US Cable Support > Comcast Cable TV > New Guides for SA/Cisco Areas (Info from Ted Hodgins Blog)

New Guides for SA/Cisco Areas (Info from Ted Hodgins Blog)

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Hi Ted,

I know the current guide for the SA/Cisco areas is called S25 and the guide for Cisco AnyRoom DVR functionality is called On-Screen Guide 2.0. What is the name of the guide that will be released this summer for the SA STBs?

Will Cisco RNG STBs get this guide or will they skip it and only get On-Screen Guide 2.0?

Thanks,

Russ

Russ | April 17, 2012 4:05 PM

»blog.comcast.com/2010/05/new-gui···nt-45717

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Hello Russ. The S25 name you referenced for this guide is not a customer-facing name but yes that is a name we use internally when referring to this version of the guide. You can see the S25p3 naming in the guide configuration menu. The next version of the guide coming out over the summer is labeled internally as S26.

For others, here is some inside baseball: The version number (S25, S26) of the on-screen guide for your cable box can be found in the guide's setup menu.

Press the Menu button twice on the silver Comcast remote control, select Setup, then Cable Box setup, arrow down to Configuration and 'Select to display' and press OK/Select.

The line immediately underneath the Review Configuration header will show you the version of the guide currently on your cable box. The first few characters (S25p3) indicate the guide code number. A change in guide code number on that box would indicate an update to the guide.

Don't worry. You will hear about the new guide from us in advance in a few different ways (other than having to constantly check your guide code number via the above)!

What area is getting which guide and when depends a lot on time, geography and hardware (cable box type) with a few moving parts to make it interesting.

To try and put it simply, most all Scientific-Atlanta branded cable boxes will be receiving this new guide (S26) regardless of where you happen to live. Some smaller quantities of older models of SA boxes (about 1% of our deployed boxes in SA-Cisco footprint) will get a guide update without the iTV applications.

In some areas (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Minnesota and New Mexico), we plan to deliver On-Screen Guide 2.0 this year to the Cisco RNG series (RNG 100, 150 and 200) of cable boxes. Some of these areas may get S26 on their Cisco box first before getting On-Screen Guide 2.0. Other areas may go directly to On-Screen Guide 2.0 on newly deployed Cisco RNG cable boxes.

The deployment sequence, customer communication plan and employee training plan will take that into consideration as each market will be at a different stage of the On-Screen Guide 2.0 process.

Other SA/Cisco areas that are in states that I have not listed above are not currently targeted for On-Screen Guide 2.0 this year and some of those areas (that I have not listed) may get our On-Screen Guide 3.0 (also called the X1 guide) this year or next year.

The long term plan is to get all of our newest cable boxes (regardless of hardware manufacturer or geography) onto a common guide starting in 2013 to provide a consistent experience.

Ted Hodgins replied to comment from Russ | April 18, 2012 2:08 PM

»blog.comcast.com/2010/05/new-gui···nt-45967

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To be honest, with the site crash and all, i was expecting to see October 2010 on this post. Thinking maybe in 2013 they will see it. lmao.

reply to RKB_t

The following posts are from Comcast's Ted Hodgins, Sr. Director, Video Product Development - Navigation, in Media & Entertainment, "New Guide for Scientific Atlanta Cable Boxes" blog.

Two additional issues to be resolved in the S26 guide scheduled for release this Summer. This was a follow up post.

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Hi Ted,

Will the following two issues be resolved in the S26 guide?

1) The Not Authorized messages that are displayed even though the channel is authorized (You mentioned that firmware changes were required to completely fix this).

2) Pass Through using an HDMI cable.

Thanks,

Russ

Russ replied to comment from Ted Hodgins | April 21, 2012 1:19 AM

»blog.comcast.com/2010/05/new-gui···nt-46323

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@Russ, apologies for the delay in responding.

We have seen significantly reduced instances of the unintended Not Authorized screen as part of the software patch that was distributed to all of our SA-Cisco locations.

We have also worked with Cisco to make necessary firmware changes in the upcoming guide release. These changes have been shown to eliminate the unintended Not Authorized occurrences that have been observed.

