TiVo + cable card wackiness = headache
If you have a series 3 TiVo or a TiVo HD, you can get cable cards from your cable company in order to receive all of the tasty, encrypted channels that you pay for. Of course, this will require that someone, somewhere at your local cable company actually knows how cable cards work or at least how to install and set them up properly.
For all you wannabe cable technicians out there, here’s a little troubleshooting tip. When someone has problems with their cable card and you hook up a cable DVR and show them that it works, this does not immediately mean that the TiVo is at fault. Putting a new card in their TiVo and seeing it fail would point to the TiVo , but only if you actually took the right steps to get the new cable card working.
I have yet to meet a cable technician that can look at the cable card diagnostics screen and understand what it means. But thanks to this document on TiVo ‘s web site, I was able to tell the Insight yayhoos exactly what to do to fix my recent cable card problem. Among other things, it tells you how to diagnose if the card is communicating with the cable headend and most importantly if the card is properly paired with the slot it is in – pairing seems to be the number one problem with getting a cable card working correctly.
Power to the people!
I agree completely. And sadly, the Insight techs ‘act’ like they know what is up and don’t want to listen (generally). I will keep that link in mind for the future.
Comment by MarkP — December 30, 2008 @ 9:40 pmI hope that in the last 3+ years the situation has improved: techs are coming out to put a cablecard in the Tivo tomorrow. That doc link above is dead but there’s plenty of fodder when you Google search [site:http://www.tivo.com/assets/ "cablecard"]. I’ll be doing a little home work tonight.
Comment by D Day — May 31, 2011 @ 11:50 amDoubtful… how did it go?
Comment by jason — June 1, 2011 @ 8:23 pmPoor guy who showed up was a sub-sub-contractor guy who had no clue what a ‘multimedia cable card’ was but was excited to try something new. The cablecard installation went well, but the tuning adapter never synched. Blink blink blink. Which means I’m getting half the HD channels I should be getting. Which means a tech is showing up tomorrow with a new tuning adapter.
HD looks great tho, and I’m really starting to warm to this Tivo Premiere after some initial disappointments.
Comment by D Day — June 6, 2011 @ 2:33 pm