Comcast installer came around 4:30p yesterday. Had almost given up hope. He was in and out in about 15 minutes (I did most of the disconnection of stuff up in the entertainment console, since it’s a mare’s nest up there).
He seemed competent and got it all working just jim-cracky fine.
It has no RF “cable”-style cable out, so I have to rejigger the wiring. Right now the cable box is all that’s hooked up.
He did leave a manual for the Motorola DCT6400, as well as the quickie guides.
As to the unit itself, it seems to work fine, except that it has an annoying habit of rebooting itself while navigating through the menu/guide. Time to call the customer service folks.
There is a trivial degradation of “analog” channel picture, but on our 27″ TV it’s not really noticeable. And we don’t watch that much on the lower channels, anyway.
And, yes, there is a slight bit of noise from the hard drive, but nothing that’s audible more than a foot away.
As a sign of how much I love Margie, the first thing I set up for series recording was Iron Chef …
UPDATE: Called Comcast. Got right in. Explained the sitch. The CSR noted that they’d had the same auto-reboot problem while they were doing beta-testing and training in the lab. She went off and found a supervisor, and came back with the suggestion that it might be overheating.
Now, I have not reinstalled the VCR, so there is currently about 8″ of clearance over the top of the box. The receiver is off. The unit is warm, like any other piece of powered-on equipment, but I can’t imagine it’s actually overheating, even if these boxes run notoriously warm.
So she scheduled a tech call for this afternoon, 3-5. Which may bump noggins with other festivities planned, but such are the vagaries of technology, dagnabbit.
Dude came, dude saw, dude scratched his head and said, “That sure looks like a bad unit,” dude replaced unit, dude left. We’ll see how it looks when we get home.
Next morning: The box appears to be stable, I’ve set up several things to be recorded, and so far no puffs of smoke.
On the other hand, the thing does run pretty darned hot. I seriously need to work on that thermostat/fan arrangement.
Shaw Cable here in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is using both this box and Motorola’s digital set top box.(We have used both).
Both units severly degrade the non-digital channels both viewing and recording. This really noticeable on our 34″ HD TV. By passing the box, we get excelent reception on the channels 2-59 but with the box the signal is quite distorted.
Something to to do with the analog receiving problems with the boxs. Apparently Motorola and Shaw are aware of the problems but so far neither company has made the facts known to the public nor has contacted customers to tell us what they are going to do about it.
Pre-test Motorola’s products at home before you buy them.
I’ve certainly read in most places that the encoding chip on the Moto boxes that turns analog to digital (for recording, but also, thus, for display) is not very good. On our 25″ non-HD TV, and with the limited amount of broadcast network shows we watch, it’s no biggie.