TV reinstall hell!

Posted on February 5, 2007 
Filed Under Ranting

I month or two back I picked up a second Tivo to use in the bedroom. It’s one of the Series 2, dual tuner types that let you record 2 shows at once. They way this is done is you use a splitter on the cable coming out of the wall and plug one directly in to Tivo and the second goes in to your cable box as normal… The feed going directly in to the Tivo will pick up the low channels (in my case, 2 - 99) and the other will pick up all the channels, or 1 - 999.

When I installed it myself something wasn’t working quite right. It wasn’t completely screwed, so I didn’t get around to fixing it right away… Then, the unthinkable happened. On the Tivo downstairs I had 3 programs set up to record via the Season Pass that all came on at the exact same time. I didn’t realize that there were 3 shows I actually cared about on TV at all, let alone on the same day and time… Sadly, I didn’t realize this until Tuesday when I tried to watch Heroes and nearly blew a gasket when I found out it didn’t record. Thankfully, NBC.com is kind enough to let you watch the entire show of Heroes directly from their site, so the crisis was averted.

After figuring out where the problem was, I made a quick adjustment and moved the High Stakes Poker season pass to the TV upstairs. No sweat, all’s right in the world. NOT!

The following Monday when I climbed in to bed around 11:00 and loaded up Tivo to watch some poker before sleep, I was upset once again when my show DID record, but the channel was completely black.

After messing with every cable configuration and every TV and Tivo setting, I finally gave up and figured it was time to call in the heavy hitters. I call Cox and ask them to come out and check on the issue. The guy that came out did a couple things:

1. Replaced a coax cable that was bad
2. Replaced the cable box that was faulty
3. Re-wired everything so that I was taking advantage of the TV’s HD capabilities.

While I’m thrilled with #1 and #2, #3 here has completely hosed me! The way the wiring is set up, I can only use Tivo to record shows on any of the low channels. Plus, I know have to jump through a couple hoops to get back and forth between sets of channels. While this would be fine if it was just me watching the TV, but I’d have to draw a map for the wife just so she could watch TV. This configuration was NOT going to work!

After putting it off for another week, it was finally time to do something about it. So, I spent about 90 minutes today messing around with the wiring trying to come up with a combination that would leave me with everything I wanted. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t going to happen. So, after getting really really frustrated, I was going to put the wiring back to almost the exact same way that the guy from Cox had installed it, but I was going to need one additional cable. When I left for Best Buy, everything seemed to be working except for this one final piece. Oh, how sadly mistaken I was…

When I get back from Best Buy I install the new cable, move the TV stand (which is quite heavy, btw) back in place and sit down to make a little how-to page for the TV. I now have 3 input sources going to the TV:

#1 AV1, This is the DVD player - working perfectly
#2 Cable3, This is for Tivo and all channels 0-99 (using the newly installed cable) - working perfectly
#3 Component, This uses 5 cables and should allow me to watch channels 1 - 999 - NO SOUND and I can only get channels 100 and above.

OK, I could live with the channels 100 and above thing, but no sound? This fucking worked before I left! What the fuck happened?!?!?!!

I tried 2 separate sets of cables for this, but no dice. Nothing worked. No sound is how it’s been left…

I was able to move my season pass for Heroes to this TV which should work no problem since cable3 is working and has sound, but still, I’m overly frustrated and may need to borrow the help of a fellow geek (cough cough Todd cough cough) to try and solve this one.

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Comments

4 Responses to “TV reinstall hell!”

  1. jason on February 5th, 2007 9:12 am

    I’ve heard about Cox and Tivo not playing nice before. It has been suggested to me more than once that if I want a Tivo (instead of the Cox DVR), I should go with DirecTV/Tivo setup.

    The fact that people are switching TV services to get a Tivo says a lot about the Tivo brand. (And not so much for the Cox brand). It could be worse, in KC I had Comcast. We eventually started calling the service “Comcastic” because of how “great” they were.

  2. Todd on February 6th, 2007 10:34 am

    I don’t know what the heck you have going on. I’ve set up this setup before and it all worked peachy. The sound…I’m not sure what your deal is there. This is how I’d set it up though. Without an HD Tivo your HD package is going to be very complicated and I’d skip the whole thing, especially with…less technical…people wanting to just f!@@ing watch TV. Regardless it’s
    1) cable C0 to splitter
    2) test split ends (C1 and C2) in tv minus anything else before continuing
    3) C1 goes to Cox digital tuner box and out as C3
    4) Plug C3 directly to TV and test
    5) C2 and C3 go into the Tivo C2 for low channels, C3 for high
    6) Tivo IR controller hangs delicately on the front of the cable box
    7) From the Tivo will be your Red/White/S-video connector bundle that goes to the Television.
    8) In the Tivo itself you have to tell it what your inputs and outputs are but there’s big pictures and stuff and it’s pretty self explanatory

    At my count we have 4 Coax cables and a Dual RCA/S-video doo-dad. I’d pull it all apart and try again. My guess is that step 4 is going to have no sound and that there’s something wrong with the cable box but that’s just a gut feeling. Good luck!

  3. John on February 6th, 2007 10:53 am

    Todd, you are some sort of wizard! No, I haven’t gone through your steps yet, but, while watching TV last night the mother F’n cable box died. The display panel started freaking out spitting out all sorts of garbage and then just bit the dust…

    I guess I need to start by replacing that prior to doing anything else. ugg!

  4. Alex on February 6th, 2007 4:04 pm

    I will make a modification to Todd’s excellent information in that I believe the Tivo DT has only one coax input, therefore C3 should be replaced with a Red/White/S-Video bundle.
    Hopefully all this craziness will be solved in a few years when Cox finally implements the TiVo interface on its DVRs. Good luck with your cabling woes!

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