Signal issues and deafening commercials giving me second thoughts

Last night's adventure 

Was getting ready for bed last night an went to turn on Colbert on the Tivo and found dead air. Flipped to ABC and it was dead too. This was to be my third debug mission just since I started for bed some 2 hours ago at this point so I was not happy! Having cable flashbacks I tried all the usual quick fixes including pulling stuff from the Goodwill pile to swap out but no help. Using my TiVo into signal strength mode and found the signal strengths were the same with either amp. Plus they were about what I recorded over a month ago. So finally I gave up and went to bed thinking the antenna must have slipped or something and it would just need to wait. However ABC and CBS look fine today so thinking they must be testing dropping to a lower power at night or something. I noticed ABC seemed weak the other early morning too. I messaged both to confirm. But no reply as yet. Does not bode well. Especially combined with the CW having slipped below the watchable at least 50% of the time level.

So now what?

You might recall I started streaming stuff I can't get over the air since last November when I got fed up with Time Warner knocking my cable box (tuner) and sometimes even my TiVo off line. I've been mainly streaming from Hulu or the network's sites since TWC's streaming is usually days behind everywhere else. I can not stream the morning news though. And I have to admit I'm getting pretty fed up with the cranked up commercials most of the networks are streaming. I have to sit with one hand on the mute button they are so much worse than when the feds stepped in back in 2011 to make them stop it when broadcasting. So I'm thinking of just switching my remaining TiVo back to cable for any broadcasts not on Hulu. Especially since now that Comedy Central is pulling their stuff off Hulu and using those windows rattling commercials on their streaming site. Plus it would be nice to see The Daily Show and @midnight on the same day they broadcast again. In a related story I found my missing extra cable card last weekend. No less than 3 times Time Warner has told me they have taken it off my bill since it was never activated because they sent it without a tuner about 2 years ago. Just checked and they are still monthly charging me for it. Granted not enough to warrant a special 50 mile round trip to town just to turn it in. So it all this seems to be telling me I should give a more hybrid approach (cable card but no tuner) a try to see if TWC can keep from knocking it off line. And even if they do it is starting to look like I probably will not be worse off. It is either that or try and cobble together an even stronger antenna / amp combo which would seem to probably require a radio tower to get more signal over the ridge. That does not seem like that good of an investment if the stations might be turning down the power.

Comedy Central pulling out of Hulu?

Yep seems not enough people braved getting forced to watch ads just to see uncensored versions of their shows so they are pulling them home. Read more here. This move is even stranger given Turner announced not that long ago they would be putting shows on Hulu.

Did you know you could watch Amazon subscriptions on Roku?

I picked up a Fire Stick for $30 last Black Friday and have been bouncing between it and the Roku since. I even added Acorn TV through Amazon. Tonight though the WiFi demons are in rare form. After resuming the same 1 hour episode of Doc Martin 6 times, I switched back to Hulu on the Roku while I research how to get my login info for Acorn TV (since there is no login to watch it via Fire TV). Turns out all you need to is bring up the Amazon app on the Roku and just start playing the show! Interface is not near as nice but at least I can watch TV while I sort out what keeps knocking my Access Points off line.

Added a bit more automation to the sheet.

Updated the show tracking sheet 

On "Last Show" tab I added some columns. 

Now all the shows are listed in F and the last seen episode from the feed is compared with the last saved in G. The greater of the 2 is placed in K and the matching date in L. Also you now force and feed update by changing the date in F1. Conditional formatting should turn the cells in columns K and L green in the rows where the G and K cells match (do not need updating). After updating the feed, copy the cells from K4 to L110 then paste the values into G4 to store the "last in feed" data.

On the "shows" tab I added some columns.

The parsing of the "Last watched" and "Last show" columns outputs into 3 columns now to handle those times when unexpected text gets parsed into the cell. The parser now works differently for the 2 formats

The "diff" column now uses a different method for calculating the number of unseen episodes available for the season-episode vs date formats. This should give better estimates.

The "Last show" column now looks at column F to look up feed data exclusively (instead of first checking the feed and only checking F if not found) and takes the value from K. This should deal with the problem of shows dropping off the feed at the end of seasons.

Moving info here

Thinking there is getting to be enough info that it needs to be structured and searchable so I'll start moving posts here. Below it the original doc that accompanied the show tracking spreadsheet.

I'll keep adding to this page but to start I've been building a spreadsheet to replace the watch list features of my TiVos that some of you might be interested in making a copy of. Below kind of explains why and what I was trying to achieve.

