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Many people are complaining about pixellation. I urge you to run the signal strength test first and also check cables and splitters carefully. Here's my story:
I bought an TiVo HD last week. I hooked it up to my cable and found that I could only receive about half of the OTA HD locals channels that Comcast carries in QAM. The others were very marginal signal strength or even zero strength.
I was using a high quality splitter so I knew that wasn't the problem. But for my initial hookup I grabbed 6 ft of "random" RG-59 cable I had lying around (because the cable had easy to use connectors on it).
This coax turned out to be the problem. The QAM channels Comcast uses for carrying my HD locals are up at 600 MHz plus. My random 6 ft coax attenuated those signals *much more* than the 3.5 dB splitter and even much more than a 6 dB inline attenuator I added as an experiment once I realized what was happening.
According to my cable modem status page (the other half of the split signal) I'm receiving about -9 dBmV of signal out of the splitter. That's just a little better than the lower end of the -10 dBmV recommended for my cable modem at broadband reports. And the TiVo HD works reliably with that signal level.
Unfortunately just 6 ft of poor coax is all it takes to drastically attenuate signals at 600 MHz. And because it sort of "works", nobody thinks about the coax. Well, you should!
What does the wiring in your house look like? If it has "grown like topsy" over the years, it may be the problem.
I bought an TiVo HD last week. I hooked it up to my cable and found that I could only receive about half of the OTA HD locals channels that Comcast carries in QAM. The others were very marginal signal strength or even zero strength.
I was using a high quality splitter so I knew that wasn't the problem. But for my initial hookup I grabbed 6 ft of "random" RG-59 cable I had lying around (because the cable had easy to use connectors on it).
This coax turned out to be the problem. The QAM channels Comcast uses for carrying my HD locals are up at 600 MHz plus. My random 6 ft coax attenuated those signals *much more* than the 3.5 dB splitter and even much more than a 6 dB inline attenuator I added as an experiment once I realized what was happening.
According to my cable modem status page (the other half of the split signal) I'm receiving about -9 dBmV of signal out of the splitter. That's just a little better than the lower end of the -10 dBmV recommended for my cable modem at broadband reports. And the TiVo HD works reliably with that signal level.
Unfortunately just 6 ft of poor coax is all it takes to drastically attenuate signals at 600 MHz. And because it sort of "works", nobody thinks about the coax. Well, you should!
What does the wiring in your house look like? If it has "grown like topsy" over the years, it may be the problem.