[tt881]

On oddity on the unit this morning. It's offering a quality choice "Best, Basic, etc." for recordings on digital cable channels. It hasn't done this before up to now, and of course it's not supposed to say anything about the quality setting for digital channels.

When I tuned around I found a few digital channels where it didn't mention quality setting, but for most it did. One channel didn't mention the quality setting when I first tested it, then a minute later the quality level mention was back for new recordings on that channel.

Rebooting made no difference. Perhaps TW is screwing with the channel flags, but this still seems fairly odd given that digital channels are supposed to be recorded directly, where quality settings have no meaning and shouldn't be offered.

Everything else is behaving "normally" (with known glitches). Fan seemed to be very loud on the last boot, but I presume the fan runs on high while booting until Linux and power control quiet it down, and perhaps I just didn't notice this before given ambient room noise.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

 

[bkdtv]

There are no quality settings for digital channels, only analog channels.

If you are seeing the quality setting, that means you are no longer getting the digital version of that channel. Time Warner could be "screwing" with their system configuration, causing a loss of those digital channels.

 

[moyekj]

Tune to channels you are being prompted for quality on and then go to Diagnostics menu:
Tivo Central->Messages&Settings->Account&System Information->Diagnostics
If Modulation is QAM then it's a digital channel otherwise it's analog.

 

[tt881]

Yep, QAM 256. Yet as of this morning, when I hit record on this or most (but not all) other digital channels I get the "Record this showing at Best Quality" choice banner, instead of simply "Record this showing"...

 

[AbMagFab]

Yep, QAM 256. Yet as of this morning, when I hit record on this or most (but not all) other digital channels I get the "Record this showing at Best Quality" choice banner, instead of simply "Record this showing"...

What version of the software are you running?

 

[tt881]

Latest afaik - 8.1.7c2-01-2-652

This behavior is new today.

 

[AbMagFab]

Latest afaik - 8.1.7c2-01-2-652

This behavior is new today.

Are you writing that down from memory, or did you just check your Tivo?

And if it's new behavior today, then it's an analog channel (remapped by your CableCo) and you must be reading the diagnostics screen incorrectly.

 

[tt881]

No, I'm not going from memory, I checked the system screen just to be sure.
I didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

As for the diagnostics screen, let's do the program right now again...

TW Discovery pacific (DSCP) digital 210 cbl
Press record:
Record this showing at Best Quality

Left arrow out of control options
Tivo
Account & System Information
Diagnostics

-- Now it's flipping back and forth. On some tries it reads 210 cbl QAM, on other tries it reads 39 Analog. It is not consistent. TW has gotta be screwing around with the mapping. I'm e-mailing my tech contact -- there is another channel access issue that needs to be dealt with anyway. More later. Thanks.

 

[sfhub]

No, I'm not going from memory, I checked the system screen just to be sure.
I didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

Woops, there goes the office pool on what "tt" stands for in "tt881" Sorry couldn't resist, no offense.

 

[aaronwt]

I have quality settings in my season passes that were set up before I got FIOS. Before FIOS it was analog. Even though the season passes have that option for me, the recordings are from a digital channel and the setting doesn't affect it. If I delete the SP and add it again I don't get the quality setting option.

 

[tt881]

The situation continues to be confused. I see the following conditions:

1) Go to digital channel, recordings offer quality settings, go to diags,
channel is marked analog with analog channel number mapped

2) Go to digital channel, recordings offer quality settings, go to diags,
channel is marked analog with digital channel number displayed (not the
analog equivalent).

3) Got digital channel that does not have an analog equivalent -- records in
normal digital mode without asking for quality settings.

Before today, all digital channels recorded as digital channels and this mapping was not taking place.

Time Warner is trying to blame the TiVo or the cableCARDS (which are both diagnosing fine and behaving identically). I did get a new channel load upon a reboot just now (to cure the infamous "no video" problem previously reported, but this had no effect on this analog/digital mapping situation.

Of most concern may be condition (4) which I've seen several times,
where the "quality setting" option is occurring on the recording but the channel diags show digital, not analog. Strange.

 

[moyekj]

Note that in Diagnostics it also reports the frequency that the Tivo is tuning to for that channel. It may be useful to make note of the frequencies reported. For analog channels the frequency table is given here (in CATV table and pay attention to CATV Channel & Video Frequency columns):
http://www.csgnetwork.com/tvfreqtable.html
Sounds to me like the CableCard channel mapping information may be screwed up from the headend. By using the frequency reported you can tell the company where your Tivo is trying to tune for each trouble channel and then perhaps they can verify if that is correct or not.

 

[scottkathi]

Do you need to have cable cards installed to receive the digital signal? I have just set up my TiVo HD, but haven't installed cable cards yet... and everything is coming in as analog. I have Enhanced Cable, which I just discovered is all digital (at least, I think it is)...
Thanks, Scott

 

[tt881]

Reception of digital cable channels would always require use of cableCARDS on the TiVo HD.

 

[tt881]

Regarding the channel mapping, I did verify some time ago that the TiVo is tuning to analog channels when it should be tuning to digital ones. E.g. tune to digital 121, but the diags clearly show that it's actually tuned to analog 39. So the mapping is "wrong" -- or being switcheroo'd -- but so far they won't admit it -- they claim the TiVo must be wrong, of course.

 

[andyf]

Reception of digital cable channels would always require use of cableCARDS on the TiVo HD.

On the advertised channel numbers. The QAM tuners are quite capable of pulling in the digital cable channels if they are unencrypted, they just won't be on the channel numbers you expect. The cable cards map these channels to the numbers you expect in addition to de-encrypting encrypted channels.

Search for "QAM Mapping", there's quite a discussion going on by people who want to receive the channels and get guide data without actually paying for the package.

 

[tt881]

I should have been clearer on this. Yes, it's true that QAM tuners will pull in unencrypted digital channels. But on most systems, all digital channels are encrypted, so the QAM capabilities are generally useless without the cableCARDs.