OH, now that's a story all in itself. I have a nightmare story about comcast.
I just upgraded to and HD cable box within the past month. It was a Motorola 6400 I believe. I hooked up the Mitsubishi to it using firewire and followed the instructions in the manual for Recording a Current Digital Broadcast.
I'm not sure if it worked or not because when I tried to play it back, I got the message "This is a digital recording. You cannot view it through this input." This is where I soured on the Mitsubishi. It only has composite a/v output or a coax output. The only possible way to play back would be through the firewire output, and of course, my tv has no firewire input. No tv on the market today has a firewire input.
I do some internet research and figure out how to access the menu of their motorola cable box. Under connections, it said the the IEEE 1394 was "Enabled" but not "Active." I get on the phone with Comcast, and the guy tells me that the firewire ports are set to SEND only and not RECEIVE.
So now I think I have the problem figured out. I thought that I needed a cable box with a firewire port that SENDS and RECEIVES. I get back on the phone with a new guy at Comcast and say I want a cable box with an Active firewire port in accordance with the FCC law. He says, "No problem, we'll send a technician and he'll have the tools to activate your firewire port." Now I'm happy. I'm thinking I can playback the Mitsubishi through the cable box, and from the cable box to the TV. I just need to find out how to switch the input on the cable box from cable tv to the firewire input from the Mitsubishi. So I'm thinking it's all going to be taken care of.
Well, the technician comes, and all he wants to do is swap out my cable box for a different one. He said they can't do anything to modify the cable boxes from the way they receive them from the factory. He said you can't switch inputs or run any external devices through the cable box. He gives me a RNG110 high definition digital set top and bids me farewell.
I call comcast back and tell them that the guy they sent out didn't accomplish anything that I was told he was going to accomplish. THIS time, the guy from comcast tells me that they don't activate the firewire ports because "they don't use them." What? I argue with him saying it was their guy who set up the appointment with the technician and told me they could accomplish what I needed. He just kept saying "we don't use them." I asked him about the FCC law, and he didn't know what I was talking about. I wanted to throw my phone against the wall. These people have no interest in helping their customers. If they can't figure something out, they come up with such BS I swear, they must be non-skilled minimum wage earning employees. It was really frustrating. So I hung up on him and haven't dealt with comcast since.
However, I did access the menu for the RNG100 set top box, and, under connections, the IEEE 1394 was again listed as NOT ENABLED. But, the funny thing is it is seeing the Mitsubishi because it listed the Mitsubishi HM-HD2000U as a device that was connected to it. And I think the Mitsubishi was seeing the set top box, because it comes up as d3 tuner under the IEEE 1394 connections (It was the 3rd tuner I hooked up).
That is where I left off. I realized I needed a way to connect the Mitsubishi output to an input on my TV because I can't do it through a Comcast cable box. That is why I signed up for this forum. I need a way to play back so I can test whether the recording worked or not.
