Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Fraking TiVo

So I turned on the TV this morning and found a grey screen on all the channels. Well not quite all the channels, I could get NBC and CBS but not in HD and I couldn't get CNN or HBO, etc. Today FiOS was supposed to add about 30 HD channels to my lineup so I figured it was an issue with that.

Rebooted the TiVo, no help. Googled for info about this, no help. Checked the CableCard status and TiVo said "Wrong Card State". I looked at the CableCard menus and it said Wait State though they were still paired. My Set top box in the bedroom was working fine but I rebooted the router they gave me because I know the set top box uses it in an odd way, maybe the cable cards did too? No Help.

I searched on the TiVo support site and didn't find too much that helped and their support line didn't open until 9am ET.

So I figured that in the FiOS channel upgrade something got screwed up with the cable cards. I called FiOS and after a short wait got a nice guy who didn't know much about this stuff. He actually said they see many CableCard users. I said I know, it seems that way. I had to pull out a CableCard to read the serial number on it. He tried a few things as I read stuff from the CableCard menus that TiVo exposes. In the mean time he asked a few questions like "what channels don't you get". Well I subscribe to several hundred, I didn't go through them all. I said I get CBS (4) and NBC (7) but not CNN (80) or NBC-HD (807). He goes through a few things and then we realize that CNN moved to 100 and I get that and that I get HBO on 400 and Starz HD worked on 840. It might have all been working fine and I was just checking channels that were now blank (80 and 807 are now unused). So that was fine but the TiVo still didn't have the right lineup.

I checked for messages but found nothing and before going through guided setup to get a new lineup (a 30+ minute process) I noticed it was now 9:01 so I called TiVo. I got a nice woman and she confirmed that TiVo still had the old channel lineup for Verizon FiOS Burlington. She said it would take 24-48 hours which is annoying. I said I had notice of this change over a month ago and got a paper copy of the new lineup a couple of weeks ago, so TiVo and FiOS had plenty of time to talk. Ugh. Now I see this thread on the TiVo Community forums. We'll see how long this takes. I can manually tune the channels but most all of my season passes are screwed up. Fortunately there isn't too much on this week; Jon Stewart is on vacation and the Olympics I tend to tune manually.

Nice start to the day. Off to a massage.

2 comments:

The Dad said...

My Tivo Series 2 on extended basic cable still runs like a champ!

I was just thinking, though, about your description of the troubleshooting. With my Panasonic Plasma hanging on the wall removing a cablecard would require three people. Glad I don't have a cablecard.

Howard said...

My Series 1 still works too. It just needs the right channel lineup.

While some TVs take cable cards, mine go into the TiVo not the TV. The TiVo is not hanging on the wall.