Los Angeles, CA - TWC - Page 255

I travel for work sometimes, and the hotels where I stay usually have either DISH or DirecTV. While admittedly not scientific in nature, empirically the images are even more compressed on sat than on TW.

I see much more macroblocking watching sat on a 42" screen about 15 feet away in a hotel room than I do watching TW on a 70" screen 11 feet away.

And I admit, I'm addicted to the TiVo feature set. Have been for almost a decade. I have yet to see any alternative boxes that come even close to the four year old HD Series 3 TiVos I own.

I have to say, though, that the description of the Ceton card, WMC, and the capabilities of a homebrew setup are intriguing.

Ok. I concede. There's no question TWC is re-compressing all local OTA network feeds. They're especially doing a number on KCBS-DT, which is unfortunate because that's the highest quality highest bitrate HD channel we have... with no sub-channels.

Fortunately, now that I know this and having both an ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI card for OTA ATSC network programs as well as the Ceton card for cable channels, I am going to use the ATI card whenever I can.

Tonight's data points:

(1) NBC - "SNL - A Very Gilly Christmas"

4.1 - 12.454GB, 13.184 Mbps bitrate
404 - 10.746GB, 11.380 Mbps bitrate

(2) ABC - "Skating With The Stars"

7.1 - 5.962GB, 12.534 Mbps bitrate
407 - 5.291GB, 11.300 Mbps bitrate

(3) CBS - "Late Show With David Letterman"

2.1 - 7.477GB, 15.211 Mbps bitrate
402 - 4.77GB, 9.705 Mbps bitrate

Would you possibly still have the name of that (clearly competent) tech? I'm in Westchester, so I'm thinking we might actually be in the same service area.

The contractors TW sent out to install an M-card in my new Tivo Premiere not only didn't make any effort to contact TW when the card didn't sync, but they knocked my other perfectly working TivoHD, also with an M-card, out of sync so now I'm not getting anything but the OTA channels. So neither is working properly now. That was yesterday.

So, tonight they had the nerve to tell my that the new Tivo is simply not compatible with the M-cards they use, when everything I've read seems to indicate otherwise. Finally, they said they needed to roll a truck again later to fix the TivoHD, which was working perfectly before they arrived.

Of course, by the time they left my house, it was too late for local TW support to call their National Cable Card Support Desk who CAN actually reset the cards.

I don't understand, is this suppose to be surprising? Is there a Sat/Cable provider that doesn't re-compress local OTA feeds?

Not any more.

But when I first subscribed to TW almost 3 years ago, they were passing along the transport stream exactly the way they got it. OTA channels looked the same whether through an antenna or on TW.

Then they started adding HD channels, and bandwidth became an issue.

They still have quite a way to go before they degrade to the quality of every single "HD" streaming service I've seen so far, however. Those are a real joke when it comes to quality, and I suppose that's what they view as their long-term competition, and probably rightly so.

So one of the three lines coming into my place is with TW, the other two with AT&T.

On the morning of Tuesday the 21st, I woke up to discover that one of the AT&T lines and the TW line were both down. The AT&T line has been going down during heavy rain for years - apparently there's some bunker that eventually fills up with water, and the line gets very noisy and eventually just dies. It has been impossible to get them to fix it, as by the time they show up, the bunker has drained, and the line is back to normal.

So I call TW to report the line down. The CS rep has me reboot the modem a couple of times, and when that doesn't work, he gives me an appointment for between 5 and 7 PM the same day. The guy shows up, runs a couple of tests, decides the modem is bad, swaps it out, and everything comes back to life.

Then I call AT&T, and after more than fifteen minutes in voicemail hell, I am offered an appointment on January 4, 2011. That's right - a BUSINESS line I'm paying extra money for has gone down, and the soonest they can deal with it is TWO WEEKS.

I used to think that keeping a copper line ensured stability and quick service, but no more. AT&T is doing everything they can to make me go elsewhere for the rest of my phone service.

I ran into this issue a lot when I lived in Woodland Hills. TWC re-encodes all of the local channels, at least for people served by the Chattsworth head-end. Many times KNBC, KTLA, and KABC would have similar files sizes from TWC verses OTA. But, since the signal had been re-encoded, there was a very visible reduction in PQ. And the unfortunate thing about KABC (aside from that it was very difficult to receive OTA after the transition) is that it has such a low bit rate to begin with. While ABC may have spent a lot of money buying an encoder that can produce a good picture at such a low bitrate, TWC just destroys the PQ of the channel only to save 1 mbps (and sometimes TWC's re-encode would use up more space than the OTA signal!).

