Comcast to offer Moxi Media Center!!! - Page 3  

Based on what Digeo is trying to do ... I don't think that's likely untill the two-way / bidirectional CableCard agreement is finalized / implemented.

Of course I could be wrong ... it's happened before. :)

Stopped by the local office over lunch today and asked to play with the Digeo box. After a getting a puzzled look the lady behind the counter finally handed over the remote and made me endure her clumsy 5 minute fumbling with the remote before I could play with it on my own. She was just trying to help but I wish they'd realize that pretty much any average guy off the street will be more adept with this stuff than the receptionists, even if they've had training. ;)

Anyway, I've never used Tivo or any other DVR so I have no basis for comparison but it looks to have most of the features I hear about Tivo having. I also obvously couldn't give it a real rigorous workout in 10 minutes, nor could I tell what features would really grow on me or annoy me over time. But I'll give my first impressions:

Good

1) All the main features are there: pause/rew/FF live TV, scheduled recordings (both single episode and "whole series" options), set recording options like when to start/stop (on time, 1 minute before, 1 minute after, etc.), how long to keep recordings (options I saw were 2 Days, until I watch, until space is needed, and until I delete).

2) Guide is nice looking, fairly easy to navigate, and fast enough that I wasn't annoyed. But not everything about the guide is perfect and I'm not sure it wouldn't get annoying if I had to use it daily. More on that later...

The untested

1) I didn't try out the 2-tuner ability, mostly because I forgot. I presume however it's reserved for recording something in the background. So if I would have started a timed recording, I can still pause live TV. I don't know if you can do two simultaneous timed recordings, forfeiting the ability to pause live TV or not.

2) Because I didn't do any timed recordings, I never got a chance to try and start a timed recording so I never saw that menu. I don't know if there's "one-touch" access to them or if you have to go through the guide menu, which would be annoying.

3) I didn't tear it off the shelf to examine the back panel, because I thought that would be rude. ;) I didn't see that info on the website at all so I would have liked to have gotten a look.

Bad

1) My biggest complaint is the guide doesn't use screen real estate very effectively and it's too hierarchical, i.e. too many "clicks" to record a show or see info about the show. My parents have an old RCA SD DirecTV receiver and it has a nice clean guide with most of the screen being a grid so you can see 5 or 6 channels at once and at least 2 hours into the future. This guide is one channel at a time on a rolling menu on the left of the screen. When a channel is selected a sub menu pops up with future shows on but it's pretty tiny so I don't think you can see the whole title of the show. There's another box with the start of a description of the show I think. Then when you hit select a bigger window comes up with a multipage description, or you can go the record sub-menu. It wasn't bad while I was standing there but the more I think about it the more I'm sure it would get annoying. It's possible there's a grid display but if there was it's non-intuitive getting to it. The moxi overview page shows the guide pretty well: http://www.digeo.com/prodserv/moxi_overview.jsp

2) Channel changing is slower than my Moto 6200, which I think has a reasonable channel changing speed. It was slow enough that a couple of times I wasn't sure the remote was working. The guide was not nearly that sluggish. I only flipped through the HD channels though, I don't know if SD channel changes are quicker.

Sorry this isn't much of a preview and most of it is already known but I only had a few minutes and I've never used a DVR before. It's still too expensive to justify getting it and I did ask and of course they insist on an install so I doubt I'll take one of these home. All in all I expect it's a huge step over the Moto or SA DVR solutions, but it's not quite as clean as Tivo is yet.

I'll entertain questions if anyone has any.

Thanks dfriend! Great report.

Did the box you try have a built-in DVD player? Did you try any of the find or keyword features? Did they have the second TV functionality on display? Did the remote look like the picture attached, with the skip ahead (30-second skip for delayed/recorded programming) button?

Do you own a digital camera? If so, you could stop by and take some high resolution photos (of all the main screens, record options) in the next week or two?

One of the important metrics for me is how fast a PVR can skip over commercials. They may have 30 second or other skip features but what I really prefer is multiple speeds of fast forward. The fastest FF on my Tivo is 60x which means I can fast forward an hour show in only a minute. I've long been concerned that when cable releases PVR's they may give in to pressure to limit this to 2-3x speeds. Did they?

- Tom

The box they had was not the DVD-player version (at least it didn't appear to be although the tray could have been hidden... she didn't mention it), nor did they mention the 2nd TV option and I didn't ask I'm afraid. I meant to.

I checked the find features out briefly. It came up very slowly because it generated an alphabetized list of programs and put that up on the left, and then there was a search panel on the right. The search panel was just a grid of letters and numbers that you navigated and selected to spell out the first few characters of what you wanted to search for.

That is the remote they had, but I didn't try the skip button. I only paused for a few seconds to verify that it worked and could ff/rew so I didn't think to try it. The ff/rew was pretty fast, so fast I didn't even get a chance to see if there were more speeds.

Based on the specs posted earlier, it doesn't appear that the DVD-enabled version (BMC 9022D) will be available until Q3 2004. Also of interest from the specs, it appears that even with dual tuners, you can't watch a pre-recorded show while still recording two additional shows in the background (the spec says "Watch one live show while recording another, or record two shows at once")

Questions I have:

- How smart is it at recording shows? If there is a conflict when the show is on at 5pm, will it notice the same show is repeated at 8pm and record it then (ala Tivo)?
- Can it differentiate between first run and repeats (ie, don't record repeats)?
- Can it group recordings (all Simpsons recordings in one Simpson's group, etc)?
- Can it filter on attributes, such as HD, Dolby 5.1, Widescreen, etc?
- Any Picture-in-Picture?

