Tivo HD one cablecard works one does not

[dsa1971]

I had 4 cablecards installed in 2 tivo hd boxes yesterday by verizon fios. 3 out of 4 seem to be working. One tivo stopped displaying anything other than the analog channels. I tested the channels for cablecard 1 and they seemed to be working but cablecard 2 was definitely not. After removing the 2nd cablecard running through the guided setup and rebooting it is functioning with using a single cablecard. I don't understand why one non-functioning cablecard basically disables tivo altogether.

[Gregor]

It's because a single-stream cable card cannot decode two video streams simultaneously.

[dsa1971]

It seems to me though that Tivo would recognize that one of the cablecards is not functioning/activated/authorized and treat the system like it only has one cablecard installed.

[ScottEllsworth]

It seems to me though that Tivo would recognize that one of the cablecards is not functioning/activated/authorized and treat the system like it only has one cablecard installed.

I agree completely. I have a replacement unit coming out, which took two truck rolls and many hours on the phone to get to.

Had my TiVo merely killed card two, and then given me a 'call TiVo and your cable co" now message, I would not be HD-less for the next week while waiting for the new unit.

Scott

[vascott1]

I just had FIOS installed this past Saturday and had similar issues. What I found is when one CableCard was dead the other worked fine. Switching to the second one just gave me a blank screen. We had some very odd issues with random channels working and some not. Part of the issue cleared up after a reboot and the last issue cleared when I got the tech to "send a signal to the card" one last time. Right now all is well and the quality on SD is so much better than cable..

[dsa1971]

I called fios this evening to try to get all of the cablecards working. After a number of refreshes, deactivate/active, authorize, etc. by fios 3 out of 4 cablecards are working. I don't trust even the ones that are still working because under the network setup menu when tivo tries to "hunt data" to retrieve the host id and data values it hangs there forever and never gets the data. I have this information from the original install on Saturday but I don't think it's a good sign that it now cannot be retrieved. The cablecard that is NOT working is still getting the MISSING_PROGRAM_REKEY on the Conditional Access screen. Hopefull the tech that comes tomorrow will know what he is doing since the initial installer had never touched a tivo or installed a cablecard. I sure hope this whole cablecard setup gets easier in the future or it could be doomed. Whether it's tivo or the cablecards or the cable tv providers fault these cards should not be this difficult to setup. They seem awfully finicky.

[dsa1971]

Verizon tech came out today and straightened things out with the cable cards. I was at work so wife was home taking care of it. I talked to him on the phone a few times though. I think he basically just reinitialized them even though the tech on the phone last night supposedly did that. The tech today told me what has worked for him is having the cards reinitialized then removing them and inserting them again. Whatever works is fine with me. He claims Tivo HD's cause Verizon a lot of headaches but I couldn't say where the blame lies in that one especially since he went on to say that he has a Toshiba tv with cablecard and he has to have the card reinitialized sometimes.