San Francisco, CA - Comcast - Page 108

I know I might in the minority as a trivia buff and someone who enjoys trivia in HD, but did anyone catch the latest ep of Jeopardy!?

It was in SD on KGO on Comcast. Anyone know what happened?

I noticed something screwy with my channels last night, so I did a channel scan. I am now able to receive KRON-HD, KICU-HD, and CW-HD...so it appears the upgrade for my section of Milpitas (Great Mall area) is done.

The channel placement also appears shuffled. NBC-HD was moved from 33.1 to 11.1 which is more logical, however KRON-HD is 138.1 or something like that.

BTW I have analog expanded basic cable.

Some clarifications from Comcast

I just received an email from Mr. J. and he would like to try and clarify somethings that have been posted here to help us understand what Comcast is doing. Here is the email as I received it.....

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Since there seems to be some issues that could use some facts, can you post the comments below.
thanks
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I've been concerned about some inaccurate information that has been popping up on the Forum recently so I'd like to take a moment to help "clarify".


With 637 miles of fiber that will need to be placed, and over 107,000 homes which will require curbside work, all neighborhoods in Hayward will have the new network in place by next December (2008). As always, when work is completed and tested in a specific neighborhood we will activate the new network in that specific neighborhood. For example, we turned on about 2,000 homes in Sunnyvale and 2,000 homes in Milpitas the last seven days, and we will continue to roll-out the new technology using that phased approach.


In the future we will need to realign our the HD channel numbers in the Bay Area. We do not have any timeline for when that realignment will take place. It is accurate to state that the recently activated neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and Milpitas will have the "new" HD channel alignment at the outset.


As was pointed out by others, the problem with the signal originated from the TBS facilities in Arizona/Atlanta. Both standard and high-definition signals were impacted. I need to remind everyone about the Sun Outages/Tiling item that MikeF5 posted a few weeks ago. During this period of solar interference it is not unusual to see a momentary "blip/s" outside of the mid-morning to late afternoon time range when we know interference of satellite signals will be the highest. That may explain what caused the interference last night, but we can't be 100% positive.
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Hope that helps explain a couple of things that have happened or is happening right now. As you can see Mr. J. does read this forum when time permits and makes a concerted effort to answer these concerns when he can.

Laters,
Mikef5

Well, I haven't really seen any trucks in my neck of Sunnyvale, but I don't usually get home from work til at least 4:30. I presume Sunnyvale is ahead of Hayward as far as progress of the upgrades, so I'm guessing I won't be seeing any new HD channels for quite some time, but by/before Dec. '08.

hi i just have a question. do i need to have access to the premium HD channels (like HBO or showtime) to be able to see TBS HD on channel 735? I don't remember seeing this channel last night during the cubs/diamondbacks game. thanks!

No you don't need access to the Premium HD channels to get TBS-HD. Check channel 735.

They need to realign ALL the channel numbers in the Bay Area, not just HD.

Mr. J should take a look at how Dish Network does it. It's one of the few things they do right, and they do it very very right.

what is wrong with the current channels?

They have aligned the channels by genre in Analog and is almost the same in digital. They start with kids channels, they have a section for Discovery related channels, all the 400's are for sports and the end they have music channels, in the 500s is all about movies, and the 600s is for spanish channels.
Maybe they could realign some channels, but most of them are in the proper group.

Wow, I'd hate to be in the last neighborhood in Hayward.

Don't worry Santa Rosa will be ready until Dec 2010.

All of the local broadcast channels should be numbered according to their actual broadcast channel numbers. 11 should be 11. 26 should be 26. 44 should be 44, etc.

The rest of the "analog" channels are not as logically grouped as you seem to believe. Although, the digital channels are pretty decently grouped. But, the fact that analog channels are split from digital channels of the same genre is ridiculous. It is unnecessary in this age of digital receivers. The channels can be mapped any way they desire by the box.

Actually, that Dec 2008 date is what was posted originally when Comcast first made the announcement that they were going to upgrade ALL the 550 MHz areas by that time frame. I would almost bet Hayward would be done long before that date, unless there is some major problem that occurs.

Laters,
Mikef5

How Comcast plans to reclaim bandwidth, interesting reading......

http://www.lightreading.com/document...35458&site=cdn

Laters,
Mikef5

Tyre,
I just setup my new LCD HDTV with integrated tuner and I'm trying to figure out the Comcast channel line-up. Have you seen a list of channels available via Comcast in the bay area with the non-Comcast channel numbers (i.e. 11-1, 33-2, etc.)? Haven't found anything in this forum, though I may have missed it.
Thanks!
-Tom

"improved" compression scheme without affecting video quality.
Why am I skeptical? And I wonder if it works with TiVo, we already know SDV does not.