The firmware update included in this upcoming release also has the HDMI cables working very well with the HD Pass-Through feature.

Ted Hodgins replied to comment from Russ | May 3, 2012 4:49 PM

»blog.comcast.com/2010/05/new-gui···nt-47826

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According to marketing and ted weirton,wv won't see any guide updates this year which stinks as I was looking forward to guide 2.0 but maybe eventually I will get the interactive features like sports,etc being tested in florida.
I guess slowing deployment of guide 2.0 and the x1 box will allow better testing so there aren't as many bugs when it does launch but I would enjoy being a beta tester.

reply to RKB_t
Haven't seen Russ in awhile. Anyway I wonder when the heck we're going to actually see the new update to fix the glitch we are seeing with cablecards showing the channel is not authorized on both cablecard equipped devices as well as the Cisco RNG200N models. This has been an issue for quite a long time.

russ is rkb apparently in 2010 someone else had the russ name so he had to use rkb for now

reply to Mike Wolf

Oh so the patch that was suppose to be out by March got delayed?

said by Ted Hodgins :

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We have also worked with Cisco to make necessary firmware changes in the upcoming guide release. These changes have been shown to eliminate the unintended Not Authorized occurrences that have been observed.

The firmware update included in this upcoming release also has the HDMI cables working very well with the HD Pass-Through feature.

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The patch I'm referring to is the one to temporarily alleviate the Cisco/SA RNG200N and devices with Cisco/SA cablecards installed that randomly incorrectly reports channels as not authorized after a number of channel changes in a short period of time. There is suppose to be a firmware update Cisco was working on to fix this issue permanently.

said by Ted Hodgins :

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Hello Mr. Wolf and thanks for your comnents and question. I am sorry to hear about the issue you are having with your Moxi and cablecard.

The software patch that we have started to roll out to the SA-Cisco cable boxes significantly alleviates the current Not Authorized issue on our cable boxes.

We did not make any changes to the firmware in this patch. Firmware changes to completely resolve this issue are included in an upcoming guide software release scheduled for mid-2012.

I will be able to update specific information as each area gets confirmed. All of our SA-Cisco customers will be getting this software patch. I don't have a confirmed timeframe for your location in New Jersey just yet.

The plan is to get the software patch to the majority of our Cisco-SA customers this year.

The software patch is now out to about 22% of our SA-Cisco customers including customers in TX, MS, LA and customers with RNG 150 and 150n boxes in MN.

Ted Hodgins replied to comment from Mike Wolf | November 3, 2011 4:05 PM

»blog.comcast.com/2010/05/new-gui···nt-41056

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Exactly, yet it's already May and there has been no status update and confirmation, and users with TiVo and Moxi and THPC's that use Cisco/SA cablecards are still affected. Also still don't know if the software patch mentioned in the post was even rolled out to my area.

I just hope that they don't break each other. »[DVR] DVR menu outage

Yeah I noticed that stuff as well. That's actually part of the program information because shows recorded prior don't have it.

reply to RKB_t
In iGuide, the menus are downloadable. That is why you sometimes get a 'please wait' and limited functionality for awhile after a reboot. You can even force a reload by changing the language.

The season/episode stuff was added to the iGuide data about 2 months ago to all users. It also started showing up on Motorola's, along with the loss of about a day's worth of programming due to it taking up more memory.

When the boxes are downloading the iGuide data, just how fast is the connection between the box and the headend it is getting the info from? I'm assuming it's a broadband connection, but is it at the same speed tier I'm paying for with Internet blast 30 or is it the extreme 105 tier?

If it's similar to the Motorola's, it uses what is called the OOB (Out-Of-Band) channel. It's typically either the 4MHz gap between RF4 and RF5, or an unused RF channel nearby. The datarate is rather slow. It's a low QAM or QPSK. That same channel is also used for:
clock
channel map (every few minutes)
near-term 6-8 hours data (probably every 20-30 minutes)
long-term data (maybe once or twice a day now)
menu downloads
firmware updates
OnDemand menus (dynamic)
OnDemand control (telling the box what frequency to tune to watch)
Network control (iPads, etc...)