How Can we Lobby Tivo to support information for QAM Tuners?

Comcast issued me cablecards with only limited-basic + HD ($13 + $5).

 

Try calling the cable company again and get a different customer service rep. CSRs these days can be totally clueless, no matter what company you deal with (cell phone, satellite, cable, Tivo). You might get a different one who actually knows what's going on.

As for the extra cost in general..... I'd love to get HBO, Showtime and Cinemax service in HD too, but the cable company wants $$$$$ for that, so I don't pay. It's reasonable for the cable company to charge extra for premium programming, but it's not Tivo's fault if you have to pay extra to get HD. The cable company's rates are public information, and you can easily determine if you're willing to pay for the extra service before purchasing the S3 unit.

Finally, if you really can't get CableCARD service so you can get the clear QAM channels, look into attaching an antenna to your Tivo to get over-the-air broadcasts. In general, the clear QAM channels are the same ones broadcast OTA, and OTA is free. The Series 3 happily accepts both antenna and cable at the same time.

 

$5 is for HD set top box rental, which you shouldn't have to pay unless you have that box from Comcast.

 

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Impossible for many people, including myself. I live in a valley on the bottom floor of a 5-story condo.

We've also clearly debunked the theory that CableCards are always a negligible cost. Did you see the news that Comcast are raising rates again by 6.5%?

There is no reason TiVo cannot do what other HD-DVRs have been able to do: manual tweaking of the channel map. Overblown fears of massive customer confusion obviously did not stop Sony and others from including this useful feature. The bottom line is, excluding it will keep some consumers from ever buying an S3. This is bad. TiVo needs every sub it can get.

 

I was only trying to be helpful.

Comcast is raising their rates for all customers, including the 99.9% who do not own Tivo Series 3 units. That has nothing to do with CableCARD.

As I understand it, the FCC requires cable system operators to make the CableCARDs available at nominal cost. The real issue is that some cable system operators are requiring customers to subscribe to programming packages they don't want in order to get CableCARD. I don't know if that's legal or not, but that's the cable company's fault, not Tivo's.

Tivo doesn't have an obligation to offer users access to every bit of functionality that is ultimately possible with their hardware, especially when doing so is likely to cost them money by support issues in the long run.

 

You are telling people to go out and upgrade their cable service to solve this problem, exposing them to higher costs and higher rate increases in the future (rate increases to a "Basic Cable" package will always be less than increases to a "Basic Cable+Digital Gateway+HD+CableCard" package). All to free up TiVo resources to fix the issues you want fixed. Are you asking me to subsidize your pet features?

They have an obligation to sell to as large a market as they can. You are totally blowing the implications of this feature way out of proportion.

 

I'm saying that Tivo doesn't deserve the blame for cable company pricing policies.

 

As I recall, QAM remapping is your pet feature, not mine.

My "pet features" are either:

- bug fixes for debilitating flaws in the current software (toxic recordings, partial recordings) which have appeal to 100% of the user base
- or Series 2 features that should be part of the product but aren't there (MRV, Tivo-To-Go) that have appeal to the vast majority of users.

Go ahead and put up a poll and find out how many people want QAM channel remapping, if they even know what it is.

 

This is true. The Sony reads the PSIP data that the local stations send as part of the digital broadcast. For those that done't know, PSIP data is what tells your tuner that when it receives digital channel 32, to map it to 4.1 (or what ever). In my area, local channel 4 has their digital broadcast on channel 32. PSIP data makes it show up as 4.1. Tivo can read PSIP data from the over the air tuner. It should be easy to make it read the same data from the cable input and map channe 112.1 to 4.1.

 

According to what I've read in the forum, cable companies are not required to send the PSIP information along with the cable feed and quite often, they don't.

 

I am not sure about the ability to take the PSIP data out. It's part of the digital bit stream. Many cable systems pass the digital OTA received signal unmodified.

 

On a station which is broadcasting one HD channel and one or two SD channels, isn't the PSIP data attached to the full data stream, not the individual channels? If so, the cable company would have to add this info to the indivudual channel. They aren't going to pay to do this.

 

From what I've seen capturing entire OTA transport streams with a HD PC capture card and examining them with TSReaderLite the PSIP information is stored along with each substream - each substream has a video track, 1 or more audio tracks, 1 or more CC tracks and a PSIP track. For my cable company re-transmissions for whatever reasons most have the PSIP information stripped with the exception of ABC HD and FOX HD.

 

This inconsistancy supports my contention that most, or at least some, cable systems probably are not set up right.

 

This really has no bearing on QAM channel mapping. As long as I know the frequencies of the clear QAM channels (which I do) and have a means of tracking any changes (HD local channels have not changed for 2 years in my headend) I don't really care if there is PSIP information in the cable re-transmissions or not.

 

Cable plants that are 750MHz or greater are required to carry the PSIP data for all unencrypted channels if it is supplied by the broadcaster.

