Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

As in Cablecards from Cox.

This time around things went much better, despite a small hiccup during the process.

This time the installer seemed to know his way around a TiVo. He put the first card in by itself first (instead of popping both in right away....) That card eventually paired up and all seemed good.

He then put the second card in. That card seemed to have issues though. It wasn't giving any channels. He went back to the office to get another card. That card worked. He then went through the whole long "Repeat Guided Setup"....and I did a quick thumb through the HD channels....checked the high HD channels, and they were there. Swapped tuners to make sure both could see them.

All seems to be good. Now to push it to get guide data and give me the Olympics TiVo Guide....

Link: http://www.zektor.com/hdvi5/HDVI5.html

One of the things I had grumbled about was now having to switch inputs on my Zektor HDVI5 more often than usual.

Namely, going between my two TiVo HD's. The other two devices, my DVD player and the Cox HD DVR, were getting little use. Like, I'm only watching on DVD a weekend...if that. And, right now I check the Cox HD DVR now and then to remove stuff it has recorded, because it is duplicating stuff that I'm now getting on my TiVo (one of the them anyways). I originally scheduled the shows because I wasn't able to get them via Cablecards, but Cox has since made all the HD channels here available that way.

I could remove the scheduling I suppose, but that's more time on the box than I want. Perhaps sometime before the start of the fall season, I'll sit down and figure out the distribution of what I record where. Kind of like the spread of channels over the many ReplayTVs I've been using.

Should be interesting to see what my ReplayTV usage becomes in the fall.

Anyways...back to what input switching problem, it dawned on that I can reprogram the switcher to select the input based on a different remote. Though I didn't want to change all the buttons, and there didn't seem to be a way to cycle through inputs...so I hadn't looked much further.

It then occurred me that I could temporarily juggle remotes to program so just input 1 and input 2 are triggered by some other IR code, that corresponds to the respective TiVo HD's. Better yet, while checking the manual...I can only change the IR codes that I want.

So, I mapped the TiVo button of #1 to input 1, and the TiVo button of #2 to input 2. Sure, the switcher is going to reselect the input every time I hit the TiVo button. But, it seemed a safe button that would switch inputs without disrupting things on that TiVo.

Especially, since it is preference to hit the TiVo button for the input I'm going to before I switch to the input. That way I won't get blasted by whatever Live TV that the TiVo might be playing.

At some later date, I'll probably think of what button on the other devices (Cox HD DVR and Momitsu V880N DVD player) to be the input selection for that. But, back to my TiVo viewing.

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I have scheduled the installation of a[nother] pair of Cox Cablecards, for my 'new' TiVo HD DVR.

I don't remember what I paid for installation last time, but it sounded much higher this time around. I may strongly consider the retirement of the Cox HD equipment next year.

Anyways...I scheduled it for August 4th, since this is my next planned stay at home for deliveries day. Though nothing else has been ordered with this date, yet. But, I have stuff sitting in my Amazon.com cart....

The 'New' TiVo HD arrived today. It was supposed to come yesterday, but the UPS delivery didn't happen until 15 minutes after I had given up waiting for it to show up.

This time I booked the morning off, and waited those extra 15 minutes. Perhaps its easier to force attempt #2, though the I didn't really know how long it would take from ordering the TiVo to when I would get it with free shipping...and didn't feel the rush....

The total delivery was the Refurbished TiVo HD, and the GloRemote. And a separate order of the My DVR Expander.

After a quick inspection, I set it aside and headed off to work.

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Of course, I'm talking about my Ubuntu server (well, maybe not obvious....except that I'm not known for doing upgrades).

I had debated waiting for Hardy Heron's release before building this Linux server. Except that I had bought the box back in December, and delaying was preventing was delaying all that BOINC work that I've been doing.

There's other stuff I want to or have thought of doing with this server, but don't know where I actually stand on doing those sorts of things. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would've gotten this box (it was knee-jerk response to replacing a dead server, which I was later able to resurrect...negating the ordeal of recreating things). OTOH, I probably would've continued on with buying something else....and I'm not sure if I would've been that happy with that purchase. Of course, it has delayed that purchase....and it may become too late to get it. Though perhaps Windows XP will continue to still be available after June 30th, and I'll make that one last upgrade in that department.

