Morph3ous's Weblog

Please note the last update at the bottom of this post. The issue was once again solved by a firmware update from Toshiba.
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It took more than a month of back and forth to get the CableCARD working in the first place. Once the CableCARD was set up properly and the firmware for the Toshiba TV had been corrected everything was great… for a little more than 4 years. Then came Tuesday, September 8 2009 and everything changed.

If you’ve read my prior posts about Comcast and using a CableCARD you’ll see that it was a huge ordeal to get the CableCARD working in the first place.

The CableCARD is now not working properly. Many channels are working, but there are a large number that do not. When flipping to one of the channels the is not working the TV shows a black screen, then it goes to channel 3 and a message comes up stating the CableCARD is acquiring the channel information. Then once this information has been acquired, the TV changes to channel 1, but sometimes another channel.

I went through all of the HD channels to note which ones do not work. Here is the list:

• SunSports/FSN HD
• ESPNHD
• ESPN2 HD
• TNT HD
• A&E HD
• Food HD
• HGTV HD
• USA HD
• TBS HD
• History HD
• Discovery HD
• Animal Planet HD
• Sci-Fi HD

These are all channels we received before and are entitled to receive. I did not go through all of the standard definition channels, but I did note that ESPN and ESPN2 standard definition also exhibit the same behavior. This is not just limited to HD.

The problem began occurring on Tuesday, September 8 2009.

The same problems we had before getting this to work are now haunting us again. You would think that in 4 years Comcast would figure out how to get a CableCARD fixed and to properly escalate the issue to an engineer when needed.

I wanted to go through the standard channels rather than crying foul and going to higher levels as I had before. The idea was to give Comcast the benefit of the doubt. That was a mistake. Here’s the sequence of events that so far has not solved the problem:

• Called Comcast on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. We did some basic troubleshooting and they “hit” the card several times to no avail. We then scheduled a technician to come on Saturday, September 12, 2009.

  Saturday came and went and no one showed up. We called and whoever we had spoken to on Tuesday never even scheduled the appointment. We insisted someone be sent on Sunday.

• Sunday, a technician arrived, but he was never told this was a CableCARD issue and did not have one in his van. He had them hit the card several times and replaced some splitters in the house that were not faulty.

  The technician was really trying his best and wanted to do something, but the company had kind of screwed him over. He helped us schedule a technician to come on Tuesday, September 15, 2009.

• The technician, a Technical Operations Supervisor, Ryan came on September 15, 2009. He had a CableCARD, but this was just luck as his notes did not specify this was a CableCARD issue. He tried to get it working by trying a new CableCARD as well as hitting the card several times. This did not work.

  He promised to forward our information to an engineer to have the issue resolved. We were to be called by the supervisor shortly.

It is Saturday, September 26, 2009 and the issue has yet to be resolved and we have not heard a thing. This is unacceptable. Why does our city keep renewing your franchise agreement?

Update – Tuesday, September 28, 2009:
We emailled the technician and the engineer, Lazaro, came today. He tried around 8 CableCARDs. He also spoke with the DAC about our setup and everything checked out. There was a recent channel re-alignment that is likely the genesis of this problem. When we originally tried to get the TV working with a CableCARD years ago, there were firmware issues related to frequency response that had to be fixed. We are now getting in touch with Toshiba to check for an update.

We called Toshiba and new firmware is available and is to be shipped to us. Hopefully this will correct the issue.

Update – Monday, October 5, 2009:
The firmware arrived. It is Seine version 1.6.5. I installed it following the instructions Toshiba sent to the letter. The CableCARD is now working perfectly.