me if these are good or low? Would investing in a cable signal booster (electroline or motorola) be a wise investment or would it do nothing for HDTV performance with the 8300?

I'm just curious...right now my 8300HDC is showing 8db signal on QAM1 and 6db signal on QAM2. I'm not familiar with signal strength numbers so can someone tell me if these are good or low? Would investing in a cable signal booster (electroline or motorola) be a wise investment or would it do nothing for HDTV performance with the 8300?

If it's 8db and not -8db, then you are at the high end but still good. if its -8db you are too low and a good zero return amp would help. I use a Viewsonic 8 way to replace my splitter and have about 3 to 5bd at each outlet now depending on the weather (hot or cold). Unless you are having problems with your digital channels and/or VOD services, you should be OK.

I'm just curious...right now my 8300HDC is showing 8db signal on QAM1 and 6db signal on QAM2. I'm not familiar with signal strength numbers so can someone tell me if these are good or low? Would investing in a cable signal booster (electroline or motorola) be a wise investment or would it do nothing for HDTV performance with the 8300?

Your signal is almost too strong. Adding a signal booster will probably blow your cable box out and may damage it. -8 dBmV to 8 dBmV is what I think is the acceptable range, and a signal booster will make it too strong. In fact, if you have a TWC-supplied amplifier installed, you may want to call for a truck roll to remove it. If you own the amplifier, remove it. Your signal level should be as close to 0 dBmV as possible, which is the signal level cable equipment is designed for.

Your signal is almost too strong. Adding a signal booster will probably blow your cable box out and may damage it. -8 dBmV to 8 dBmV is what I think is the acceptable range, and a signal booster will make it too strong. In fact, if you have a TWC-supplied amplifier installed, you may want to call for a truck roll to remove it. If you own the amplifier, remove it. Your signal level should be as close to 0 dBmV as possible, which is the signal level cable equipment is designed for.


jnv is correct. 0bd is ideal and -8 to 8 is considered "acceptable". TWC may tell you different, but you should see what your level is without any other devices inline. (IE: amps, splitters) These items may boost or reduce signals respectively but not encompass the frequencies digital services require. Hook your box directly to the drop coming in and see what you get. Splitters depending on the number of legs will drop anywhere from 3.5 to 11db. Are you having issues at this time?

Another problem could be wiring. Are you using RG-6 throughout? RG-59 doesn't have the proper frequency bandwidth for some of the digital signals.

Ok...now I'm confused. I just went back in the diagnostic screen and found a couple of screens that show dBmV values. One has values under FDC of either 0 or 1dBmV (106MHz) and RDC of 33dBmV (20MHz). Another screen, showing QAM1 and QAM2 has values of +9dbmV or +12dBmV depending on channel (QAM1) and 6dBmV for QAM2. I'm not having any problems...I was just curious at what point people use amps to improve picture. As for cable...I'm using a length of Belden 1694A (RG-6). That is from the wall to the box...I have no idea what's in the wall but the apartment complex is less than 10 years old.

Ok...now I'm confused. I just went back in the diagnostic screen and found a couple of screens that show dBmV values. One has values under FDC of either 0 or 1dBmV and RDC of 33dBmV. Another screen, showing QAM1 and QAM2 has values of +9 - +12dBmV depending on channel (QAM1) and 6dBmV for QAM2. I'm not having any problems...I was just curious at what point people use amps to improve picture.

Those readings seem OK. The FDC is spot on. Amplifying your signal will do more harm than good by overdriving. If everything is working, don't worry about it. Some analog channels might look like crap, but that is the signal coming into the house. My QVC looks like garbage (all wavy and grainy) and some other analog channels are grainy. My amp helped and help maintain levels for SDV, but as the saying goes "Garbage In, Garbage Out". All my digitals are crystal clear. It's just another downside to analog.

HERE (http://www.dslreports.com/faq/sciatl/3.1_Using_diagnostic_screens) is a link to help you understand the SA diagnostic screens a little better. Read up on that and lets return the thread to Navigator talk. :-)

Just for the hell if it, I changed the sidebar intensity to "medium". I noticed that when viewing SD programming, there is a half inch black bar between the grey sidebar and the image on the left side; as if the image was shifted to the right by a half inch. It seems to me that if someone wanted to use the grey sidebars to avoid burn-in at the SD edges, this black bar would be problematic (not to mention distracting).

Still have MDN 2.4.1-92 here, but yesterday the guide was filled for the next 7 days without me having to manually load each day. Anyone else experience this? Not sure if it's a software fix or just a one time 'glitch'.