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FIOS TV: Be *SURE* cablecards are *correctly* paired!Although I thought I was immune to the recent FIOS cablecard/copy protection mess associated with the Frontier transition, it bit me in a massive way last night and only now is it finally cleaned up.
The long and short of it is: be *sure* your cablecards are *correctly* paired. VZ did not make a habit of pairing cablecards (not necessary when there's no copy protection) and the net result of that is undoubtedly lots of missing or inaccurate info in VZ's systems. Due to the previous lack of copy protection, no one noticed or cared until now.
After copy protection was turned on, I started having random recording failures on my Media Center PC. I eventually figured out that this was resulting from CCI="copy never" being set on some programs. That's even more restrictive than "copy once" and basically makes a Media Center PC worthless as a DVR.
While debugging this, I pulled my cablecards out at one point. Big mistake! Because they were not paired properly, whatever residual functionality I had with the newly protected channels disappeared and I was completely cut off from most of my service and the smallish issue of random CCI="copy never" had become the massive issue of no service on most channels I care about.
It took the better part of a day on the phone with Verizon to get my cards correctly paired and service restored. One reason for this is that the data ids of my cablecards somehow changed since originally installed. So VZ had inaccurate info in their systems, and I had inaccurate info in the text file I had created to concentrate the pairing info for my 3 tuners into one central and convenient place.
Once VZ deactivated, reactivated, and sent init signals to my cablecards with the correct pairing info, I got my channels back. I'll guess that my random CCI="copy never" issue is fixed too -- time will tell.
Bottom line: improperly paired cablecards may appear to work but in fact behave erratically and are a ticking time bomb inside an OCUR tuner or tivo. |