I’m a loyal user of the local cable TV company for my Internet and cable television needs. (Phone too, actually.) The service I get is good and the options reasonable, and I’m not a big fan of satellite dishes on the roof. I’ll certainly endure one if I have to (like at the cottage) but in the city I’m happy to let them pipe a piece of cable straight into my house.
Digital/personal video recording boxes have become a godsend. They have changed the way I watch TV. However, I have a busy schedule and we often get behind our regular TV watching. We used to use VCRs to record all our programming (don’t laugh, but we had three – two would record stuff and we’d watch on the third). Truthfully if not for HDTV they would still work reasonably well – although we tended to tape stuff on EP so that we could cram a bunch of stuff on a tape. Still, we had to remember to change the tapes when they were full.
A PVR box fixes that. Record stuff at will (even two at once on our boxes). Watch at will, even if you’re recording already or haven’t finished recording the event. Rewind and pause live television. You’ve all seen the commercials. It’s super convenient. The only real disadvantage is that the content is tied to the box on which you recorded it. (Soon my cable company will have multi-room PVRs which will help, but I still won’t easily be able to take what I recorded somewhere outside the building. Still, it’s very livable.)
The hard disks in these boxes are surprisingly small (160 GB) and now that we’re recording so much television in HD format, the disks fill up fast. No matter – the boxes have an eSATA port for an external drive.
Well, problem. The cable box had a weird issue when an external drive was attached. It would pause for several seconds every few minutes. The recording was complete (although every few pauses there would be a dropout of a few seconds because the box seemed to have lost its buffering). The pauses would not occur in the same places necessarily – you could play back the event and the pauses would be at different locations. They happened on live television too, although less often. It was very annoying. A faster drive in a new enclosure with a new eSATA cord didn’t help.
A few days ago I bought a second box from a friend. The price was good and I thought it would be nice to use in the bedroom. After changing the disk on the main box, I put the old external disk on the used box – and it worked perfectly.
We’ve now swapped the boxes. The living room has the old used box with the first external drive and it’s working perfectly. The original rented box is in the bedroom with no external drive and it’s working perfectly. (It seems to only have an issue when eSATA is in use.)
These are Motorola DCT3416s. I’m guessing there is some issue with the eSATA port on the rented box. Clearly the system works fine on my purchased used box.
The annoyances of technology…
Since we don’t need the extra capacity in the bedroom I think I’ll live with things for now. Once our provider has multiroom PVR boxes available (in a few months I hope) I’ll change hardware then.