Sunday, March 11, 2007

FIOS Woes IV

I thought I should post some progress. First off I have the bedroom TV and cable box all configured with my old TiVo. I dug up an old Universal Remote and have that all configured and working fine.

I tried video chatting with my sister and it wasn't working. I realized it was the new Actiontec router that came with FIOS, I had to open the appropriate ports. Configuring port forwarding for this is why I dumped my D-Link 524 and was happy with my Linksys WRT54GC which did UPnP which automatically configured this. Apparently this isn't on by default on the Actiontec and trying to turn it on wasn't obvious and didn't seem to work. I thought I'd have to configure the dozen or so ports by hand and started that but I found it had a preset for iChat which did all the relevant ports and that worked. I could video chat with my sister so I could help her debug her computer issues (she wanted a different image for her IM picture, otherwise her mac is working fine).

I've heard from my landlord for his bill. It's a lot but he was calm and reasonable while talking with me. I'll call Verizon tomorrow (when a supervisor might be in the office if I need it) and probably have them come out to adjust the signal to my HDTiVo. The HDTiVo also has some fast forward problems with FIOS, it tends to jump around at differing speeds. The HDTiVo uses the digital encoding that Verizon sends and is a little confused by their format. TiVo knows about the problem and is apparently working on it. For now I FF at double speed not triple speed for you TiVo knowledgable folks.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do I find the preset for ichat for the router? Any help you could provide would be MUCH appreciated...

Howard said...

If you have the Actiontec router with the latest firmware, it's under Firewall, in Port Forwarding, click add and fill out the fields. There's a choice under protocol for Apple iChat.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much - hope this works!