Caution: CC fried when swapping between TV and Tivo

[SeanC]

The Comcast tech just left from my installation of the 2 cable cards in my S3. I was lucky in that he had an extra cable card with him to replace the dead one in my TV.

I got my S3 on Monday and I didn't want to wait for HD goodness. I tried using the in the clear QAM channels that the Tivo found but I couldn't find what I wanted to watch. I had heard of people swapping their CC from their TV to their S3 and I figured why not. The card did work but only to receive the basic HD channels. I figured this was just a provisioning problem and once I swapped it back to my TV everything would be hunky dory. Wrong. The TV now only received the basic HDs as well.

After the tech got the S3 provisioned I asked him to take a look at the TV CC. He tried for 20 minutes with Comcast to get the TV CC working again, no dice. So he swapped out the card called in the new numbers and now I'm up and running with 3 working CCs.

I just figured I would put my tale of caution out there for anyone contemplating using the CC in their TV in their Tivo.

[DrDravenStone]

I thought it was pretty well established that a CC is married to the device it is installed in and can not be moved to another device, period.
Frankly, I'm surprised it worked at all when you moved it from one device to another...

Maybe I'm not paying enough attention (don't have an S3 or CC) but I really was under the impression that cable cards can not be moved.

[gastrof]

That's my understanding as well.

[jfh3]

I wish people would stop referring to CableCARDs being "fried" when they aren't working properly. Granted, most of the time this reference is made by ignorant phone CSRs or installers.

If you interrupt a CableCARD during the firmware upgrade process, you can, under some conditions, turn it into a brick (i.e. "fry"). But the other 99.8% of the time, it's user error - either the customer has moved it to a new device improperly (like the OP did) or the card programming and/or authorization hasn't been done correctly from the head end.

To the OP - there are some systems where what you wanted to do would work, but those are the exception, rather than the rule. Most CableCARDs are "married" to a specific device, and for the Series 3, a particular slot by the cable company's system.

[SeanC]

Ok fried may be a little strong as far as describing the situation goes but, please explain to me why when the card was moved back to the TV it was married to it would not work even after it had been reinitialized by Comcast.

I understood CCs to be married to devices as well but, as I mentioned, I have seen posts on this forum where people have done what I did without any negative results.

As the title says I want this to be a cautionary tale for those who would try moving CC between devices assuming that once they go back to their original configuration everything will work OK.

[jfh3]

Ok fried may be a little strong as far as describing the situation goes but, please explain to me why when the card was moved back to the TV it was married to it would not work even after it had been reinitialized by Comcast.


My guess is that they did not do a cold initalize on the card and just "hit" it.


I understood CCs to be married to devices as well but, as I mentioned, I have seen posts on this forum where people have done what I did without any negative results.


All depends on the cable system. In general, most can't do what you wanted to do.

[Roderigo]

Ok fried may be a little strong as far as describing the situation goes but, please explain to me why when the card was moved back to the TV it was married to it would not work even after it had been reinitialized by Comcast.

It doesn't work initially because the card only remembers the last host it was in. So, as soon as you placed it into the S3, it forgot about the TV. If it's a Motorola card, it also generates a new Data number, so if you didn't give that to your cable company, no amount of initialization will get it working again. As far as I know, a cold initialize should never be necessary.

The rule on moving cards is that it will work for any channel which doesn't have copy protection. If you cable system uses any form of digital cable copy protection, the card needs to be married to the host.