Time Warner Cable Navigator - Page 539

I guess TWC... or at least your division... no longer uses weather boots and silicone grease to prevent the corroded fittings. Are the F fittings at least the type with O-rings?

The other two things that really would concern me is the tightly cinched black ty-rap near on the drop cable near the bottom of the picture and the tight bend radius of the larger cable at the top right (near the blue tape/sleeve). The change in cable capacitance at either of those points can cause frequency response and return-loss/reflection issues, especially at higher frequencies.

Also, when the system was constructed the tap should have been reconfigured so that both the input and output feeds come straight out of the bottom of the tap. The 1/2" cable coming out of the tap thru port should have a minimum bend radius of about 4"... looks to be about 4" diameter, lol.

well tech came and went, couldn't do anything as i figured, he was gonna give me an 8742 but couldn't give up my 8640 yet, have to get thru some recordings as does the wife, so rescheduled someone to come late today, hopefully they'll have an 8742

Just replaced my 8300 with a Cisco 8742HDC. Can't get my external hard drive to work with it. Any suggestions?

That cable coming out of the top of the tap is flex feeder, no P3 or Qr cable could bend that tight. I agree that the picture has so many things wrong with it that it is even funny. Leakage detector would scream just being 100' with in that area.

Honestly, I could have cleaned up that mess, but as I explained to the customer that it's not my responsibilty and technically I'm really legally permitted to tamper with their taps. No one is going to reimburse me for any expenses and should something happen then I'd be liable. On top of that, why should I use my wire, connectors and equipment? I explained that the residents should take pictures and petition the local office to make it right. TWC is getting at least $1K a month from those people ((8 residents with double and triple play packages) so they should demand that TWC make it right.

I also noticed there was a run off feeder cable that was cut, but looked like it was patched because a critter gnawed on it. Some of the F Connectors were weather resistant, but almost all were indoor rated with no seals. I always use compression with O-Rings on ALL outside fittings. There was a mix of really old connections and RG-59 in there too.


You probably should have took the 8742 at the time and just added it as a second DVR until you got rid of the other. However, it should be noted that the 8742 has issues of it's own and all appear to be Navigator related. I'm confident that if things and Navigator development continue in the new direction that these issues will be addressed.

well we finished off the recordings and had a guy come back with an 8742, its setup now (had some issues getting it programmed into my harmony activity) seems ok so far, but damn that clock is huge and bright, its like blurry to look at it

Shouldn't have had to do anything with your Harmony remote

It works the same as others and mine was seamless.

Known issues with the 8742 at this point are:

1) De-Interlacing glitch where SD video is chopped up and blurry looking.

2) Audio dropouts where you lose sound altogether. A quick press of the jump back key will correct this.

These are both via my HDMI connections. Other system wide Navigator bugs/glitches still apply as well.

I've had my 8742 for over 5 months and don't have any of those issues,it's been flawless. I know it doesn't mean that others don't,just sayin'........

BTW; I know what he means about the clock display,I turned it off!

well when i removed my old 8640 from my devices and added my 8742, it didn't have some commands like the 8sec skip back command, had to manually learn it


but now i'm having a different problem, apparently with the 8742, if you select 'record series' instead of 'record series with options' it uses the option 'new and recurring episodes'

so i ended up having a couple conflicts because it wanted to try recording all episodes of mythbusters, conflicting with my recordings of american dad and family guy, it was making me cancel one of them to resolve which i did. then i went back and saw the 'new and recurring' that the box used, fixed that, removed the american dad and family guy schedules from the list, then went back and redid the recordings but it wont do it, it shows them in the series list but no longer highlights them red or shows pending recordings even though it did before....

How ya doing?

I don't think you can get the expander to work. It's been hit and miss with ODN Navigator, C-Models and Samsungs. What's the brand of the drive expander? I heard Western Digital is good, but it only works consistently with MDN. (No C, No Samsung,) boxes.

The 8742 gives you 500GB's of storage. Maybe you might want to consider a second DVR for more storage? You could call TWC and ask to be transferred to Customer Retentions, and get some kind of deal to get that second DVR fee reduced. What are you paying now?

Jack

So, I am getting WH-DVR installed on Monday. I understand this uses MOCA, and filters will be installed on my cable lines. Will these filters prevent me from also using Tivos with tuning adapters?

Thanks,
Ted

Will not affect Tivo at all, nor any other device that you may use for Cable TV.

The drive is an Iomega. It worked fine with my 8300HD. I do have a 2nd 8300 with another external drive, so I do split the recordings between both DVR's.

I believe that the filter will be installed at the cable entry to the house. Their purpose is to keep your MOCA signal from propagating out of your house (into your neighbor's houses).

Excellent. Thanks!

Cool. Hopefully the WH-DVR will be good enough I don't have to go the TiVo route, but my expectations are low. I would not have considered trying it if the deal to switch from DirecTV was not so good.

-Ted

That was your mistake. You shouldn't have touched the Harmony settings and left it as the 8640. The commands are the same for all TWC DVRs. When I checked, Logitech didn't even have the 8742 listed. I left my Harmony 900 alone and it just worked.