See 47CFR76.640

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/...ccess.gpo.gov/cfr_2005/octqtr/47cfr76.640.htm

 

Yes, you have the frequencies, but as you said earlier, you had to use a PC to find all of them. You admitted that the Tivo couldn't find them. At this point we don't know if the failure to find them is hardware or software related on the Tivo end or hardware setup related on the cable plant end. A combination of these may (or may not) be very hard to identify. I don't know whether or not some relatively simple software can fix it. If it's problem with the S3's chip set with some cable plant hardware, then Tivo is not likely to be able to address this without going to S3.1. If it's a problem with improper configuration of the cable plant equipment setup, that's pretty hard for them to identify on a case by case basis and still may be hard for them to fix.

My brother just went down our vacation home Wednesday. 3 weeks ago our clear QAM TV picked up 8 of 11 clear QAM HD channels. The tuner also picked up 3 clear QAM SD channels (that you could find up running channel up through the frequencies) that were not identified with a given cable channel number. Yesterday he could get 1 HD clear QAM channel. That may or may not indicate changing frquency assignments (perhaps affected by the NFL's manipulation of their channel and availability of games, but that's subject for another day) but the disppearance of most, but not all clear QAM channels is certainly troubling. It doesn't prove anything, but it's troubling.

My comment about inconsistent transmission of PSIP info by cable companies infers that other technical issues also probably exist with cable system transmissions and some of these issues may affect identification of channels and/or frequencies by the S3.

I think it's fair to say that we paid big bucks for the S3 and continue to pay for support and Tivo should repay us by at least briefly acknowledging the issue publicly with possible causes and with a disclaimer that they have their programming priorities and this may not be amoing them. I know they have good reasons for not doing it, but I think they should.

My PC clear QAM tuner card once found a hard core video. PPV, I assume. Maybe Tivo is trying to protect us from that. If so, they are taking the wrong approach as someone in another thread saw some of this on his Tivo that he'd bought for his children to be able to watch without monitoring.

 

But how do we verify that they do? Perhaps part of the solution lies in having the Tivo tell us when there are unencrypted channels without PSIP data. I wouldn't think that Tivo is looking for PSIP data, but for the virtual cable channel number, so adding a manual unsupported mapping feature now might be superceded by an automatic one later. The second solution may require modifying the Tivo DB layout and may require modifying the programming data that we receive via phone or Internet. I wouldn't expect automatic support soon, if ever.

THis assumes that local HD channels are unencypted, which depending on who you believe, is or is not required by the FCC.

 

Wow, I thought everyone gave up on this two months ago, like I did after
my twelve e-mail replies back and forth with the TiVo "lineup agents"
finally led me to sadly accept the fact they were never going to give in
on this issue (out of stubbornness as far as I can tell, because it is
*NOT* a complex programming issue at all.)

First, my plea to TiVo is limited in scope perhaps from what others are
asking for. I do see that some people appear to be asking for the ability
to map all digital cable stations to their cable company's corresponding
QAM channels. Well, I do concede that is the purpose of and why TiVo
added support for the CableCard.

No, what I'm asking for is trivial, because ALL OF THE DATA IS ALREADY IN
MY TIVO! I am *ONLY* talking about broadcast television stations (ABC,
CBS, CW, FOX, PBS, NBC, etc.) which many/most of our cable providers re-
broadcast unencrypted, specifically the HD channels, which are the ones of
interest specifically those TiVo owners who shelled out top-dollar for the
Series 3 in the first place.

Here's what I'm talking about, as an example, because I find that many
posts in this and other threads on this forum really are arguing against
something they clearly aren't fully understanding.

During setup of a TiVo S3, one enters in a zip code, so that the
channel:station database is populated with the relevant "ANT" (over-the-
air) channel:station entries for one's viewing area.

Let's use an example, suppose one's S3's CHANNEL LIST screen looked
something like this:


2_1 ANT KABCDT [KABC-DT digital frequency 52, ABC affiliate]
3_1 ANT KFOXDT [KFOX-DT digital frequency 53, FOX affiliate]
24 CBL USA
25 CBL TNT
...
101_1 CBL *
101_2 CBL *


Now, let's assume that channel 101_1 is a clear QAM channel the cable
company is re-broadcasting KABC-DT on and channel 101_2 is KFOX-DT.

In order to use 101_1 and 101_2 properly, that is, to have guide data
associated with it, all we need is either for the TiVo "line agents" to do
it or to add some simple mechanism to let the end-user do it, to set an
association (pointer, link, whatever programming term one might
understand) between QAM channel 101_1 to station KABC-DT and QAM channel
101_2 to KFOX-DT.

That's all I'm talking about. As they say, this ain't rocket science, it's
basic computer programming concepts (data structures). The data structures
that TiVo uses to associate station KABC-DT to ANT channel 2_1, in this
example, can just as easily be used to also associate station KABC-DT to
QAM channel 101_1.

So, frustratingly, the guide data I personally want for my clear QAM HD
broadcast channels is ALREADY ON MY TIVO S3, but alas because TiVo doesn't
want to support it, those clear QAM channels are useless for recording
purposes, which is the entire point of owning a TiVo in the first place.

Now, people with CableCards working in their S3s can roll their eyes all
they want, but digital cable here is an *EXTRA* $25 per month, simply to
allow people in my area the ability to record say CSI and Lost in HD. With only
trivial changes to my S3's configuration, TiVo could do the right thing and associate, or allow me to associate, *existing* station guide data already on my S3 box to my clear QAM channels.