Molten Boron

So last week Comcast moved Cartoon Network (and, more importantly, Adult Swim) to digital-only. I discovered this when CN started showing football games.

This is one of three channels I watch, and it’s been replaced by “Sports South.”

I contacted their tech support in a vain attempt to get some sort of satisfaction, and was told they sent mail out to everyone announcing that they’d upgraded and enhanced their system in such-and-such a way that blah blah blah, etc.

Monday I ordered a cable box. It was free, ’cause I was only going to hook it up to one TV (actually mercury [my MythTV box]).

I get it in the mail Thursday, the same day I get the letter from Comcast explaining that they’d upgraded and enhanced their system in blah blah blah. Great timing.

Since I’m now using a cable box (technology I was glad that we got rid of with the advent of “cable-ready” televisions), I can’t use MythTV to change channels on the tuner. Well, not directly. There are a few options.

One is the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge capture card; I can’t get this to work. There are a baker’s dozen tutorials and howtos, but they’re all different, and none of them seem to work for me.

The digital receiver has a serial port! I can control it through that, but discovered (after 20 minutes of digging through boxes for a serial cable) that mercury doesn’t have a serial port.

I believe mercury has Firewire, and could (in theory) use that — but the receiver doesn’t have it.

So now I’m boned. I can use the MythTV box for viewing live TV and pause it, but I can no longer use it to schedule recordings.

It’s all very frustrating. Things were working just fine until Comcast decided we all needed to be on digital. How the hell is this better? The first digital show I watched on it was King of the Hill, and the display got corrupted three times in twenty minutes.

I now have far too many damned wires in my living room.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 @ 12:11 am on the category Rant, Technological. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.