Switched Digital Video (SDV) and BH?

[TampaTiVo]

Hello all.

I normally post over at the TiVo Community Forums, and I've seen mention of these forums and found my way over here.

Long time Brighthouse customer (even going back to Time Warner, Shaw Cable, FSN, etc.) near Pasco county.

Just got a new Series 3 TiVo installed with Cablecards, and it went pretty well. The contracted installer (Knight, I think it was?) was a nice guy. Hopefully as more time goes by, cable learns more and more about these devices and they become less of a mystery.

Anyway, I've noticed some odd behavior when tuning channels with the new cablecard TiVo. I tried automatically recording a program on one of the high def upper tier channels - I think it was Universal High Def - channel 708? and TiVo seemed like it didn't pick up the signal from the channel. I was left with a recorded program of 0:00 duration. I also notice a slight lag when tuning in some of the digital movie channels manually.

Is it possible that Brighthouse is using, or plans to use, switched digital video for some of its channels in this area? As far as I know, this could create problems with 3rd party cablecard devices like TiVo being able to properly tune those channels.

For those of you in the know at BHN, I'm hoping the answer is "no" - that would eliminate the possibility that this problem is being caused by a SDV channel.

Thanks!

[bdraw]

The problem is definitively not from SDV.
I have recorded a few shows from UHD as well as other HD channels with my Series3 without problems.

If they were using SDV those channels wouldn't work at all with the Series3, since the Series3 is not capable of sending the command up the line to let the cable headend know what channel you want to watch.

You may have a problem with one of your cable cards.
Try this, next time manually switching to a channel is really slow change to a lower analog or ATSC channel. Then press the LiveTV button to switch tuners and switch to the same digital channel to see how fast that tuner tunes that channel. If the problem doesn't go away then it isn't the CableCARD since you forced it to use the other CableCARD.

Tuning digital Channels with the Series3 has been anything but fast, but seems about the same speed as I remember when I used to have a SA 8300 which was about 3 years ago.