My first thought was that this had something to do with the digital changeover, since the problem seemed to start about that time. I first tried the usual stuff, like resetting the cable box and the TIVO, but neither of those seemed to do the trick. I googled the problem, looking for TIVO, Comcast, “This channel will be available shortly,” but didn’t find anything right off that suggested a solution. So, I sent emails to both Comcast and TIVO technical support to see if they had heard of this problem and how to solve it.

I went back to googling and found a couple of forums where there were active discussions. One guy suggested that Comcast might be sending updates to the cable boxes on the hour, and if I started recordings a minute early, that might fix it.

I tried the record early fix and it didn’t work.

By this time, Comcast got back to me with a formula answer. From what it said, it was clear that once the tech saw TIVO, her brain shut down and she just copied in some boilerplate text that said they didn’t support TIVO … blah blah blah.

Another suggestion was made on the forum: try switch to the IR Blaster for channel changing. That made some sense, so I tried it. No joy.

Finally, I stopped including TIVO in my search criteria, and found that lots of people who’d just installed cable splitters were having these problems, and it seemed that when the signal was a little weak, for some reason the channels that would go out were all low numbered, just like what we’d been seeing.

My wife, Heather, spent some quality time with the nest of cables in back of the TV, and came out of it with several loops of cable she’d eliminated plus a splitter and amplifier she’d managed to eliminate. She’d also tightened all the connections up. That solved the problem.

So, bottom line is, if you encounter this problem, try making sure that all your cable connections are secure, that all unused connectors have terminators on them, and that you don’t use any more cable or splitters than you absolutely have to. Hopefully, you’ll find the problem easier than we did.

I’ve written articles before on what it was like to build my own MythTV box, so I thought it might be good to write up an article on what I like and dislike about each system.

It’s been an interesting experience, playing with TIVO and learning how it compares with our beloved MythTV.

Now, one thing that has been frustrating to us about MythTV, is that it hasn’t been terribly easy to upgrade. We use KnoppMyth, and I never really took the time to learn the upgrade procedures. But, of course, that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to learn a procedure. These are computers, they should just do the work for us.

NOTE: I just visited the KnoppMyth site, and discovered they now have auto upgrade for the current release. It will upgrade from release 3 or 4 to the latest software. Unfortunately, you still have to do the backup yourself. I’m puzzled as to why that should be the case, I think it would be a great enhancement of MythTV/KnoppMyth, if the whole automation procedure were automated. When KnoppMyth is installed, it could set up a separate partition on the hard drive and use that for backup, or allow you to specify a network drive, or USB hard drive.

One thing we dearly miss about the MythTV is the commercial skipping. We can fast forward through commercials with TIVO, but with MythTV, the commercial skipping was so accurate, we rarely ever had to mess with it. When there was a problem, it was fairly easy to go in and manually cut out the commercials.

Another thing we miss from MythTV, is the ability to do our scheduling using a web browser over the local network. MythWeb is one of the best features of MythTV, I believe. It seems very silly that TIVO makes you use the rather cumbersome, by comparison, on screen scheduling, when they could easily set up the same kind of thing that MythTV has.

TIVO itself uses open source software. They use Linux for their operating system. In fact, since the TIVO boxes are sold at such a low price, some people are using TIVO boxes to construct low-cost network appliances.

I will admit that TIVO has a pretty nice interface. The program suggestion feature is nice, too. If you want a DVR that isn’t any hassle, and you’re willing to pay a monthly fee for it, TIVO isn’t a bad deal.

If you like a bit more of a challenge, a lot more flexibility, and complete access to the source code, MythTV is your answer. They both have their places.