Cleveland, OH - TWC - Page 779

This statement is hilarious. Adelphia didn't use SDV, how can you use that as a comparison???

Let me elaborate on this. At the time Adelphia was around we had only the basic local channels on HD and there was their HD tier which at the time has USA HD. That's all there was back then.

The digital channels may have been clear then, quite honestly I don't remember. But IF Adelphia had stayed believe me, they would have adopted the same policy on recording digital channels as TWC.

I guess if someone has WOW maybe they can speak on their policy for digital copying. I don't know what other cable companies do to be honest, but you can't say that made Adelphia better then TWC.
Edited by hookbill - 4/12/13 at 3:14pm

Looking for Cathode Kid. In your opinion if a hard drive is starting to go bad, do you think that would cause an issue with receiving SDV channels?

I got TWC coming out with a new cable card for me on Sunday, but I'm also seeing signs that probably my eSata is going out. This would all be on my TiVo, of course.

Well, my appointment for 3-4 pm is a no go. They did call though and told me that the tech had an accident. I don't know if I believe that, but there is someone suppose to come out now between now and 6 pm. They gave me a $20.00 refund.

I called it in, and they scheduled a service call. The next day, everthing was fine, but when I got the robo call I told them to come anyway.

The tech showed up today, an hour early. Fortunately, it was acting up while he was here. He replaced the line from the pole to the house. Hopefully that took care of it.

The hard drive buffers all channels being viewed, SDV or linear. A failing drive would therefore affect all channels, even the analog ones. I think your problem is related to S/N ratio - forward and return - and bit error rate.

The context of my comment is what mattered to me. "As a mythtv user." Where I live, during the Adelphia days, I got the following channels via clear QAM: USA, TNT, TBS, STO and NFL. The bulk of the rest of the digital channels were set to copy freely, so with creativity and resourcefulness, one could pipe them quite easily into their whole house DVR (mythtv) system .. in 2005/06 or whenever that was.

I get the upside of SDV, that's fine & the extra HD are nice. But SDV doesn't necessitate restrictive copy policies. The fact is that many of the other large cable systems have much more reasonable polices on this than TWC. Cox & Comcast to name 2. Certainly it's presumptive to declare what Adelphia would or wouldn't have done 7 years later.

Now, with TWC, we get only the locals in clear QAM, and every single other thing is copy once, which changes the hardware requirements from a 3 channel $170 tuner that uses CableCard, to needing to encode off of a set-top-box one channel at a time.

This doesn't even factor in the steadily rising cost of having no premiums or special services, and the now frequent periods when an OTA QAM channel becomes unavailable, like it is again tonight (WKYC & WUAB).

The notion that TWC would be considered better than anything is hilarious to me.

I have to agree on all of this. Coming from playing with Firewire capture (which follows the same copy protection flags as cablecard tuners) on TWC many moons ago, it always seemed like they had absolutely no clue what they were doing. From day to day the copy protection on channels seemed to change like the wind direction. Sometimes I would get lucky and get some of the primetime busy cable networks (TNT, USA, etc) and others they'd be inaccessible. Could never count on it and you'd be lucky to get anywhere with convincing TWC to fix it. I remember running through trying every channel over Firewire and the CCI flagging was random at best. Not to mention Navigator made FW capture horrible to begin with. Bogged down the STB so bad that the resulting capture was glitchy as all get out. Do a fresh reboot and capture right away and it would clear up temporarily til Navigator hogged every last bit of resources it could.

Where I am currently at I have WOW and chose them over Insight and AT&T namely because of the copy protection setup they have going. First off they are all digital and all basic SD's and OTA HD's are ClearQAM with officially published channel numbers in their own channel listing PDF. And there are no future plans to encrypt these and require DTA's. For CableCard tuners, Every channel but the premium movie channels (Starz, HBO, Showtime, etc) are Copy Freely unless otherwise demanded by the channel owners (And as far as I can tell from other customers as I don't have a cablecard tuner yet, it is batting a thousand on being wide open) so you can do what you wish with the recordings and open source software has no issues tuning and recording said channels.

So WOW may not have the best channel lineup or be the cheapest (when you take promos from other providers into account), but they lay everything out in black and white so you know exactly what you are getting.

