Why did a single MCard work on my S3 while the installer was here?

[dsol]

I just moved to NYC and had Time Warner come out today to install cable cards in my Series 3 TiVo. I made the mistake of not reading these threads before the installation and he installed a single MCard into the box. I questioned whether this would allow me to record two shows at once and he assured me that it would. Not wanting to take his word for it, I attempted it myself and it worked fine - I recorded one show, switched channels, recording the second channel. Both showed up on the Now Playing list and I verified that it had recorded a minute of each show. At that point, I let him go and assumed all was well. Now tonight TiVo tells me that it needs to change channels in order to record something I'm not watching and I get conflicts trying to record shows at the same time.

Reading through the threads here I realize now that S3 is not set up to support a single MCard, but why did it work in the first place? I had to run through Guided Setup after the installer left - is that when things changed? Do I really have to spend a third day w/ TWC installers to fix this?

[Hippster]

Hmmm that is interesting. Are they using any SDV (switched digital video) channels yet and if so have you tried one of those channels?

[Ben_Jamin75]

1) Do you have a series 3 or a TiVo HD?
2) did you do your test recordings before or after re-running guided setup?

[Devx]

Originally Posted by dsol

...he installed a single MCard into the box. I questioned whether this would allow me to record two shows at once and he assured me that it would. Not wanting to take his word for it, I attempted it myself and it worked fine - I recorded one show, switched channels, recording the second channel. Both showed up on the Now Playing list and I verified that it had recorded a minute of each show...

Quick answer, yes. When you say that you verified it in the Now Playing list do you remember if both shows had the red recording icon next to them? It is certainly possible that the S3 recorded both shows one after the other. In other words, it recorded a minute of your first show, then stopped when you switched channels to record another minute of the second show.

If you're watching a live show, what happens when you press LiveTV again on the remote? It's supposed to switch to the second tuner. The test I used when the installer was still present was to switch to the second tuner and make sure it could tune all the same channels as the first tuner while verifying that the first tuner was still on the same channel. Guided setup shouldn't have changed anything. If you don't believe me you can do a clear and delete everything and try again.

[Joybob]

It works for a while then turns off. As a few people have noticed on other threads.

[ciper]

One show (or both) were recorded analog which didn't use the cable card.

[sommerfeld]

Originally Posted by Joybob

It works for a while then turns off. As a few people have noticed on other threads.

My speculation for a little while based on my experience with the low-level behavior of similar hardware is that the S3 has some combination of a hardware limitation and/or a driver performance problem which limits how much data they can pump through a single cable card socket - my speculation is that they can pump a full HD stream through each socket, but might not be able to push 2*HD through a single socket.

Complicating matters further, it could well be the case that they can get two typical bit rate HD streams through the socket but two maximum-bit-rate streams will choke it, so they're disabling multi-stream functionality on the S3 because they can't predict when that might happen or prevent it...

Again, this is total speculation. I'm probably completely wrong about this.

[andyf]

Originally Posted by dsol

I just moved to NYC and had Time Warner come out today to install cable cards in my Series 3 TiVo. I made the mistake of not reading these threads before the installation and he installed a single MCard into the box. I questioned whether this would allow me to record two shows at once and he assured me that it would. Not wanting to take his word for it, I attempted it myself and it worked fine - I recorded one show, switched channels, recording the second channel. Both showed up on the Now Playing list and I verified that it had recorded a minute of each show. At that point, I let him go and assumed all was well. Now tonight TiVo tells me that it needs to change channels in order to record something I'm not watching and I get conflicts trying to record shows at the same time.

Reading through the threads here I realize now that S3 is not set up to support a single MCard, but why did it work in the first place? I had to run through Guided Setup after the installer left - is that when things changed? Do I really have to spend a third day w/ TWC installers to fix this?

Guided setup is what does it. It checks for single/dual cable cards during guided setup. Also, note there is a bug that back to back recordings will try to switch tuners rather than recording both on the background tuner.