Oh and KTTV would always be reduced from 15 to 8 mbps. A show has better PQ off iTunes than watching it on TWC.

Needless to say I am very glad to be rid of TWC where I live now! Cox has amazing PQ even on the expanded basic cable HD channels.

Totally OT: anyone else in Los Feliz area having connection problems with AT&T mobile service? Going on 2 days now.

I'm @ Griffith park & Hyperion (Tracy). There's a cell tower that's been offline for 2 days now. I don't know where it's located exactly, but around Gelsons, trader joes and rowena you won't get service. If you go down hyperion towards sunset you will get service towards casita del campo. I also managed to barely get service at the Coffee table.

You must be near me, on the other side of hyperion (near Marshall?).

Yeah it sucks.

@fleaman: yep, I'm at Griffith Park and St. George (across from Marshall's field). Went down to Gelsen's this morning to try. Now I see why I got nothing.

Don't have a land line anymore and had to make some calls, so I ended up in the park on the way to the Equestrian Center and got a connection. Tried 611, but only got a canned response -- the same one that's on the website. In fact they won't even connect you to a real person for more detail. The bass-tids ...

If it's not one thing, it's another!

I bet the farm on TWC's tripleplay, including phone. So now I lose my land line if there's an Internet outage!

Fortunately, I also have a cell phone. But since TWC doesn't have "remote call forwarding" (something I've only seen offered as a custom calling feature in Dallas, via SW Bell, many years ago) I cannot get calls automatically forwarded from my land line number to my cell phone during the outage. I have to manually call-forward from a phone in my house, but when there's an outage I can't do that of course... so when there's an outage nobody can reach me (unless they know my cell phone number too, which very few people do). Plus, very often, the whole system is kerflooey, so incoming callers can't even leave a message on voice mail... because it's not working. Or, I can't pick up messages from voice mail (when calling from my cell phone)... because it's not working.

So... what do you do? Ditch the land line and go all-cell, and risk your current story? Or keep the land line and go with a real phone company (instead of TWC), to kind of "spread the risk" and minimize your exposure from an outage of some kind? Or do you also have a "basic" emergency second phone service from the "other" provider, to virtually guarantee you'll always have service?

Apparently, putting all your eggs in one basket in this modern world is NOT a reliable solution, no matter how many pennies it saves you.

@DSperber; Have you tried Google Voice? Check it out here: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html#

I have a land line with DSL, my total cost for that is about $47 a month. I only have the 1.5mb DSL service (it's about $28), and my land line (that I rarely use). I took off the flat rate (so it's measured rate), and both of them together w/taxes and all come to $47 a month, both AT&T.

Then have a separate AT&T cell phone (different account).

+ TWC for TV (that's about $70 a month with DVR).

Going 'All in' with AT&T or TWC wouldn't save me any $$$ over what I have now, plus I have the security of having a land line when I need it (especially for emergencies---earthquakes, etc.).

Does anyone have TWC movie pass and/or sports pass? Are there any HD channels included? i know the TWC movie pass includes Encore, however, i don't believe TWC carries Encore in HD. I only watch HD channels.

I wasn't aware of an option named "Turbo Plus".

I do pay for "Turbo", but had never heard of yet a higher speed "Turbo Plus" (unless this is just that very nice terminal server feature they have which boots speeds dramatically early in the download, but eventually throttles down to your paid-for speed if you have a long, big download).

Anyway, just ran a speed test and was quite astonished:

28.6Mbps download
1.92Mbps upload

This is on a Saturday (Xmas day) at 4:30PM. Very surprising.

Do you suspect that their listing is not accurate?

http://www.timewarnercable.com/SoCal...ashx?linkid=37

I have Turbo as well and do a lot of large file downloads. What I see from my newsreader is an initial speed of ~24-25Mbps to start which always drops down to the expected 15-16Mbps after about 5 sec. I have always assumed this had more to do with filling a cache than any kind of "boost."

