Twice we have found our recordings replaced by programs we do not record. Rebooting the modem and the DVR remedy the situation and bring our recordings back.
Is it truly a DVR with the recordings on our box, or just links to recordings stored at Comcast?
Comcast is my cable provider, and I have a cable box/DVR provided by them. But they have several models of cables boxes and cable box/DVRs. Which one do you have?
I’m fairly sure that the one I have has the recordings on the box (on a local hard drive). But I know that Cablevision was experimenting with a remote DVR, in which the programs would be stored centrally.
The easy way to check would be to disconnect the incoming cable, and try to access a recording. If it’s remote, you’ll get nothing. If it’s local, you’ll be able to view.
I have Dish, so can’t speak to Comcast’s system, but I do know that if the satellite dish is obstructed (by a snow/heavy thunderstorm for example. Not often, but can happen) I can view DVR recordings without a problem.
Not necessarily. Cable company DVRs generally encrypt the content on disk, and some will not play it back if the cable connection isn’t present. That’s to prevent you from taking your DVR to your friend’s house and watching all the shows with him over there.
Bwuh? Why would they even care about that? Seems as harmless as, and much less probable than, him watching it at your place.
Cable DVRs are such a poor product, in every respect, that I am amazed they are so popular and there are so few market alternatives. Users pay a fortune in rentals for limited capabilities, poor reliability and the honor of running a 100-140 watt appliance 24/7/365 so they can time-shift stuff that’s available on on-demand anyway. Craziness.
Well, the real reason is that the STB has to validate itself back with the headend before it will decrypt the recordings, in an attempt to deter stealing content.
I had Dishnetwork when I lived in the boonies, and it is the same with Comcast. That truly sucks; nothing to watch when the cable is out.
I have a Comcast DVR with maybe 70 hours of programs recorded on it. I was doing pretty well managing my storage allotment, which was hovering around 90% for a long time, then all of a sudden my storage allotment only shows that I’m using one fifth of my drive. I still have the same shows recorded.
I’m trying to figure out if my disk is really full but it just can’t figure out how full or if it was never full in the first place.
The problem I’m having the last couple of days: click on ‘guide’ to look for a program, and suddenly I guess the DVR has decided I’ve looked around enough and defaults to the channel I currently tuned to. WTF?
While I agree with you that a lot of DVRs are pretty crappy products (since the cable company provides the lowest bargain unit they can get) but I disagree with your last bit there. Not only is a lot of stuff not available on-demand, but even when it is, they frequently won’t let you fast forward, pause, or rewind, which makes watching stuff a pain. Or it’ll be non-HD quality.
I have used Tivo for a number of years, and when I purchased the first one, it was auto-tuned to record EVERYTHING Kardashian-related. 
It made me wonder if this was done at the factory to boost the programs’ ratings, and I had to call customer service to get it deleted. :eek:
I have had two other units, and never experienced anything like that with either one.
You got one that was tested and the test guy was messing with your head.
You can hear the noise of the harddrive whirring if its in a quiet room, and even see the HDD if you look through the vent holes on the case (might depend on model, but on mine you can, don’t even need to search, it’s right there). That’d be a hell of a waste of money to put them in all the DVR boxes if they were just going to record remotely and serve it out. Also, if you’ve ever used On Demand, you’d know how laggy and poorly controllable remote served shows are on Comcast compared to locally hosted recordings on these boxes.
Comcast has been transitioning from the older MPEG2 to the newer MPEG4 compression algorithm over the past few years. They roll it out in different markets at different times. MPEG4 is about 5 times as efficient as MPEG2, which is pretty much the ratio you’re seeing, so dollars to donuts your area recently switched.
I wrote the filesystem used in most Comcast DVRs starting around 2005 or so. I don’t know what they’re doing in recent years, but I can assure you that at least up to a few years ago they were definitely recording shows onto the hard disk.
–Mark
Were they accessible when the user could not connect to the cable provider?
As I said previously in the thread - cable providers encrypt all content on the disk so you can’t remove the disk and steal the content. In at least some cases, the keys have to be validated at the head end, so if the cable box can’t communicate with the head end, it won’t decrypt what’s on the disk.
Thanks again. 