Comcast DVR

Best Buy delivered my new TV on Wednesday.  It’s pretty great.  I wish I could say the same about Comcast HD service.  After the TV came I went out and swapped my digital cable box for a new Comcast HD-DVR.  The HD signal is great but the box does not have accurate channel information.  The Comcast web site was also no help — it agreed with the box but not with the actual channels.

I called customer support and the nice man told me to reset the box.  I reset it.

Thursday morning, channels are still wrong.  The DVR functionality does not really work if it doesn’t know what the channels are.

This morning the box was entirely broken — nothing involving showing a UI worked.   Apparently Comcast pushed out an “enhancement” last night that broke the guide and the rest of the UI.  I can’t continue troubleshooting my channel guide woes because the box is entirely broken.  It can tune channels if I use only the up and down keys, but many of channels don’t tune at all and even entering channels by number does not work.

So far Comcast is making an excellent sales pitch for the HD TiVo. If I didn’t live in an apartment with a balcony facing the wrong direction Comcast probably would’ve sold me on DirectTV by now.

Comcast customer support has been very polite but sadly not very helpful since it really seems beyond their control to fix.

I thought I should add one more search result for “Comcast HD DVR sucks” in case anyone searching for information about it doesn’t get the idea from all the other voices.

The Comcast HD DVR is much less expensive than the HD TiVo but also unusably bad.  The HD TiVo is very expensive when a whole Windows Media PC is only a little more expensive and substantially more capable.

Most companies don’t use paying customers to alpha test their new service.

Microsoft should be pleased — they will probably sell a lot of HD Vista Media Center licenses.