[mythtv-users] My FIOS TV experiences

Jerry Rubinow jerrymr at gmail.com
Sun Jan 7 04:36:51 UTC 2007


I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, and about a month ago Verizon started
offering FIOS TV in a bunch of townships here.  I got my install on
Thursday.  Here are my experiences, for anyone who's thinking about doing
the same.

I signed up for both FIOS internet and TV at the same time.  The install
took about 6 hours with two guys, mainly because they had to run new coax
that was up to their specs to the three tvs in my house.  The techs were
professional, knowledgeable, and cut no corners.  Very happy with them and
their work.

Picture quality for the analog channels puts Comcast to shame.  They looks
like digital feeds now.  Extremely happy with that.

Now the myth-related part.  The set top box is a Motorola QIP6200-2.  It
looks identical to the Comcast DCT-6200, except for lacking a cablecard slot
in the front.  Firewire was enabled, and Myth had no problems changing the
channel on the box.  6200ch however needed a little tweaking (had to add a
new vendor and model id - 0x0000195e and 0x00007100, respectively) before it
would work.

The bad part is that a seemingly random assortment of HD OTA channels have
some kind of copy protection enabled.  ABC, CBS, and CW, according to the
set top diagnostic screen, have CCI: 0x02 and RC Flag: 0x01 set.  And
test-mpeg2 generates garbage when trying to record them.  The rest have
these flags set to 0 and test-mpeg2 has no problem.  A little googling shows
these setting control whether a program is copy-once, copy-always, etc, and
whether a device is forced to downconvert it on playback.  I'll be calling
Verizon support as soon as they're open to get them to fix this and report
back once I have more info.

Now to look up those FCC regs in case I need to cite them...

-Jerry
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