Anyways...other than taking much longer than expected to upgrade....either the upgrade servers are still badly hammered, or Cox is throttling me. Cox seems to be sluggish in general today. The download speed was dismal. And, then hidden in the terminal you don't see my default, it was asking if I wanted to proceed with the upgrade after everything had been downloaded.

Annoying enough when doing 'sudo apt-get upgrade', even more so here....because I wasn't expecting that I had to wait and interact (with a hidden screen) in the upgrade. Later there were dialogs that popped up on stuff that wanted input, mainly to decide if stuff I had configured in Gutsy could be unconfigured in the resulting upgrade to Hardy. Umm, I configured those services so that I could use them....

Finally it was done....it took forever to boot while it did fs checks on /home and /MMCVideo, but then everything looked fine.

Well, not totally. lm-sensors was changed, so I had to reconfigure that, and I'm not sure but the core temperatures seem to be higher now. The default is FireFox 3.0 beta....and all my extensions and themes got disabled. I've been avoiding upgrading to FireFox 3.0 on my other machines for this reason. Though people say that the new version is faster, and the memory leak is fixed, and some of the hanging/crashing problems on Mac OS X seem to be gone. But, I want it to work the way I've customized it....

So, I changed my shortcut to launch firefox-2 instead and reverted things.

Now other than network lag, which I hope will clear up on its own....the only main thing that doesn't seem to work in the update is vmware. Which probably just means I need to rebuild the kernel stuff again (or see if there's some hardy specific details to making that work). Not really a big deal though, since I never got around to running anything in vmware. It was on my list of things to try, but now I need more disk on this box.

I heard 8.04 was going to have support for PM SATA, wonder if that's true and if the PCIe PM SATA card that is in the box will now work, etc.

Well, now that things seem to be working, I was making use of the TiVo HD last night....to the point where I didn't check any of my other recorders for content last night....

There's quite a bit of channels that I got on the Cox HD DVR, that I don't see via CableCARD....don't know if that's because Cox isn't making them all available to CableCARD subscribers or because they aren't in the lineup data from TiVo. TiVo lineup isn't very complete...there are channels it knows about, but has no program info for...so I can't schedule anything from those channels. And, there's other channels that are just missing. I had submitted the missing channel form for Fox HD, along with a link to the local lineup information...so hopefully TiVo will eventually get around to having things right.

Meanwhile, I started looking at the TiVoCasts....some of them are pretty interesting, I've downloaded just a few of them, and set up season passes to keep them coming. Checking my cacti monitor, I see that I've already downloaded >10GB of data in the last week. Wow. Probably the most downloading I've done....even more than when I set up my last new computer. Though that's probably because it wasn't a Windows computer.

Someday I'll get a new Windows computer.....only because my current one is starting to fail (had originally intended to replace it a couple of years ago, when it was 3....) And, want to get one before I can't get Windows XP anymore.

Well, I got to a point where it said it was going to take a long time to update. So, after waiting a while....I decided to go in to work.

When, I got home, it was still finishing its connection. It was the the slow count up of "Loading". It was at 40%. After about half an hour...it neared 50%....but while I was checking what channels I was getting (and ignoring the messages that it had no program info...) it rebooted on me.

It wanted guided setup again (but I ignored it)....afterwards, live TV was funny. Sometimes I would get ESPNHD, ESPN2HD, TNTHD, UHD, etc....but most of the time I didn't. So, I tried guided setup again. It kind of worked, but mostly didn't....hopping around the setting some more and few more unexpected reboots, some successful and some failed net connects. I once again was asked to do guided setup...so I did.

Finally, I poked around in the CableCARD menus....found that CableCARD 1 was working for everything, but CableCARD 2 was having issues. I contemplated calling the Cox installer to see if he could help, but opted to try another guided setup, but tried to see if instead of confirming 23 as QVC what it would ask and see if I saw it. But, it would ask if 24 was X, then 25 was Y, then 26 was Z....they all were, so I stopped there. Would take to long to see if it would tune digital channels.

