cable card annoyance (activation screen pop up)

The same has been happening to me over the past 3 or 4 days, on a variety of channels and spamodically. I have an HDXL, (not a Premium) with Comcast San Jose, using a M-Card & a SD TV.

I reckoned it was not Comcast, because all my programs were recordable and viewable so I called TIVO. They said the "pairing" had been lost so we had a 3 way call to Comcast/TIVO. Comcast said they sent another "pairing" message but nothing changed.

Now I just clear the screen and carry on with whatever I am watching.

Can anyone suggest what the problem is and what to do to correct it?


Thanks

 

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I have that problem on my TiVoHD- especially on stations that I rarely use. The activation screen will appear when first tuning... even if it is TiVo changing the channel of a tuner in the background while I am watching something else. If I press anything but the TiVo button it is likely to get the UI "stuck" or "hung" and I have to yank the power. It only happens to me about once a week, but it is a bit irritating. Sorry to hear the Premiere has the same problem

 

Yes...for me it's a result of not having my M card properly paired. It showed up when I replaced a defective HD XL with a new PXL and just stuffed the cable card in the new unit. I was lucky, it only affects a couple of channels and I'll eventually fix the problem when convenient. I'd ignore it completely, but it affects the USA channel. Get the activation screen and hitting clear brings up the channel. Comcast also, here.

 

So the very day someone in that avsforums thread mentioend comcast was starting to encrypt expanded basic channels in my area, I started seeing this issue as well, where the pairing screen pops up whenever the dvr tunes to a channel over 35.

It seems like the accepted solution is to ask Comcast to re-pair the cablecard? Or is it reasonable to hope that it'll just go away on its own.

 

With cable companies it is reasonable to assume that if there is a way to make everything less compatible, more difficult, more lock-in, more expensive, more DRI, more complex, more dependent on their equipment, less reliable... they will do it.

 

That is what I did and, keeping my fingers crossed, it appears to have cleared the issue.

 

Same problem, Comcast Stockton

Happened when I replace the hard drive, which changes the host ID and other things. The Cablecard is not paired.

Had to call Comcast like 4 times before I got a tech that knew that just hitting the card is not enough, they need to change the Host ID and the other settings and re-enter it in their system and then hit it.

Under Val? it shows V 0x00, the "V" showed up instantly when it worked. Look up what I mean by "V" in the cablecard FAQ for comcast

 

Aha! Thanks for mentioning the bit about resetting the host id and everything else, I wouldn't have thought to mention that to them otherwise.

This is actually a new unit that I got as a warranty replacement a week ago, so I'm guessing the combo of encryption plus new host info is what caused the popups for me.

Update: Yep! That did the trick.

 

Started seeing this the past couple of days on both a Premiere and an S3HD box. On the S3HD box it seemed to happen when a recording started and then again when the recording completed. We were watching a previously recorded show at the time. The Premiere seems to do it sporadically. At this point I'm inclined to believe that it is something that the cable company is messing around with, especially since I just got an e-mail from them about a system upgrade and possible interruptions in cable internet service.

 

Somewhere during their internet "upgrade" my cable company managed to set the CCI byte to 0x02 on five of the standard (non-premium) HD cable channels. Those are the channels that are causing the problem with my cablecards. Curiously, one out of three cards still works properly.

 

Ahh. got them to unpair and then re-pair the cards and now the missing channels are there. Strange that all other digital and HD channels worked prior to that. I also pushed the CCI issue up the service chain. Appears that when they added a few NBC HD channels just for the Olypics that those few other channels (I think all somehow NBC related) ended up with the CCI getting changed. Ironically, the new Olympic channels are all set to CCI = 0x00. Hopefully they will get it corrected so that the basic service channels are 0x00 again. I hate not being able to transfer shows.