For a giggle I went to Speedtest.net and ran the test 3 times. My averages were similar to yours:

26.72 down
1.80 up

Perhaps, if the test lasted longer, the speed would level off at ~15Mbps.

No, I think this is actually intentional. I forget what their brand name is for this TWC feature, but it's relatively new (i.e. implemented in the past year or two around the country) and actually DOES provide a faster "initial thrust", providing short downloads at pretty remarkable speeds. That's the design.

Now the point at which the throttle kicks in and reduces speed back to what you're entitled to may actually be cache-filling as you speculate, or simply based on a number of bytes provided at that speed, or perhaps some other algorithm. Because eventually, no downloads start off at that higher speed any longer... they're all now back to "normal".

I believe it actually is called "Turbo Boost". Actually this may be an advantage to their infrastructure, getting traffic out of the way quicker with this faster delivery to prevent "congestion".

Yep. Me too. Seems it's more dependent on file size than anything else. Right around the first 5 megabyte mark, my speed drops from around 35Mb to around 15Mb every time.

What I don't understand is when I download headers ( which can be upwards to 2-3 gigs ), the speed ( as indicated by the newsreader software ) is 60-70 Mbps, and remains there until they are all collected. This is the only time I see speeds like this. Maybe as you suggest it has to do with size of the files.

Some newsreaders compress headers if the news server allows for that (Forte Agent talking to Giganews, for example).

The speeds they show you internally are how fast you would be going if you were downloading the number of headers you're getting but at an uncompressed rate. So they're bragging, and the numbers are artificially high.

^^^^^ Aha! So that's it. Never thought those speeds could be an accurate assessment.

Actually they do, its an online service where you can set and change your call forward number. Find it at Time Warner Cable - MyServices https://myservices.timewarnercable.com/ in the phone area after you log in.

I didn't know that. Thank you very much for the tip.

I just spent 10 minutes trying to get into that MyServices interface, but it must have been built by 5-year old rookie programmers. Doesn't seem to run with Firefox, and even with IE the login/newaccount dialog failed to complete after waiting 5 minutes. "Sorry, our system doesn't seem to be working. Please try again later".

So, I'll give it another chance later. This is apparently a totally different sub-system from the PayExpress online billing system, though I don't know why it should be. I'm a customer/client, and their system should handle ME, and everything about me.

Oh well. I'm actually very excited to learn that they really DO have a feature I'm looking for... even if it's an online service.

Too bad their CSR's apparently don't know anything about it, and (like I did) think that "call forwarding" is just an old-fashioned manual phone service and must be done manually with *72 and only from your home phone. I can't tell you how many times I've asked for "remote call forwarding" (in Dallas SW Bell it was facilitated by calling an 800-number from any phone, and entering your home phone account login details, and then providing the new phone number for forwarding) and gotten "oh, we don't have that" as the response.

Ok... eventually, my first-time registration/login got handled. So eventually I was able to go to the above link and actually log in.

However the whole site does NOT appear to be compatible with Firefox. You must use IE. (EDIT: apparently, this may not be true)

Furthermore, it's not obvious from any "search" or FAQ or how-to or anything, that this "remote call forwarding" feature (as I call it) actually exists. All that ever appears, no matter what you look for (and even if you chat with the idiot CSRs in the TWC chat room) is reference to *72/*73 and this manual from-home-phone call forwarding control.

But, as it turns out, you are absolutely correct!!! Once you're logged into MyServices for your account (through IE), if you click on the MyHomePhone tab, and then click on the "getting started" link in the VoiceZone area on the page, you will quickly be taken to a "getting started wizard" of sorts which is really a HELP page.

If instead, you push the "Go to VoiceZone" button at the bottom of the VoiceZone area on the page, a second IE window will open and it will then take a few minutes to actually load, but you will eventually be sent to the very same place you were instantly at through the "getting started" link in the original window. This is the "summary" page of your settings for VoiceZone.

Anyway, it is apparently this whole amazing VoiceZone functionality which is where "remote call forwarding" via the Internet is buried. I never knew anything about this VoiceZone thing.

But as far as call-forwarding, you can genuinely set it on of off, conditional or unconditional, selective call forwarding, other special bells and whistles, and even set the call-forwarding number you want to be assigned... which is exactly what I've been looking for for years!!!