Yep... my Harmony still is programmed for an 8300HDC and has worked perfectly for subsequent Samsung and Cisco boxes that have been in that location. In fact, since I know that Harmony's 8300HDC database is complete and accurate, I have always programmed other Harmony remotes in the house and in friends/relatives houses using that model, regardless of what the box model actually is.

ah, live and learn i guess

In addition to the 4x FF there is also the 15 minute skip which is invoked by holding the FF button until it happens. The wierd thing about it though is it's more like a 15 minute "bookmark" than it is a skip; it will only jump to the next :00, :15, :30, or :45 point in the show. So if you do it from the very beginning then it'll go to 0:15, but if you're already at something like 0:27 then it'll go to 0:30. Thus if I need to skip a decent chunk of show I always have to think for a sec if 4x or +15 will be faster. If it were a true +15 it would be perfect for hockey intermissions, but unfortunately I can only use it when the break happens to start just after one of those increments so I get the majority of the jump. But it does work great for getting back to your place in a show, especially a 1hr, when Navigator decides to forget where you were.

My 2 older CRT TVs also got a filter to make sure they didn't introduce feedback into the system. In other the filters "filter" both ways

@Shotgun
Thanks for the 15 min ff tip. I had not known about that.

Back on the subject of unscheduled and unwanted recordings:
This weekend the DVR was recording like mad on Discovery HD. I don't remember all the series names, but the episode descriptions all indicated the DVR thought they were Mythbusters. The show title would be correct for whatever was actually recording, but the descriptions almost all said something about Mythbusters.

I got my 8472 WH-DVR and some kind of Samsung remote STB. I have to say the responsiveness of the menus and such is much better than the last 8460 DVRs I tried. The whole home functionality is just ok. Playback is fine, but FF/RW functionality could be much better. I do not get a progress bar when FF/RW. Instead, I get the channel banner for the currently tuned channel. This is problematic as I am not interested in what is currently tuned, but rather the status of the recorded program I am watching.

If I had never used DirecTV whole home or even Tivo transfers, I might not notice these little annoyances. But alas, I have, and I do. As soon as my WB promotion gets officially approved, I'll be going to get some cable cards, tuning adapters, and MOCA filters. I'll keep the WH service as that is the deal I got, but I will just use it as a backup recording in case I have Tuning Adapter problems.

-Ted

The weekend was relatively quiet (got a couple of repeat Deadliest Catch episodes)... but either Thursday or Friday of last week I got a bunch of "I Can't Believe I (Almost) Got Away With It" episodes that were correctly listed as such. I had never previously recorded a single episode of that show, so it was completely out of left field. Only the 8640 did this, not the WMC setup... although the WMC setup had its share of repeated Deadliest Catch episodes.

I have mentioned previously that I have been running my 8640 and WMC setups in parallel since Christmas to do a thorough comparison, and will likely end up dropping (soon) the 8640 DVR for a plain STB (to maintain VOD). One thing I had not mentioned is the whole house capabilities of the WMC setup. Admittedly it is limited to "Copy Freely" programming (broadcast programming mainly), but that is OK since the prime use seems to be for my wife and/or daughter to watch recordings Desperate Housewives, DWTS, Vampire Diaries and Secret Circle upstairs in the bonus room or for me to watch a show or two in down my office during lunch break. Watching programs remotely is absolutely an identical experience to watching the shows on the recording PC. Very neat.

To fix this, do a hard reboot of all your boxes. I had this issue and documented it in the Sig Home thread. A hard reboot (unplug wait 30 seconds and plug the boxes back in) solved the banner issue.

On a side note, I did go in and set priorities and let that Food Network Star conflict reported earlier run it's course and guess what? Navigator DID record the later 12AM showing on it's own! The issue is that it never removed the conflict from the list so a typical end user (or one who doesn't monitor their priorities) would always think there was an issue and probably do what my wife did: delete it without letting the conflict run its course. Thanks to jcalabria for the tips on it.

Glad to hear it worked for you. No doubt that it can be disconcerting if you aren't aware of what is going on (and even if somebody tells you but you haven't let it run its course to see for yourself). Current Discovery Channel curiosities aside, I have had at least four years of very reliable series recording and conflict resolution by setting priorities and then leaving it the hell alone. Trying to micro-manage it by manually resolving conflicts or using the time slot settings never seems to work.

I understand that, but for the average customer who is getting prompted left and right with Conflict warnings (pop up & a Conflict tab in the List Menu) and Resolve boxes then logic dictates that they have to interact with it. If the box quietly found that later showing and just scheduled it, then it wouldn't be issue.

Of course... which is why I opened with "no doubt it can be disconcerting..."

I can think of a few reasons why it doesn't do that, but I certainly don't know definitively. One small but positive consequence of how it's currently done is that, if something happens that cancels one of the A or B shows (either by user or update of guide data), the C show will fall right back into where it should. I doubt that if the C show was successfully rescheduled up-front that they would expend the box horsepower to keep looking for earlier showings to fall back to.

I have never been successful at leaving a conflict alone and having it record correctly.

Last night, I had selected America's Got Talent (A), and Dancing with the Stars (B) to record. AGT was from 8-10 and DWTS was from 8-9:30. I also had selected a PBS special on Johnny Carson (C) which was on from 9-11. All 3 programs were series recordings. The guide indicated the Johnny Carson show would not record; it was greyed out. The other two were in red.

At 8:10 I checked what was recording, and AGT was not recording. I selected it to record and had to cancel the Johnny Carson special to do so. I then had to manually select a later recording of Johnny Carson.

This is not the behavior I expect. From everyone's description, I should have to do nothing. AGT and DWTS should have automatically recorded, and the PBS show should have recorded on another day.

I have tried leaving the schedule alone before, and have had similar results. Am I doing something wrong, or do others have different software? I'm stumped.

Betty Reed
TWC San Diego
Cisco 8640
ODN 5.1.06