Could not get a picture, gray screen only. Finally switched the Tivos and took the new HD Tivo downstairs to another cable outlet.
Cablecard one popped on and had a picture. Cablecard two was defective and could do nothing to make it work. These are both Motorola cable cards (single stream).

I looked at how many splitters were between the upstairs cable outlet (one) and how many splitter were between the amplifier and the downstairs outlet (three) and realized that the Tivo could not handle the signal strength at the upstairs outlet. If you look under the channels setting there is an option to look at the signal strength. Tivo signal strength on a scale of 100 was 100.
I swapped the cables where they were attached to the splitters and had the picture upstairs right away. The second cable card was bad and after replacement, both tuners have a picture.

IMHO you should look at the signal strength and what sort of splitters you have in your cable lines. The cable guy who put his decibel meter on my cable outlet upstairs behind the HD Tivo said the signal strength was +5 which he said is perfect.

What model of TiVo do you have – a Series3 or a TiVo HD? 9.2 is only for these units. Your comment about the cards is a little confusing, since if you have a S3 or HD, and are recording digital cable, I’d expect you to already have CableCARD installed for that to work. If you have an older S2 or S2DT then none of the issues in this post apply to you, they’re a completely different beast when it comes to this, so what follows may not apply.

Animal Planet is usually not high-def – there is a special ‘Animal Planet HD’ channel that is. Though AP may be in the digital cable tier, as it often is. If it is just one channel it is usually the source – a problem with the cable itself. When the TiVo is haven’t trouble it usually impacts multiple channels.

Do you have a standard cable box in the house? Can you tune Animal Planet on that and bypass any TiVo – right from the box to a TV? If you see blocking then it is the cable for sure. If it looks fine there, but at the same time looks bad through the TiVo, then you know it is the TiVo. (You want this to be at the same time since an intermittent issue could provide a false positive.) If you don’t have a way to tune AP without the TiVo, it is harder to troubleshoot. Though you could call the cable company and ask if they know of any issues on AP currently – it may be something they’re working on.

I went to this site and found out something about having to get cards installed by the cable company…. Not sure what this is about, but this thread came up after I searched under MACROBLOCKING.

I wonder if this is the same problem Larry David had on CURB? Hm

Jonathon, i reinitialized the cards by removing both, and then reinserting card 1, and letting it bind again, then follow with card 2, just like a new install. since the cards have been paired or married to the sytem and my tivo, they don’t need to be reinstalled, just reset or reintialized.

Ive already had the CC’s replaced 1x. Any other suggestions? Is this related to the macro blocking issue?

Also, the if the thread you mention at TiVoCommunity goes back to 2005, then it can’t have anything to do with the Series3 and must be related to problems with cable boxes and older units, since the Series3 didn’t ship until September of 2006. Anything from before that simply can’t be a report relating to the S3.

If you have channels in the analog range that work within a CableCARD and then do not work with the card installed, it is certainly a card-related problem. Most likely an error in the channel mapping the card does. Or your MSO does ADS (Analog-Digital Simulcast) and those ‘analog’ channels are being mapped to corresponding digital channels with the card – and you have problems receiving the digital channels. With modern cable systems the same channel number may actually point to different frequencies on different devices on the same feed – fun, ain’t it? Since you said they failed on the TiVo *and* the TV, that points to your cable as the common factor.

I’ve been experiencing this problem continuously since February. It appears that I’ve blamed my cable company for these issues, and I wasted a lot of time going through their tech support instead of searching the Internet.

The audio dropouts are far more upsetting to me than the small pixellations that accompany them. I can’t tell you how many punchlines I’ve missed. Nothing gets my blood boiling more than watching a show, and the Tivo audio drops out at precisely the most critical moment of dialogue.

I’ve been using the optical digital audio connections, so one thing I will try is to switch to analog and see if that resolves the audio dropouts at least.

Also, I found an old thread at Tivo Lover’s in which the problem was blamed on the “sewer”, which is the range of frequencies going back to the cable head-end. Even though the Tivo does not transmit on any frequency, they suspected on that thread that the Tivo might be susceptible to signals in that range. The reports of this problem dated back to 2005, and in later posts, commenters tried attaching different filters in an attempt to resolve the problem. Ultimately these proved ineffective and the thread died out. However, one thing I might try is to power off my cable modem for an hour and see if the dropouts may be related.

One odd behavior that threw me off the scent was a completely different issue (was it?) in which extended basic cable channels, broadcast in analog on channels 2-77, cannot be received when the S-cards are installed. Out of 75 channels in that range, I receive 11, spread randomly throughout. My HDTV has a cablecard slot, so I had TWC install a cablecard there. The HDTV was not able to tune to the same channels 2-77 that weren’t working on my Tivo S3. This problem continues to this day, and no one has been able to resolve it.

The first question I was always asked when reporting the 2-77 problem was whether I could receive the channels without cablecards installed. The answer was yes. For a time, I would work around the problem by ejecting the cablecard from my HDTV. Eventually, I returned it to TWC.

The next question always had to do with signal strength and quality. I’ve had several visits from TWC techs to check this out. The signal at the curb is -6dbm. I finally gave in and started renting a Scientific Atlantic Explorer 3250HD from TWC several months ago to watch all the channels my Tivo cannot pick up. This box comes with a diagnostic screen that reports the signal strength at -9dbm. The -3dbm attenuation is exactly as expected when factoring in the cable length and number of splitters.

As for signal quality, the bit errors reported by the 3250HD are well within tolerance, and are actually quite low compared to other TWC users in my area.

We swapped out cablecards twice. Always with Scientific Atlanta cards (which is all TWC Austin uses).

Since my kit was purchased back in January, and I spent so long chasing the wrong issue, there’s no way to get a refund. I can’t even attach a price to the grief my wife’s given me, since she hated the Tivo from the start and can’t understand why I didn’t return it when I had the chance. So in total, $1100 and at least as many “I told you so’s” from my better half.

For those who are just now joining the Tivo community, in answer to your question about whether Tivo was aware of this problem, I would say definitely yes. The thread above was started in April 2005 and includes references to many calls to Tivo customer support. Yes, Tivo shipped the product with this known issue. I can say from my tech industry experience, this is standard operating procedure. Cutting edge products are committed, and tenacious engineering problems are spackled over in order to make marketing commitments. It all comes out in the wash, normally, as the early adopters assist in shaking out these problems and ultimately we end up with reliable products. It’s an imperfect system, but it has given us remarkable technological leaps in my lifetime.

I will choose patience, mainly because I don’t really have a choice. New Tivo-ers reading this may want to hold off a bit longer before jumping headlong to the bleeding edge.

I still have the pixelation issue on my tivo HD which has software ver 8.1.7b2-01-2-652,

b2 being the latest ver. The cable cards are Scientific Atlanta.

Been a Tivo fan for many years, but this problem is very frustrating

With the 30 day return window nearing what is one to do? Will tivo ever have a fix for this problem ?…

1) My signal strength pre-Tivo is strong.
2) My 2 Cox-issues Scientific Atlanta boxes have no issues (one HD, one just plain digital)
3) My main pixelation is only in slot 2, regardless of which card is in there.

I’ve actually been surprised at how much time Cox has wasted trying to help me debug this…