TV-Drive my review

ok there are loads of posts on this here so I thought sod it and created another one.
As things are (im pre firmware update) the TV drive has to be the worst piece of AV equipment ive ever had the displeasure to have in my home.
Im hoping its all software but I think there is more going on with my box than that.
Every single night after midnight I suffer from the very poor remote control lock up something I never had with sky+. Ive had failed recordings again something I never had with sky+. All the menus are tediously slow to navigate around and as for layout of favourites well this sucks all these problems were absent from sky+. Now I fully realise this could be sorted with a firmware update but getting a date where all boxes will be flashed by is impossible.One tech guy said 14th feb then he had to admit he was wrong. Then of course still no VOD
Now hardware...
The hard drive is far to loud I upgraded my sky+ box and neither drive that was in there was even closely as audiable as this one also I think there is buffer problems.Today for example I had picture and sound stutter like the buffer was lagging on a pc id say the page file was full and struggling but obviously this box isnt a pc so I dont know. The box has suffered lock ups and restarts these I would call system crashes if a pc but im not getting any warnings or codes or anything.
To sum up this pile of crap will be removed from my house irrelevent of contract as its not fit for purpose as I cant watch tv when I want and the pvr does not work correctly so I have grounds. NTL have till the end of Feb to sort this out or thats it.
The only thing going for it is HD but content is slim and with sky throwing dummies out of their pram im concerned its not going to take off.
These boxes with out of date firmware should never have been exposed to the general public NTL have done their customer base a disservice installing this rubbish all over the place

I would be ashamed if I shipped a pc with so many bugs

[Traduk]

It is a heck of a shame that you are having so much trouble. I have found that the V+ box is excellent apart from very infrequent frame freezes which is a head-end signal break as opposed to anything to do with the TV Drive.

I think that if you use the Computer analogy then the mode in which I think it should by thought of is as a client working off a server. For client\server the send\receive path must be perfect or the client will show all manner of problems.

In all the years I had CableTel and now NTL, I had all manner of problems with cable modem and TV. I cancelled all services and gave them the notice period to sort the problems with an insistence that they upgrade the old skinny cat cable to the latest much fatter cat 11. I could see the CM parameters drifting outside of parameters on a daily basis but after a re-run with better co-ax I have not had a problem since (about 2 years ago).

IMO the more kit has to do the greater the impact of sub-optimal lines and it would be a shame if you rejected what I find to be very good kit on the basis of possibly a sub par feed.

so your saying its cable? but my 10 meg has been stable and the other box is fine also

[RS100]

My tv drive has been fast the last day or two with no lock ups apart from when the tech guys at ntl play about at their end (i am still on the old firmware),

I also have Sky HD and a full multisat system, the only thing i would say that the tv drive has over sky HD is Three tv tuners and one data tuner and no cost for the tv drive cable receiver, Apart from that Sky HD is much better

[Traduk]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

so your saying its cable? but my 10 meg has been stable and the other box is fine also

I thought that my 10 Meg cable modem (was about 2 Meg back then) was OK until I monitored it (graphing tracer) and found that it was anything but reliable.

You can easily find out your power levels by checking in the CM's stats and providing neither the CM or TV Drive has an attenuator fitted then they should be the same. My up link is 33db the downlink is 34db with an SNR of 7.5 (which is highish as optimum is +\- 2.5). There is an attenuator fitted to the TV Drive to lower the levels a bit. In my experience the more serious service problem are apparent if the CM drifts down to big minus numbers and I found that on the old co-ax I hovered around -35 and drifted down to -60 at various times of the day (mostly at night). I firmly believe that if I was still on that cable, the TV Drive would be a nightmare.

[rdhw]

Originally Posted by Traduk

My up link is 33db the downlink is 34db with an SNR of 7.5 (which is highish as optimum is +\- 2.5).

Those figures needs clarifying, as I think you have two of them the wrong way round.

Your "uplink" figure of 33 is the cable modem's transmit signal level, and therefore the unit is dBmV, not db. So your upstream signal level is 33dBmV, which is fine. Lower is better, higher is worse, for this one.

Your "downlink" figure of "34" is in fact your downstream Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and the unit is dB. Your downstream SNR is 34dB, which is OK. Higher is better, lower is worse, for this one. Going below 30dB would lead to unreliability.

Your downstream received signal level is 7.5dBmV. This is not the SNR. The optimum level is as close to 0dBmV as possible, though anything in the range -15 to +15dBmV should work.

In my experience the more serious service problem are apparent if the CM drifts down to big minus numbers and I found that on the old co-ax I hovered around -35 and drifted down to -60 at various times of the day (mostly at night).

I don't know of any signal or SNR readings that can be expressed as negative numbers that extreme. Maybe you are thinking of upstream transmit levels rising to as high as +60bBmV, which would be bad.

[Traduk]

rdhw,

I was a bit lazy with my use of dB and dBmV which is a carry over from my days when I worked in transmission systems. We never used the mV tag because if we were dealing with power levels it was just dB or often no tag at all.

It was my downstream receive power level which is currently at 7.5 dBmV that used to hover around the low neg 20's but used to slide down through the neg 40's on through neg 50's. The surfboard used to drop in the neg 40's but the replacement 200 could hang on until about neg 55. The upstream power could hang on to the connection until it's power dropped comensurate with the downstream but degrading service was seen all the way down to drop-out.

When the CM levels were increased through higher and higher Meg levels there were some people with suspect lines who had problems. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a number of people didn't find that the new TV Drives are problematic due to poor power levels on their CATV feed. I have already seen people state that a CATV outage prevents viewing of recorded programs so I guess that interaction with the feed is critical.