Hiker,

From the little I've been able to find out about it, it is based on Mpeg2 compression so it should work with Tivo without any change. The Mpeg4 compression might be more problematic for Tivo unless Mpeg4 is built into the box or not or can be added to it later... I still have a lot to learn about my Tivo

Laters,
Mikef5

I think the decoder that is in the TiVos is capable of MPEG4 decoding, but I'm not sure it has the associated "horsepower" to actually do it.

TiVo has talked about a "dongle" that should solve the SDV problem, they "seem" very confident it will be available in the first half of next year...

I am pretty sure what they are talking about is gear that transrates multiple MPEG2 streams in realtime. That is, let's say you have 12 SD channels in a 6 Mhz package, based on the case that you have to constantly allocate for each SD channel the peak data rate that signal could consume. Well, turns out, most of the time, the data streams are well below the peak rate, so capacity is sitting around idle.

What you can do today dynamically allocate capacity to each channel, and when you have overlapping peaks, then the hardware at the hub transcodes the MPEG2 streams to a lower bit rate for the peaking streams, effectively "shaving" capacity per stream so they all fit in the capacity available. So for example, you could fit 18 SD streams in a 6 mhz channel instead of 12.

The savings are even bigger for HD because the peak to average ratio is higher than for SD. You should only need to reduce the quality for a second or few seconds in realtime when you get overlapping peaks.

Generally, you can't really tell this is going on. The impact on quality is slight and fleeting, but it saves quite a bit of capacity. Of course, you could overuse it and get a bigger hit to quality, but the MSO's tend not to do this.

This doesn't affect the endpoints, as they just display the "shaped" stream. No CPE changes required.

SDV on the other hand, screws everything that is not a two way box. Though just for the channels that are supported using SDV. So let's say they add 20 new HD channels using SDV (effectively turning them into on-demand streams). If you had a Tivo, you could still access all the other HD channels that are simulcast, but you would not be able to view the 20 new HD channels. If you had the comcast STB, then you could still see all of them, even if it was a new cablecard equipped STB, because DSG and other techniques.

Basically if you can't do on-demand, which Tivo's and MCE media centers can't, you won't be able to see programming that is sent via SDV exclusive transport. Channel changing takes longer for SDV channels, just like starting up an ondemand stream. In general it's not too bad.

Time-warner has deployed SDV pretty extensively and has had good luck with it. Comcast isn't really a technology leader per se among the MSO's, but given how well it's worked on other operators, I think when it shows up here it'll work pretty well - most of the bugs have been ironed out by now.

Thanks,
mike

I'm sure it was. The bottom line though is that they waited too long to start the upgrades. Business decision, whatever, that doesn't matter to the customer that wants more HD. Comcast's HD lineup is going to look utterly pathetic when compared to the satcos, it already does, and at the snails pace they are adding channels that situation doesn't look to improve anytime soon.

Both the TiVo Series 3 and the TiVo HD have hardware to do MPEG-4 decoding (see http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...&&#post5332428).

Might be something along these lines, I asked the same question in the Comcast Technology thread and AVS member holl_ands posted these links.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=132997
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=32796

That's sort of what I thought, it would've been very shortsighted of Tivo not to include that in their box and it shouldn't be that hard to mod the box for more horsepower.

As far as the SDV, I don't think we on the "Left Coast" have to worry about it for along time but it would be nice to have the "dongle" so we could use it for VOD

Laters,
Mikef5

That's what I thought, I don't know if it's ever been utilized yet though.

Just checked the specs for the Broadcom chip that the TivoHD uses and it states it can output 1080p.... really ??? Here's the link to the pdf...http://www.broadcom.com/collateral/pb/7401-PB04-R.pdf

Laters,
Mikef5

The Moto DCT boxes can not do MP4 though, so I wouldn't expect to see a wholesale transition to MP4 any time soon. I don't know about the new (DCH?) boxes.

I hope you are right Mikef5. I just read Mr. J's comments and I'm shocked to hear completion won't be until Dec. 2008. I recall the timeline announced in December saying upgrades would be made within 18-months. I'm in San Lorenzo, a sub-division of Hayward, and recently got the note from Comcast that upgrades are underway. I hope this isn't lip service to keep me quiet or from jumping to another provider. Per Keenan's comment, I really don't want to be the last neighborhood that gets upgraded.

Me too and I think the hayward hills will be the first area in Hayward to be complete, I have no source I just see a ton of trucks in that area everyday and my cable has been acting strange as of late. And like you mentioned I also got the upgrade notice last month and it stated the upgrades would happen in the next 2-3 months.

Hi Tom,

I sure wish I had something like that! Trying to find a particular channel can be very confusing. I was helping my dad setup his new TV in Fremont (he has analog cable as well) and it was a royal pain trying to find certain channels. It doesn't help that many of the channels and subchannels are duplicated.

Anyone else have any suggestions for finding a semi-accurate list of Comcast channels?

So Comcast should follow Dish Network and start their HD channels on channel 9419?

I think Comcast is doing fine with the channel numbers right now.

Don't be ridiculous. I'm talking about channel grouping, not copying actual numbers.