Moxi HD DVR - Page 59

First I want to thank everyone on this site - those of you that have asked for help and those that have provided help you all made my decision easy.

It is time to upgrade.
My 5 ReplayTV's were doing a great job but was time to invest in HD DVR's, now that the last of my big screens were upgraded to HD.

I have been watching the Moxi development since it was a concept and have been impressed. Even with the problems posted on this site, I have seen nothing but compliments on Moxi's support so I took the plunge. Being able to use the Moxi to do many things I was using a xBox or HTPC for will help to increase the WAF and her "OFF/ON requirement".

I will miss the ability to download Replay recorded shows to the HTPC which is also backed up by a 17TB Windows Home Server. To compensate I will be adding an eSATA enclosure with eventually fill with 4 1.5TB drives.

One of the lifetime replays will remain in the mix mostly because if for some reason we miss recording a show we can always get it from Poopli.

Dave

I took the plunge and ordered a 2 tuner from Amazon today. Comcast are coming on Thursday to install a MultiStream Cablecard.

What is your advice to help them acheive the goal of a successful card install?

I would get the moxi set up and updated before the cable installer comes out.

My Moxi had to run an update right out of the box. The updates can take quite a while.

You will also have to be familiar with where the cablecard information is in the Moxi settings menu. The Comcast installer may not have ever seen a Moxi.

Other than that if the installer has any problems activating the cable card start a live chat with Moxi. Moxi support was able to help Charter get my cable card working.

Included in the Moxi shipment are cable card install instructions. Make sure you read that beforehand and if necessary give a copy to the installer.

At minimum, read the quick start guide.

Yeah, must have been a tough choice to give up the ReplayTV when they must have worked so well...

Welcome to Moxi and hopefully you will not miss your ReplayTVs too much...

To recap: I have Moxi 3-Tuner. Only three weeks old. Yesterday, with just Live TV, Moxi froze. I had to do a Reset. Over 10 mins. went by with "Moxi Checking Hard Drive." After reboot, all recorded programs were gone, and the Network Icons next to channel numbers in TV Guide were gone.

I called Customer Support, of course. They are always nice. They always tell you they will forward report to the engineers. Hearing back from engineers takes time, of course.

But more importantly, I was told: During reboot, if Moxi detects a problem with the hard drive, Moxi will attempt to fix the problem. During this fix, it is very common (if not always expected) recorded programs will be lost.

Not very comforting, is it? (What I take from this: One should watch their recorded programs as soon as possible just in case of a hard drive hiccup. Yeah, I know. Most of the time one's Moxi hard drive will not arrive with problems. But now there are two users, me and someone from 3/6 who have posted lost recorded programs after reboot the first week of March.)

Keep reassuring them by saying this phrase, over and over: "It's like a TIVO"


Mark

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv...emmy-20041201/

Watching recorded programs as soon as possible isn't enough. Last night we had an Oscar party. I set the program to record and we started watching it about 45 minutes after the show began.

Half way thru the program it froze. Neither FF nor Rew did anything. I could stop it and start playing again, but it was frozen when the replay started again on that program. The realtime broadcast was about 45 minutes ahead of us, so we'd miss that much of the show if we lost the recording.

We had a dozen people watching and it was embarrassing. Fortunately the program continued after about 30-45 seconds. The problem was just like you'd get on a scratched DVD. It froze, moved a frame, froze again, then another frame, then nothing for almost a minute.

I guess this could be a bad hard drive, but if we had lost that recorded program while we were watching it I would have been extremely pissed. I may get a replacement, but if its a design problem that may do no good.

That actually could be a symptom of a bad/dying hard drive. Consumer (non-raid) drives will retry aggressively to read a bad sector, trying too many times before giving up, and then re-map the sector to a new spot. 30-45 seconds is at the extreme of this but it may actually have been much less but felt that long...

This is why some drive manufacturers are now selling 'DVR' versions of their drives. Zero retries on bad reads... I do not know if Moxi uses these but I have other reasons to believe that they do not.

Sorry to hear about your trouble. I do not think this is a design. I too had a similar issue and it turned out to be a bad harddrive. After Moxi sent me a replacement unit, it has been working fine without any issues.

Please call them and log any issue you have. This will help determine if you need a replacement sent to you.