Defintely interesting....

I picked up mine at the local office, too, even though the nimrod CSR I talked to on the phone insisted that I had to have a tech come to my house. I'm glad I took the initiative to go to the office-- they had plenty in stock and the whole transaction took about 5 minutes. Of course, I had to make about 6 phonecalls before they got all the HD channels activated correctly...

Funny you should mention that. When I plugged in the Pace 550 my TV worked for a bit then my Internet connection went down. Called Comcast Internet support and they couldn't figure it out. I could ping and traceroute but I could not surf. Then my TV went down. Immediately the Internet CSR washed his hands of my problem saying that if there was a TV problem my Internet would not work. I then called TV tech support. Got someone who didn't know much (surprise). She said I would not have TV until someone came out the next day - again a 4 hour window. I threw my phone, grabbed a beer and walked outside.

Calmed down after a bit and called Comcast back. Got a CSR that actually knew something this time! She said it was basic. They crossed up my accounts with the new serial number on the STB. Within 2 minutes she had my TV and my Internet working again. I did enjoy that hour with the neighbor and my beer(s) though. Guess I don't always need a TV or a PC to be entertained :p

I tried the same thing today. I was by a Comcast office, so I walked in and up to the counter and asked the lady "What does Moxi mean to you?" She smiled and said that they were going to set up a demo soon, but that was all she knew. That was a better response than I thought I'd get :p

I called Comcast South Jersey today and the CSR didn't know about Moxi. He did say they were having a meeting later and he'd bring it up.

At least he was aware they are planning on offering us the SA8000HD in a month or so ("They keep pushing it back, though").

Moxi sounds great.

Digeo posted a new video demo of the Moxi on their web site. Direct link is right here.

They don't show the recording options in this one, but you can see the UI and navigation.

Anyone running the Moxi on a 92" + Diagonal screen with projector? If so, did you notice a difference in picture quality from your previous cable box?

The one I saw did not have near the picture quality of the moto 6200 on the same system.

Thanks

Someone in another thread said that SoCal was going to be the region to test the Moxi System. Anyone have anything on this?

Yeah, please if anyone has any info on this, let us know!

Socal the test bed? Naww, not a chance in hell, we get everything late. I'm just happy we got the 6208 reasonably quick.

-- Rob

Does anyone know if Comcast will be offering the Moxi to it's Scientific Atlanta customers?

I just caught up with this thread.....And the real question on my mind after looking through all of the pics and videos and whatnot is: Does this thing actually have a clock on the front? And if that's what it is, can you force it to flash 12:00?? DVRs will need to accomodate this feature if they will ever truly replace VCRs :D

Boy, that's a good question. I wonder if we'll be stuck with the 8000HD?

Perhaps they could convince Diego to build another model for us if this one won't work with our systems. Goodness knows the SA boxes are rife with problems - digital audio dropouts, clunky interfaces, inability to remember programs to be recorded - the list goes on. Now you've got me concerned, as I was really looking forward to Moxi.

Hi all,

What can I do with the USB and Ethernet connections on a Moxi? Will I be able to network to my PC and archive recordings on it? Will I be able to play movies that are stored on my PC?

Thanks,
Kirk

It is my understanding that the USB will be used to attach a MOXI formatted hard drive for expansion purposes. Supposedly we will not be able to hook up to your computer.

The Ethernet will be for the internal cable modem.

No cable box is ever going to let you save 5C HD recordings to your PC until Microsoft et al develop protected storage for digital content. That's probably two years away, maybe three.

Moxi has already announced a USB 2.0 add-on with a DVD drive / DVD writer and hard drive expansion.

That link didn't seem to mention anything about a DVD writer, just a DVD drive to enhance watching movies.:confused:

John,

Look at the Moxi Plus datasheet for info on the DVD writer option.

...because they are big and can afford to do so.

They are also deploying MSTV 1.7, which looks very nice:

http://www.microsoft.com/tv/content/...sReleases.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/tv/default.mspx

Regardless it seems the days of suffering under the Gemstart/TVGuide tyrany will soon be over. I just hope we have a choice among all of these emerging solutions.

I do know this: TiVO and Replay are hosed if they don't license their bits to others or deploy OpenCable solutions.

Just got off the phone with Comcast (CSR Tim) in Fort Myers. He said they are having meetings next week about the roll out of new High-Def DVR's :P Said he'd give me a call. What do you think - will it be a Moxi? Fingers crossed!!!

The answer will be "No."

Your cable box is a Pace, so I would think your system is based on Scientific Atlanta head end technology. If so, your HD DVR would be an SA 8000 HD or 8010 HD.

OK, thanks for the info. So Moxi won't be doing any SA headends?

Moxi can do SA headends, but I think all the boxes Comcast ordered were Motorola boxes. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Comcast only ordered 40,000 boxes, so even if you are on a Motorola head end, the probability is still fairly low that you will see one of those 40,000.

Of course, Comcast probably will order more in the future, assuming the first batch work well, but who know when those will eventually make it to the customer.

Sonoma,

That's correct, and it's unfortunate. It doesn't make much sense either. For Motorola systems, Comcast at least has the choice of the more modern Microsoft DVR platform. It appears that Comcast customers on Scientific Atlanta systems will have no choice except the SA8xxx DVR software for the next year.

By year's end Comcast will launch the Motorola BMC family STB with Moxi in the Portland, Oregon area.