All from this fairly neat interface on the VoiceZone settings page.

Too bad no TWC CSRs are aware that VoiceZone even exists! Every time I've ever called asking about "remote call forwarding" (really, assuming it was going to be accessed by calling into an 800-number) I've always been met by silence, or NO.

And I've never seen any mailer from TWC advising of this feature and functionality. Who knew? As the title says... "VoiceZone: Control and monitor your home phone from anywhere".

EXCELLENT! (just use IE, not Firefox)


EDIT: note that from the URL links in this post, I can seem to get to the pages via Firefox. So maybe it will work that way too, not just with IE.

Also, the PayExpress site is linked to from the MyServices site, but is not the same site and requires its own separate login and password. Cumbersome.

Glad you liked it. Found out about it by reading their website. Best place to find out things about your services.

Payments are handled by the TWC third party billing software vendor Convergent (who also handles outsourced call centers) while the phone software solutions are from another vendor. Usual stuff for cable operators, who get their programming from the likes of HBO and Turner, their installers from a third party, and software from another vendor and resells it to you. Website is fairly well integrated, but it could be better.

Next step is controlling your DVR recordings from the web, that seems to be coming soon to TWC in SoCal... http://www.timewarnercable.com/corpo...mote-DVR-Manag

Had occasion to have another "spirited" phone conversation today with "The Chief Technical Manager" at KNBC in Burbank, regarding the very low audio level on the three NBC channels (4.1 OTA, 4 and 404 from TWC) as compared to every other local network in town, and even as compared to the other NBC family of cable channels.

As usual, he defended the setting at NBC as being "right on" per the ATSC A/85 standard and the CALM act, and it was the other networks which were NOT in compliance, and that I should really be calling them to complain. I protested, saying that every other channel (including the NBC cable channels) were "normal" to me, and I could change channels at will and never have to adjust my volume, until I tuned to any of the three NBC alternatives at which time I have to turn my volume up to near-max in order to hear at semi-normal loudness. And of course, then changing to another channel blasts me out of the room as I race to turn the volume back down.

Anyway, I got nowhere of course, but as usual our discussion was "spirited".

But most interestingly, he speculated regarding the other NBC-family channels which he'd thought should have also been at the NBC-corporate standard -23 dialnorm level (rather than the -27 which everybody else locally seems to be set at). So when I said that they were not "low" as NBC was, he thought that maybe TWC's delivery system was somehow involved in making them louder than they should have been.

I then told him "you do know that TWC is re-compressing your NBC feed, don't you?", to which he replied "no, they're not, or at least they're not supposed to per our agreement, or at least that's not what I was told they were doing".

I then provided him my story of the bitrate analysis research experiments I'd done back last week on recorded streams from all the local OTA channels vs. their TWC-delivered equivalents, including the real hatchet job done on KCBS dropping its OTA bitrate of 16.4Mbps down to about 11.5Mbps on 402. But KNBC and all the other channels also showed marked re-compression, just not as dramatic because of the sub-channels in use on the other networks and the already lowered bitrates across the board.

Anyway, he was very appreciative of this new and surprising (and unexpected) revelation and information, and promised he would call his counterpart over at TWC to find out what was really going on.

Again, I don't expect anything to come of this, but I did have to smile. At least there will be one very interesting phone call made between two opposing honchos on this topic, and I wish I could be a fly on the wall.

Regarding NBC low audio volume: I notice this mostly when I'm listening to my receiver with surround sound. While every other ch/network sends dialog and most of the main audio through the center channel, NBC does NOT. NBC seems to have no center channel information, dialog is sent to the LH/RH speakers. Put your ear up to the center speaker and switch between NBC and other stations. When switching channels w/surround sound, the audio volume drops quite a bit on my system when switching to NBC.

I do notice that the center channel seems to come into play on NBC when say watching a late night show (like Leno) and the guest band comes on to play, you can hear the center channel come into play.

But, when I'm just listening to my tv's onboard stereo speakers, the difference is negligible as everything is being downmixed in that case. I rarely turn on my surround sound when watching TV anyway, so I guess it doesn't bother me that much.

Yes, it is annoying the NBC seems to be strutting their own standard in this case, but what can you do....

Anyone know why "Playboy TV is pay per view and Playboy in spanish is Premium?