The gist was CableCARD 1 was getting all my digital channels (SD and HD)...while CableCARD 2 seemed only able to get broadcast HD. So, I gave the Cox installer a call. He said he would call somebody and then call me back. While staring at a black screen of something I should be getting (what happens when CableCARD 2 is selected...) It jumped...flashed an error screen....and then seemed to work. Though I found that CableCARD 2 now reported that it had no channels, and CableCARD 1 was doing all the work.

I got the call back, he said he had them do a reset/refresh for that card and asked if it was working. I described what I was seen and that it was currently saying no channels available for CableCARD 2. Said it would take some time and that he would call back in 5 minutes.

Soon afterwards...it started working, and I had everything. When he called back, I told him that it was now working.

Now to start scheduling stuff to record on it.....

The process got off to a rough start...the installer put card 1 in and then put card 2 in, and called to do the pairing. During the call he was instructed to remove cards and then do them one at a time.

That seemed to go somewhat better.

He didn't want to go through guided setup, just wanted to see live TV to confirm that things were working. But, it stayed at Acquiring Channel Info, forever. A quick call, seems he would have to do it, if he wanted to see channels.

So, we did the guided setup.

Still no channels. He decided that everything was done on their end, that it must be TiVo that is preventing things....so he left his number, and said to call if there were any problems on their end.

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Well, I pulled that trigger....

I called Cox, navigated through the phone menus...entered my old Vonage phone number (the Ohio one)...and then got to talk to someone about getting CableCards.

The only hang up was how many did I need? I asked if they did S-Cards or M-Cards...she didn't know, said the installer will bring the right card based on the work order of what they would be installing the cards into. Saying that it was for a TiVo HD didn't help answer the question, she needed the model number and then she would go find out.

The answer was, I would need two cards.

The installation is scheduled for between 10-12 on Thursday March 20th.

It never came up that I have other Cox boxes already, etc. Just the one time fee for them to come out and install the cards and the monthly fee that having the cards would add.

A much improved experience so far.

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Today, I came home late from work...and found sitting on my doorstep that FedEx has left the TiVo HD DVR there. Odd, when I ordered the Cox HD DVR, they wouldn't do that...and even though I waited at home all day by the front door, they claim that I wasn't there to make the delivery (ignoring that it was the first K-State football home game of the season...or perhaps the real reason?)

Anyways....I just moved the box aside, since I intend to hook it up digitally and not knowing how quickly the woot order would ship, I had put off buying DVI and/or HDMI cables. Though I had a good idea of what would be needed, since the TV is DVI and the TiVO HD is HDMI. What I hadn't worked out full is placement of it and my Zektor DVI switcher. Or what pieces of tech that have an input on my TV need to move onto the DVI switcher, because I'm out of digital audio inputs on my receiver.

The plan is that I'll likely move my Momitsu V880N to using DVI. The OTA HD tuner will probably be retired as a result of the TiVo HD DVR (and not because it only sees one station and poorly)....but that digital audio output had already been bumped. Since unlike my setup in Columbus with TimeWarner, I have both an HD tuner and an HD DVR from Cox. Not ready to retire the HD tuner from my mix...but perhaps some day it'll go.

I suppose the only outstanding issue I haven't figured out is whether I need open return path for the TiVo's cable connection. I have a 4 way and an 8 way splitter....the 8 way has no return path and is off of one of the 4 way splitter outputs. I have my cable modem, Cox HD Tuner and Cox HD DVR on the other 3 outputs of the 4 way. 7 of the 8 outputs are my ReplayTV...the 8th has floated around a bit depending on what gadget I wanted to try....on the HDTV for using its internal tuner, a DVD recorder that I had to see if TVGuide data was available, the OTA receiver to see if I could do clear QAM....

Now that I think of it, I probably should've checked Amazon.com for an upgrade of the 4-way splitter...I think the next up is an 6-way (want to minimize the split loss at that 'tier'). But, I once again used Amazon Prime to order a bunch of DVI/DVI and HDMI/DVI and Toslink cables....discovered that the 3.99 upgrade to 1 day service is per item, not per shipment or order. In retrospect I might have scaled down the size of the order to just what I needed to get the TiVo HD going, and leave the rest for free 2 day service. But, I guess I'm not thinking clearly right now

Initial setup will be a weekend project, not sure how it'll go on getting the Cablecards.