I think I'm passed this now. The problems with the 8 channels resolved themselves over the weekend and have been working since. I can watch CNN again :) I don't know what changed but I now get a strong 100% signal lock on them. I assume Verizon changed something since I told them which channels were the problem.
My landlord sent a bill and I called Verizon. I will say, their phone people have always been good and helpful. This one (Steve) hadn't heard this one before but I can't say I blame him. He forwarded me to his supervisor Paula who gave me a discount off my bills. While it was an odd request, the fact that my install took 3 visits and 14 hours was a bit ridiculous, particularly with people leaving the job in the middle. Also, the fact that to simplify the install I added TV service to my bill probably helped. My landlord agreed to pay part of the total since he was partially at fault in this as well. As it turns out, I paid a little and I'm ok with that.
The only outstanding problem I have is that 3x Fast Forward on the HDTiVo doesn't work, it jumps around all over the places and is pretty much unusable. This seems to be a TiVo problem specific to the HD TiVo since it doesn't digitally encode the video itself but depends on Verizon's encoding that they send over the wire. There must be something they don't agree on. According to the TiVo forums they know about the problem and are working on it. I hope it's resolved soon, but expect it to take a few months.
My internet service has been good. I've done speed tests and have actually gotten 5Mbps download and about 1.7Mbps upload. Hopefully this is the last post on this topic.
3 comments:
Do you notice any diference in the FIOS HD vs the Comcast HD?
Honestly no. The lineup is different and FIOS has a couple of more channels than Comcast.
In the sales pitch they tried tell me that FIOS digital TV looked better than comcast and I pushed back. Digital is digital, it's 1s and 0s, if the image is coming through, it's the same 1s and 0s. Have you tried swapping the digital cables between a CD player and a receiver (not the analog cables), you won't hear a difference. Every notice that there aren't high quality video cables for computer monitors? They're digital, they're all the same.
Now the fact that my HDTiVo is having some problems with FF and the mpg encoding FIOS uses says maybe they encode differently. If their source is analog and they do the encoding, they could do the a-to-d conversion with better quality, but I thought the broadcast sources are digital now, but I could be wrong on that.
I believe cable TV uses analog transmission even for its digital channels. This is to say that the signal is modulated just like it would be for over the air transmission (with significantly smaller channel loss).
This is distinctly different than something like ethernet or other networking techniques which are actually digital. I'm not sure what FIOS uses.
As you mentioned, the encoding could also differ. DTV uses MPEG which is a lossy compression, although I would expect this to be set by the source provider.
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