All I can say is WOW. It's very difficult for me to explain how awesome that type of access would be. It would help me simplify, yet expand my current setup so much I can imagine. Congratulations, I'm jealous.

Has anyone tried TWC using their Roku player? It is available on Roku.

For me, I get 164 channels, many in HD. No local channels. Oddly however ESPN is not available. ESPN News is. I just don't understand that.

Reason I ask is my TiVo is recording 2 programs and I want to watch the ball game live on ESPN. Fortunately I was able to move a recording to a different time, but that's one of the reasons I imagined the Roku with TWC to be a bonus.

First opportunity I've had to use it, and I can't. Oh well.

What do you mean "it is available on Roku"? TWC is not on a Roku. Roku has it's own (quite extensive) selection of apps and online streaming ch's, some are free, some are paid subscriptions. Roku will work with any high speed internet service.

I'll assume that either you don't have a Roku player, or you didn't get the email.

Roku has a variety of channels for you to choose from. Recently Time Warner Cable became one of those channels.

Now that doesn't give you free TWC, it's just an app more or less. Just like the ones you get for your mobile phone or iPad. But maybe not quite as good. I could be wrong about that I only looked for ESPN last night.

So you download the TWC channel on to your Roku, you enter your user name and pass word just like you were logging into My Services on line. TWC allows you to access most of the channels that are on your subscription, i.e. I have Showtime and HBO so I can get to those. Local channels are not available so you can't watch WOIO, WJW, etc.

CNN HD, most of the big channels, I saw SyFy, and a whole lot more. All in all it allows ME to access 164 channels, including the music channels. YMMV as it depends upon what is in your TWC package.

It doesn't mean you don't have to purchase digital cable. You still need that. For me however it allows me another tuner if I have two recordings being recorded on my TiVo DVR.

I believe it will allow you to access some On Demand like HBO, Showtime. I don't know if the other channels are all live or not. CNNHD was live. ESPN however was not available except for some odd reason ESPN NEWS HD WAS. I know ScyFy is a SDV channel and I saw that so apparently SDV does not apply when using this channel on Roku.

I hope I've explained it well. If you have any other questions, ask and I will take a look and see if I can answer them. So in a nutshell, Roku provides a TWC channel so you can acces Time Warner Cable. If you pay for TWC.

I've had a Roku for over a year and have installed several others for neighbors/friends/relatives. But I did not know that TWC had an app/ch for Roku. Interesting. I don't use TWC at all. Been a WOW customer for years, just recently upgraded to U-Verse.

Most use Roku as an alternative to cable/sat so it seemed counter intuitive to have a cable ch (both for the consumer and the cable co). Often internet streaming of content is a completely different licensing and has it's own restrictions. This is especially true for the sports ch's like ESPN, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc... This is why many sports radio broadcasts like a live Indians game you can get via local AM/FM radio but are not allowed to be streamed online from that same radio station. I'm guessing that might be why you are seeing a difference in programing between ch's on TWC TV service and what is available via TWC internet app/ch on a Roku, but just a guess.

I'm not getting notifications by email on a consistent basis from AVS, matter of fact I seem to get them less frequently since they went to this format.

Fortunately for me it turned out not to have anything to do with the cable cards or the hard drive. The tuner adapter was the issue.

Now from my point of view the tuner adapter was working fine. My TiVo diagnostic screen for the tuner adapter showed that the tuner adapter was connected and channel list had been received. It also showed a solid steady green light.

But when the tech came out he called into somewhere in TWC, I don't know if it was cable card support or not, and they apparently spotted something wrong. He powered down the T.A. under there instructions (I sat there biting my lip, wanting to jump in and say something) and then had me look at the card diagnostic screen. He gave them some read outs, they made some adjustments, he powered up the tuner adapter. The green light stopped flashing after a bit and he told me to check out the problem channels, which were all SDV.

To my amazement when I went to live TV it did not show that it was downloading channel info. When I went to a couple of the SDV channels that were having the issue, they were now accessible.

To be honest, I don't know why this needed a truck roll. The tech had absolutely no idea about what was wrong and only the people who he talked to did. He just relayed instructions on what to tune the TiVo to with the remote, and whatever was wrong was cleared up by I believe Cable Card Services.

The reason I thought that my eSATA might be going bad was the fact that the guide was loading slow. After they fixed the issue with the TA, the guide was back up to full speed.