I've had that happen on a CableCard equiped TV without any DVR. Maybe the CableCard; but, I'd contact Moxi and send the logs to see if they find anything

This is scary. I ordered a 3-tuner unit a few days ago; haven't recieved it yet. If there is any possibility of recordings being deleted accidently, I'm going to return the unit. I've used various cable company supplied DVRs for many years and have never heard of a problem like this. I've had to reboot DVRs to get them working right, but recorded shows were never affected and were still there after the reboot.

You might as well send it back with the delivery guy then because there is 0% chance of you receiving anything that is 100% guaranteed not to fail.

I have a question: will the Moxi HD DVR work with the mCard CableCARD provided by Comcast? I've talked with Comcast customer service and they told me while they actually support using it with the TiVo HD (and soon TiVo Series 4 Premiere) DVR, they are kind of waffling in regards to Moxi HD support. Help.

The Moxi will work with a Comcast m card. The FCC probably requires Comcast to allow you to use an m card with your certified cablecard device.

If you call Moxi support they will probably be able to tell you exactly what Comcast needs to do in order to activate the cablecard. When my Charter cablecard was installed I had to start a Moxi chat session so Moxi support could tell Charter how to use Charters own system.

Dickmiles,

Keep in mind we do not know the number of total Moxi users out there. Most customers who have no issues you do not hear from. However, it seems when people have problems they venture to the forums. However, some like a few us of here are here just to monitor news. So the three users that have posted a problem here could be 3 out of 100 total users (3% problems), 3 out of 1000 total users (.3% problems) or 3 out of 100,000 (0.00003% of problems). It is a matter of numbers and perception.

Electronics are fickle in nature.. more so if you use volatile harddrives. I remember reading in Tivocommunity a batch of Tivo XL that will not recover after a reboot as well....

My theory is that electronics are going to break. As long as company and it support department provide great support, I will be a happy customer. As most posters point out, Moxi has excellent support. For failures within warranty period, some had one or two day delivery of advance replacement products.

Lets also look at out of warranty repair.

Moxi has $75 plus parts for repair.
TiVo charges a flat $150 fee to replace after the warranty expires, but also charges an additional $199 lifetime transfer fee after three years.

Dick.. I am sorry if you decided to return your Moxi. It is a huge investment and should work without any issues. I also add one thing... most cars have issues... but would you stop driving it one broke down on you?

Good luck your decision and we be happy to answer any additional questions you have.



RayChaugng,

The MCard will be fine for your Moxi (or Tivo). The customer service rep is just not familar with the Moxi.

I have a Comcast M-card that is a Scientific Atlanta card. It works great with my Moxi 3-tuner dvr. Just be prepared when the tech comes to install your card by having the Moxi set up and ready to go. Become familiar with the menus so you can get to the card configuration pages easily as the tech will not be familiar with the Moxi user interface.

My install was completed in under 30 minutes and that included a call from the tech to engineering to get the card authorized because the 1st level support rep couldn't get it done through their screens.

Acaoacao, what you wrote to Dickmiles is very articulate...and I agree.

I am new to this forum and say hello to everyone. I joined because of Moxi problems.

History: For years, I used and loved two ReplayTV's (5500 series).

I jumped on the Two-Tuner Moxi, at the end of Oct. '09. Besides the occasional freeze, I had no major issues.

I use Cox Cable in Orange County, CA. I do not use a CableCard. I have digital cable plugged in and only watch the free QAM stations. There are a lot of them here in my area. Please know, however, that I can get all the free QAM stations except one: KCOP Channel 13 out of L.A.

I know for a fact that Cox transmits KCOP as a free QAM station, but for some reason the Moxi will not pick it up. I have scanned the QAM stations using two different Moxi's, where both cannot pick up KCOP, yet they pick up all the other free QAM stations, including the TV Guide Channel.

Last month, I decided to get a Three-Tuner Moxi. Lots of problems immediately off the bat, including bad hard drives and loss of recorded programs.

But let me tell you: The Moxi customer service has been phenomenal. Every time I have called, I get a rep on the phone. The reps are very helpful, and appear sympathetic. (They also respond via email very fast. Moxi might have some of the best customer service I have ever experienced.) My third Moxi Three-Tuner has been approved for shipping and I am hoping the third one will be the charm.

If Moxi received a small batch of bad Seagate hard drives for their Three-Tuner model, it's not Moxi's fault. And we all know that all hard drive manufacturers release a small percentage of lemon hard drives.

