Time Warner DVR vs. DirectTV DVR

Yeah, I was really disappointed in our HD lineup for a while, especially compared to DTV. But since them implemented switched digital video in our area they’ve added probably a dozen or more HD channels in the last few months.

Actually, they just added it here as well (along with USA, Bravo, and the CNN Business network). So now the only channel we watch that isn’t in HD is Comedy Central.

So there was a new episode of Good Eats last night, and the DVR actually recorded… the first sixteen minutes of it. Seriously, it just stopped recording halfway through, for no apparent reason. Shows up in the list as Good Eats: 16 min. long.

At this point, I’m fairly certain that it’s just mocking me.

You sure my mother-in-law wasn’t at your house? She lives with us and that’s her specialty, turning the channel in the middle of a recording (and yes, even with 2 tuners she manages to do this).

If it’s a Scientific Atlanta box, you should just expect it to be horrible. Seriously. Before I finally got around to rolling my own, I was routinely derided by my friends and acquaintances for the horrible performance of that buggering device. The advantage to having cable, of course, is that you CAN roll your own DVR for a little bit cheaper than with DirectTV, but if you’re dedicated to paying for a DVR, there’s no competition between the two devices. DirectTV’s model is a well-trained show dog and anything from Scientific Atlanta (literally anything - I cannot express the amount of contempt that I hold for their hardware, software…pretty much everything) is the mechanical equivalent of the sickly mutt that pisses on your floor every time you leave the house just because he knows it bothers you.

We had our first issue in a while with the box. Last week, I’m guessing around Thursday, the box just lost the programming guide. Of course the DVR works off the programming guide, so nothing recorded. We didn’t notice until Sunday when I went to flip through the guide and it kept telling us the guide wasn’t available. Fortunately I think all we missed were CSI and some kids shows.

I did a restart on the box and 5 minutes later (that’s how long it takes to restart) it had the guide and everything’s been working fine since. Just annoying that it happened and we had no idea for several days.

SciAtlantas will do that sometimes. They do a guide request exactly once if they’re up 24x7 every day and if that fails, they don’t seem to want to try again. And if you download a totally empty guide, the scheduler still runs again and then proceeds to wipe all of your scheduled items because one part of the programming was too damn stupid to tell the other part that it had a whoopsie and maybe you shouldn’t trust the data. One solution is to power down and back up again on a regular basis and try to open the guide. I had it do that to me on a few occasions - sometimes it would get the guide back myself and I would just lose a bunch of DVR recordings and sometimes I would have to get all up in its business and give it what for.

Specific problems that all Scientific Atlantas seem to have revolve around quickly powering down and back up again - if you get brown outs or short outages where you live, it might be wise to invest in a UPS to plug the bastarding thing into. I’ve also had caps (and this is still a problem, since I’m operating off the analog loophole) that failed because I was sitting at a black screen on account of it fell over and couldn’t get up until I forcibly cycled the power (by jerking the plug) and made it do a hard reboot.

I love the extensive feedback during the reboot process, too. If you haven’t done it before, you might think that something is wrong, or even that your DVR is broken. Basically, you’ll get a single message on the DVR’s LED display (“boot”), and a splash screen on your TV that says that the DVR is powering up. And then both disappear–the DVR goes totally dark and silent, and the TV loses it’s signal, and both remain that way for a really long time (as you said, 4-5 minutes, generally). But don’t touch it! It’s still booting, and if you interrupt the process, you’ll just have to start all over. The only indication that it’s done is that the clock appears again on the DVR’s LED display. No message telling you that its done, and you won’t get a signal on your TV screen until you power the DVR back on by manually pressing the power button (but don’t do this before you see the clock!).

It’s a masterpiece of terrible design.

So DirecTV came out to the new house to install us yesterday. The contractor they sent installed everything and decided, on his own, that the HD DVR should go upstairs in the bedroom while the regular one should go in the TV room downstairs. Didn’t ask, just did it. We want it the other way around.

So the regional manager stopped by the house to check up on things (he was in the area, apparently) and when he found out what happened, he apologized and gave us his personal number. On Sat, once we’re moved in, he wants us to call him and he’ll send someone ASAP to make it all right and install everything for us.

So, it was a fuck up but also a potentially spectacular recovery!

Is there any reason why you can’t just move the two boxes around yourself? I assume they’re operating off the same dish, so you should just be receiving from a coaxial cable running into the back of the receiver with each box receiving the same gross data feed, from which it selects either the standard or high definition content with its internal programming.

Or is this running off two different dishes/receivers?

It’s really interesting to hear how folks with the same gear or service have completely different experiences. Must make things fun for the TWC troubleshooters once you get past the script.

When resetting our box, we get an OCAP splashscreen with a progress bar. After that fills up, we get another splashscreen for Maestro (or something like that) and it counts down slowly from L-18 (or something like that) to L-1. The countdown is replicated on the front panel until it gets to the point where the clock is initialized.