In other words, I don't know half as much as I think I do. :embarrassed: I'm just glad it works now.

You probably are correct. There was one channel called TWC Sports (out of market) and I'm not sure what they had on there exactly, but whatever it was the name speaks for itself. I don't quite understand why they wouldn't have ESPN. In MLB ESPN does not black out local sports BUT it does black out subscription channels. For example, I have the MLB.TV subscription for my Roku, iPhone, and iPad and I cannot get a game that is shown on ESPN. You have to tune to ESPN to see those games, no way around it.

I think TWC is the only cable provider that has a channel on Roku. Comcrap doesn't, and you and I both know WOW doesn't. Like I said in my previous post, I simply see it as another tuner. Remember the cop manhunt a month or two back? I was really into it and had recordings coming on my TiVo. I cancelled a couple of recordings so I could stay on CNNHD. Had I had TWC on Roku, I wouldn't have missed those shows. Since they were broadcast networks shows I was not able to move the recording time, like I would with something like TNTHD, or USAHD which shows the same show at many different times and days.

So it's not something I will use on a regular basis, but from time to time it may come in handy. And it's free, with my TWC subscription so why not?

Toby, there is a TWC app that will install on a Roku and will play many TWC channels through a TV that isn't connected to a TWC cable box. However, you must be a TWC subscriber and the Roku must be connected to a TWC cable modem. I tried it yesterday; it works fine. Along similar lines, there is an HBO GO app that will let you watch HBO On-Demand content through the Roku; you must be an HBO subscriber through certain cable providers.

All kinds of channels now have apps for their shows. I believe ScyFy has one, and I know for a fact Showtime does. However, you cannot use the Showtime App with TWC. At least not the last time I checked.

That's really not a big deal however, since the TWC app for iPad and iPhone allows you access to On Demand you can still see Showtime programming, provided you have it as part of your TWC package.

I believe it's due to ESPN/ESPN2 being a part of watchESPN, and them(Disney) wanting to be the only ones doing the streaming.


On another note, still waiting for beIN sports, and the PAC12 network in HD, It's sad I can get all of the PAC 12 channels online, on the twc app, and the PAC 12 site, but not on the cable box that I'm being raped for.

Roku has several models , any recommendations ?

I wish I could help, I bought the Roku 2 because it seemed to give me everything I wanted in HD quality and used an HDMI cord. It was also price right.

To be honest, if I had to do it all over again I probably would have done Apple TV. The sound quality that comes from my Boes Soundbar compared to regular television is not that great when I use Stereo only programs. Anything in Dolby 5.1 however is fine

And if you want TWC, I'm not certain that Apple offers it. Apple is more expensive as well.

Roku is currently in the middle, well actually behind of sending out new a new i.e. to all it's current models. Their newest models come with the latest i.e. Go to Roku's home page and check out for yourself the difference in price and what each device has to offer. I think they all offer the same programming.

Compare all four models, $49 to $99.
http://www.roku.com/roku-products

Looks like the Roku 2 XS I bought has been replaced by the Roku 3. Features all look the same to me except the new Roku 3 now says:
- "HDTV's only" (not really sure what that means, maybe it won't output in 480? The XS does)
- added headphone jack to remote (nothing I'd use)
- added dual band WiFi (dunno if that was on the XS or not, not needed by me)

Poke around the net as you can often get the $79 or $99 Roku's for $20 off depending on current deals and the retailer. I got the $99 XS for $79 on Amazon last year.

Yes, all programming is the same for all Roku players.

Many thanks, seems like an alternative to a cable box (one time charge, no rental fee, no wires with WiFi)
I have Apple TV on a set, very nice , especially if you have apple devices.
No HBO GO (yet, I hear June) I use for Netflix and airplay from Apple devices.
Quality is good, user the TOS video to my sound system , no complaints.

Roku seems to have more content available

We're very happy with the Apple TV. ITunes in the cloud is great. Plus iCloud for your iPhone's photos is great. Interface is really easy even for the kids to use. I love airplay with our iPad and iPhone. I suspect Apple will be adding lots of new features and channels with iOS 7 next month.

I'm seriously close to cutting the cord on basic cable. Hoping Aereo enters Cleveland soon.