reesesWeb

Moving back to San Francisco and ordering a new Digital Cable/HD/PVR box from Comcast seems to be the easiest way to upgrade cable boxes. I had a 6208 in Bethesda for a couple years, and while better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, had its downsides.

Quickly, the good things about the Motorola DCT 6412 Phase III compared to the 6208.

• Dual-tuner is sweet, especially after using the single-tuner 6208 for a while. I used to have frequent programming conflicts, and now, only when I have to do "start a few minutes early," or "end a few minutes late," recordings to get around ABC's obnoxious anti-Tivo programming.
• The new software does "Series Recording", which my 6208 lacked. It's not as good as Tivo's Season Pass, but it's nice not having to remember to record the same shows every week.
• The 6208 used to make this obnoxious noise when the fan came on, and would actually drown out the TV. The 6412 doesn't have this problem.

There are some downsides, however, and these are not completely independent from the benefits.

• A huge quantity of compression artifacts, especially while watching HD content with lots of fast movement. This wasn't the case with the 6208. I acknowledge that this may not be hardware related, but instead the result of differing signal transmission policies between Comcast in Bethesda and Comcast in San Francisco.
• It will usually "hang" with an "operation not available" after almost exactly 40 minutes into watching a second TV show. It will often take three or four attempts to "commercial skip" far enough through it that it doesn't hang up on the bad bit. It's not 40 minutes of "play time", but rather, 40 minutes of program time. Skip commercials or watch them, it's going to hang between 40-43 minutes into the program.
• See that "obnoxious noise when the fan came on" bit above? The 6412 doesn't have that problem because there is no fan. That means it gets hot, which I suspect to be the cause of the hanging and crashing when doing sustained reads from the hard drive. Putting a home fan next to it to blow cooler air across the top of the unit seems to support this hypothesis by ameliorating the 40-minute-hang problem.

Addendum, 12 August 2006:

I had to return the box today because it finally stopped recording programs entirely. It has been replaced with a DCT3412 Phase I. It's currently downloading the channel guide, so I'll see how it does in a bit.

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