When that finishes, it either goes dark (because the box is turned off) or we see channel 1.

So we get lots of feedback and progress, it’s just frustrating because of how long it takes. I can’t imagine trying to wait around for it if there was no progress indications.

hey do a guide request exactly once if they’re up 24x7 every day and if that fails, they don’t seem to want to try again.

That is just brilliant, and totally not surprising. Why the thing wouldn’t try again in x number of minutes after a failed guide update is just beyond me.

And we tend to have trouble with the power (mostly in the summer) where we lose electricity for like 2 or 3 seconds, so the TV, cable box, and computer gear are all on UPSes.

Who’s your manufacturer? The thing about TW and Comcast is that they use different manufacturers in some different areas of the country. The thing you’re talking about with the splash screen and the countdown doesn’t sound like any Scientific Atlanta model that I’ve seen, and they’re the most notorious for being horrible, on account of them actually being criminally horrible devices. When Comcast took over here in Houston, some of us thought that we’d be getting Motorolla boxes that actually did things and didn’t break…but then Comcast just went ahead and adopted the same hardware provider and started shipping in more “new and better” Scientific Atlanta stuff which still breaks, but now in more different ways. If you’re working on a Motorola box, you’re already light years ahead of any unfortunate sod who got socked with a SA piece of crap.

The failure to communicate schedule download errors to the actual recording scheduler seems to be fairly endemic across all material, though. I don’t know who gives TimeWarner their data feed, but they sure seem to fail a lot more often than Zap2It (the people who sell to TiVo). Ideally, when you get an empty schedule you want to assume that that’s wrong, but that seems to be a concept to puzzling to the majority of developers in the field to parse, so they completely divorce the schedule build (an extremely complicated issue, which, by the way, they do entirely wrong) from the guide download.

  • Directv HR20 series have default 30-second skip activated. Click click! Unlike the tivo, you don’t need silly cheat codes and activate after every reboot. Commercial? Push skip 4 times.
  • m.directv.com - schedule record from phone/internet. Actually somewhat easier to type than use painfully slow interface.

Time Warner experiences definitely differ by region. I have two different Motorolla boxes from Time Warner (not at home right now so I don’t know the models) and I was actually very happy with the DVR service until recently. Every once in a while the record function would stop working and I’d have to reboot but that’s about it for complaints.

A couple of months ago, however, they tried to add On Demand to our region and the upgrade went horribly awry. Everyone in the region was without cable for 2 days. They were only able to restore service by wiping everyone’s hard drives without notice and slapping in a kludged up temporary software solution. Most people had to call tech support to have firmware flashes manually sent before things started working again.

The new software is inferior in every way to the old software. After several weeks of fucking around with it I have finally figured out how most of the basic functionality works but it’s still a horrible, klunky design that is endlessly frustrating and time wasting.

The ultimate fix will be when they complete the upgrade but I gather they’re gunshy about doing it based on how poorly it went last time. I hope the “temporary” software is not actually the new software minus On Demand, because that will suck hard. I was told that they are “still working” on fixes for all of the myriad complaints I had about this new software.

Of course, their front line folks are oblivious to all of this. I had worked all of this out for myself and finally was able to speak to a higher up in their customer service department who was aware of the details and was able to confirm my interpretation of events.

Time Warner in Nebraska got hauled in front of the public services commission that governs public utilities for their horrible DVR problems. People were that pissed off about it. They made some vague promises to fix things soon and cut everyone’s DVR rental rate by $2 a month or something and it all blew over.

Which makes me sad, I’d hoped the state government could have gotten some TWC execs the death sentence. I’m normally anti capital punishment, but I’ll make an exception for TWC.

You know, the weird thing is that the dudes managing the Comcast twitter feed seem to know what they’re about and they can get things done. They understand customer service. I asked them if I could get a consistently updated clear QAM channel mapping and IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, for a while anyway. There must be a missing link somewhere between them and the dudes who handle the purchasing of hardware/software, though, because as soon as I step down I’m right back in the same old hell I remember from Time Warner days. I suspect they might have a few too many customer service tiers between the box under your television and the guy who knows how the program works in the first place.

Wait, Nebraska has Time Warner? I thought there was only Cox. Not that I’m looking to switch, I just haven’t seen anything around to indicate TW is here.

They have a lot of the state, just not Omaha. Here in Lincoln they is the monopoly.

Ouch, sorry to hear that :( Shows how often I get out of the Omaha area…

There was a pretty interesting story in Wired a month or two ago about Comcast’s CEO and some of what they’re doing to try to improve customer relations. Supposedly one guy took it on himself to do some outreach via the internet. When they saw how successful it was, they put a team together to reach out via that channel even more.