I finally broke down and decided to record some shows that I should have been watching for forever but always forgot about and I noticed that the Comcast DVR was acting weird. Oh it was working just fine, but the “Season Pass” that I set up was giving me some strange channels in the “upcoming episodes” section of the DVR. Like for Cartoon Network, it’s showing channel 42 which is normal but it’s also showing 742. Same thing for TBS: one in the two digits and another in the 700’s.
That’s when I did some digging in the Guide: Comcast is up to something. The difference between 42 and 742 is that 742 seems to be much brighter. Of course on my rear projection display it makes for a worse picture, but I’m beginning to wonder if they’re about to kick off a “All Cable Channels in HD” bit. There’s no 700 counterpart for the channels that are available via regular broadcast, but that makes sense: the ones that have HD variants are already in the 100’s. It’s just the cable channels that are being shown as nn and 7nn. I dunno. It’s very odd.
One other thing is that they added a HD channel for TNT in the 600’s which is near Discovery Channel HD and inHD 1 and 2, which offer the best picture of all the HD channels… very neat.
We dumped Comcast for FIOS a colupe of years ago because their service was too unreliable. Comcast buried the cable only a colupe of inches underground and even left part of the cable above ground in our front yard! They did not fix this after repeated calls. Once a neighbor cut off our service when he aerated his lawn. We were out of luck for a colupe of days then.Then one day, a neighbor’s gardener accidentally dug up a 3 foot portion of the cable across the street. It took Comcast most of the week to get us back on line.So much for their same day service. We then signed up with Verizon FIOS and it has been relatively trouble free. They buried their cable deep enough.FIOS has video on demand. We have been watching movies regularly using this service since the Blockbuster closed.My big gripe with FIOS is their pricing is non-transparent.