Does your Time Warner Cable DVR suck? (Atlanta, Cisco: new house, buy)

[janejanejanejanejane]

Ours is SLOW and makes multiple mistakes. I hate it. I have used a dish tv DVR and it's wonderful.
Just curious if we are just unlucky?

[hoffdano]

Which one do you have? The Scientific Atlanta unit or the Samsung?

Our SA unit was at least three years old and started to get flaky. They replaced it with the Samsung, which most of the time seems better. But it also acts up occasionally. It has more storage capacity than the SA unit.

[ciscotree]

The whole reason I cancelled TW was because of those boxes. In a modern age, those things are Windows 3.1

[Moonlady]

We had an SA 8400 and it started to flake out and blink on the HD channels. We went to the lobby and swapped it out and got an SA 8240? Anyway, it was really slow to change channels andf when our TW guy came out to install cable at the new house, he said we needed to change the settings on the box (via the remote). Ours was set for 1080p but our TV is only 1080i, so it was looking for a better picture. Anyway, that seems to have fixed it for now.

What kind of mistakes does it make?

[atxcio]

I have one of the SA models with TWC, and it's terrible. I also have a Tivo, and the TWC one isn't even close to as good as the Tivo was 5 years ago. It's unacceptable... poor user interface, delayed response (seemed to get worse after they upgraded the software remotely), doesn't always remember the "last" channel when you want to flip back and forth, almost useless search feature, etc.

I wonder if I could say it's broken and swap for the Samsung model?

[janejanejanejanejane]

Its slow to do everything. It is the samsung model. It rewinds too far, often. It does not record at times. It just sucks.

[Gorfml]

the boxes are such crap its unbelievable...

[hoffdano]

Originally Posted by janejanejanejanejane

Its slow to do everything. It is the samsung model. It rewinds too far, often. It does not record at times. It just sucks.

Our Samsung also seemed "slow" initially. But a few resets later, it is responsive to the remote. Easiest way to reset it is to unplug it. Count to 10, plug it in. It will take several minutes to re-boot.

My remaining beefs:

- inconsistent FF and RW speeds. Sometimes the 2x speed is really fast, sometimes not.
- every once in a while I lose audio (which is sent to the sound system not the TV). Power the box off then on and it is fixed.

[Moonlady]

Originally Posted by atxcio

I have one of the SA models with TWC, and it's terrible. I also have a Tivo, and the TWC one isn't even close to as good as the Tivo was 5 years ago. It's unacceptable... poor user interface, delayed response (seemed to get worse after they upgraded the software remotely), doesn't always remember the "last" channel when you want to flip back and forth, almost useless search feature, etc.

I wonder if I could say it's broken and swap for the Samsung model?

I don't know if you get a choice. But I've taken equipment in when I didn't like it and ended up getting something worse, so that didn't help!

That's interesting about the SW update - that's probably just when our other box started flaking out.

My son works for the company that provides the SW to Cisco (Scientific Atlanta) and tests the boxes for a living. I'm going to ask him what's going on that we're having so much trouble. We never had any issues with the 8400 model until recently.

[AustinGuy]

You can buy your own Tivo and get a cable card from Time Warner if you'd rather use a Tivo. That's what I do, but my Tivo isn't that great either.