Well, I'll throw this out there and see if anyone has some ideas..
I just had a tech visit my home, and he thought the problem was probably one of two things: either my 8-port amp (which was an older model and known for problems), or the amp on the pole that services my street. He swapped out the Extreme Broadband amp with the latest generation, and then used his meter to see what kind of signal measurements he was getting at the amp. Measurements at the amp were dead on the money with SNR of 34-36 and perfect signal strength on all frequencies. So pole drop, grounding block, splitter, and amp checked out fine
Coax in the house is a star formation with all home runs back to the utility room. Coax from amp to each outlet is Belden 1829A with high-quality compression fittings on all the runs. Some outlets have runs as short as 5' from amp to outlet, and some are longer, but all exhibit the same behavior (video and audio freezes requiring the channel to be changed to restore video and sound). Meter was used to test outlets, and signal strength and SNR were dead on the money for all outlets- showing SNR of 34-36, signal strength on the money, and no errors whatsoever. So coax runs to all outlets checked out fine
RG-6 with compressions fittings is then used from the outlet to the cable boxes. And the cable boxes report on their diagnostics screens no errors, SNR of 34-36, and signal levels in the sweet spot of tolerances.
With the amp switched out, I thought we had it at first, but last night a random freeze-up happened to one DVR, and this morning, a random reboot happened to the other DVR. So no luck... problem still exists.
Neighbor says he rarely sees a freeze-up, maybe once a month, and that freeze-up requires a reboot, it's not correctable by the remote. Since our symptoms are different, I would think that rules out the street amp, but truck will be rolled to take a look early next week.
Only 2 other possibilities I can think of if street amp checks out as good:
1) Flaky tap. My neighbor and I are on the same amp, but different taps. I would think this isn't the case since it's so infrequent and random, and I'm getting uptimes on my cable modem of 20-40+ days usually.
2) Charter's boxes are just problematic. I had a DVR when I first got Charter that was horrific, and had it swapped out, and this replacement is just annoying. That makes me suspect that these Scientific Atlanta/CISCO boxes are just not up to the compression that Charter's downstream video is sent at. When it gets overwhelmed... it hiccups, and a freeze-up or reboot occurs. That's my theory anyway.
Any ideas or things I haven't thought of? This is really baffling.