At least you can take comfort that Moxi is backing up their product, and that when a defect is confirmed, they bend over backwards to get you a replacement.

Now, if it turns out my third Moxi Three-Tuner is also bad...since I love the three tuners and multi-room functionality with the Moxi Mate, I will stay with Moxi until I get a solid one. (I guess you can tell I love using the Moxi when it works.)

Extra note: Cox in my area only offers single stream cable cards. (And Cox offers two-tuner Motorola DVR's, but they do not offer multi-room functionality.)

Again, I love the Moxi...and I am confident I will get a Three-Tuner model that works.

I read that they use Seagate st3500321cs hard drives in the Moxi. I think these are $80? Can these $80 hard drives successfully handle Three-Tuner recording in DVR's and 24-hours-per-day running for the long term? Since the Moxi Three-Tuner is new, I doubt these drives were tested long term for this. If it turns out the Seagate cannot handle this extra load well, I am sure Moxi will seek out a different hard drive model.

Sorry for the long posting. I won't do it again. I am only doing it because I am new and I want to explain everything for full clarification on my situation, and to hopefully help anyone deciding on the Moxi.

I found your post very useful, please don't apologize. Feel free to post at length.

Seagate seems to think the drive is designed for that kind of use:

Supporting capacities up to 1TB, Seagate® Pipeline HD series hard drives were designed to deliver 24x7, reliable operation with performance tuning oriented toward low-power consumption, silent operation and smooth video streaming performance. With the ability to support a minimum of 10 simultaneous streams of HD content and operate at temperatures of up to 75°C, they provide reliable storage that enables consumers to take full advantage of premium services like video on demand. Boasting the industry's lowest overall power consumption profiles and coupled with the Seagate commitment to recyclability, Pipeline HD drives are more than green; they offer customers a comprehensive sustainability value proposition which incorporates leading environmental stewardship and a focus on customer satisfaction.

http://seagate.datarecovery.eu/en/da...data-loss.html

I cannot verify the accuracy of this link, but they highlight that the SATA version of ST3500321cs as part of a a batch of problematic harddrives. The Seagate Pipeline drives are used by many OEMs as well as Tivo upgraders as well.

Keep in mind there a lot of drives on that article. Not sure if it is accurate or if they are trying to drum up business.

Thanks for this info. The site says the drives which are defective are those manufactured before January 2009. I truly hope Moxi is using Seagate drives manufactured after January 2009 in their Three-Tuner models...but you never know. Also, I would hope Seagate would send out bulletins to their bulk customers like Moxi, advising them to upgrade the firmware in the hard drives.

Cox is due to introduce a multi-room DVR and a 16:9 IPG (made by NDS) in most areas sometime next month. 3-tuner DVR? Not from Cox. [BTW, I was told by Cox that they now have M-cards in all areas.]

Domino, that is good news Cox will soon be introducing multi-room DVR's.

I phoned Cox in Orange County, CA, just two weeks ago. The rep told me they only offer single-stream CableCards in my area and that they have to send a rep out to do the install. I explained I had a Moxi DVR that can use multi-stream cable cards. They told me I was out of luck. (I decided not to get the single-stream CableCard.)

Do you know how to interpret the date code on the drive. I would like to know it was manufactured after January 12th, 2009. Isn't it odd that drives manufactured over a year ago may be just now being put to use?

Moxi won the SCTE Canadian Summit Award. Moxi can put this award next to the Emmy they won. lol.

http://www.cable360.net/ct/news/thew...ard_40332.html

I have Comcast with my Moxi and it works just fine, the Comcast tech was in and out in less then 30 minutes and no problems pairing up the the Mcard. Just make sure to hook up your Moxi to the Internet before the tech arrives so that the Moxi can download the updates which took me about 40 minutes for my Moxi to complete.

Had a new problem happen the other night. Watching tv via mate for several hours and channel locked up and then got the "you do not subscribe to this channel". Hard rebooted both mate and 3 tuner units three separate times. Continued to get "you do not subscribe to this channel" for all channels with occasional choppy frozen pixelation in background. Under cable card settings the unit was not recognizing the cable card. Continued into next day. Moxi tech support not sure what happened but acknowledged the unit was failing to recognize the cable card. I'm on Verizon fios.