Some history

Basically I've had TiVos since they first came out and loved them. I still have 2 Premieres and a series 2 setting on the shelf with old shows on them plus my 2 connected up Roamios.  But around 2 years ago now Time Warner started jacking with the cable boxes to knock them off line randomly around once a month. I setup a second TiVo so it could act as a backup in case one got knocked offline but found they almost always got knocked out within an hour or two of each other. Often I’d have to call Time Warner to reauth one or both boxes after it happened. Pretty obvious some sort of received signal was the cause but Time Warner was still claiming it was not them so I switched the TiVo that could still receive broadcast TV to do that instead. (Note most TiVos now only work with cable and will not receive Over The Air aka OTA broadcasts. As of the Roamio series, TiVos only receive cable or OTA not both at the same time like previous models did.) Next Rovi bought TiVo and decided to swap out TiVo's accurate and detailed guide (the MAIN selling point of TiVo) with their own. That change / glitch caused about 2 weeks loss of recordings for most of their customers and ever since my cable connected TiVo would just stop receiving signals randomly requiring a reboot to fix. So I started looking at what would be involved in just going with streaming and OTA. To keep it all straight in my head and to help come up with a plan I started the sheet above.

Summary of things learned

For the most part going without a DVR seems doable if you still pay for cable as most of the network streaming sites still only work if you have a cable subscription.

With Time Warner it appears it can actually cost you more to get just internet than internet + cable + phone. Plus a Time Warner DVR used to be in the bundle or $5 to $10 per month. Now is $25 per month. That is more a month than getting a TiVo on contract plus the monthly cable card fee!

Keeping track of what you already watched and if something new is available is almost impossible even with a TiVo when streaming is in the mix unless you have something like the above sheet.

If you want to watch something within a day or two of broadcast but not live you still need a DVR. (For instance if you watch the news or a late night talk show on your schedule you will want at least an OTA DVR.)

You will probably need to get used to commercials again. Almost everything streaming outside of Hulu and Netflix has commercials you can not skip. CBS is the exception with a commercial free option for $9.99/month but you mainly only get the last 7 episodes of current shows so it is pretty pricey for what you get.

A TiVo OTA might still be cost effective compared to other OTA DVRs but the last TiVo update has REALLY slowed it down so jury is still out.

Most networks still don't get it. A LOT of shows you will only find the last 3 to 7 episodes available for streaming even with commercials. Outside of Netflix of course. But even on Netflix more and more shows are DVD only.

Why do you need a spreadsheet?

The TiVo OnePass system would not only automatically deal with recording at changing show times but would also show you what shows were available to watch, both recorded locally and streaming. The streaming bit has some issues but it still helps. If you watch more than a few shows you quickly see how much of a time saver this is, when it works. But the Tivo only tracks stuff it can stream or record so your OTA Tivo will not know anything about what is on AMC, for example, while a Roku would even though the Roku AMC app does not work with a Time Warner ID to watch their shows right now.  So in order to have something that works I came up with this some what manual option.

So first thing you will want is a list of what is new this week. The sheet grabs an RSS feed for that.

Next you will want to compare the last available episode (shows:C) from that feed against the last you watched (shows:B) to know if there is something new to see. Colors change to let you know if you are ahead (watched live) or behind what the feed sees as the last episode.

Lastly you will want to know where the best place is to go see it and a backup if that fails.There is a place for you fav (shows:E) and all the other places you can get it (shows:J-X).

Plus if you watch the same shows I do I've done a lot of the work for you. The sheet is by no means done but there is already a ton of info on the 91 shows I'm currently tracking. I'll be adding stuff as I go.

There are also links to some helpful info and compares of devices and streaming sources.

Hulu rating issues

At 10:03 AM: Started going back through my Hulu history rating shows to see if I can get better suggestions till I noticed it does not seem to be keeping my ratings. Guess that was time wasted.

At 10:47 AM: Still trying to sort what is going on with the Hulu watched indicators on episodes too. Thought they had just stopped working in the TiVo app but while on the web site going through my history I see they show up on some shows and not on others. You would think the watched indicators would key off your history (just makes sense to the programmer in me) but they don't seem linked.

Troubleshooting Netfilx Streaming Issues

A friend was asking if anyone else was having Netflix issues in the evenings. Here is a summary of some of the things I discovered: Be a squeaky wheel, I often Tweet when things are not working which generally gets multiple responses from TWC. Ping a server as a quick check, I've noticed even cable TV issues often clear up when running a test on speedtest.net which seems a bit suspicious. Worst case it gives you an indication of the line quality. Check the modem, if you have a TWC Arris modem you can check the line levels directly by pointing your browser to http://192.168.100.1/cgi-bin/status_cgi It also might be at 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. Even if you are not having issues, find your modem's web interface, there is lots of good info there. Also good to know what the levels are when things are working to compare to when they are not. Run Netflix tests, view http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70136810?trkid=439131 which is a Netflix test video. Upper left tells you the speed they are sending to you at. Should ramp up to 3000 kbps @ 1280 x 720 if things are OK. Assuming you have at least 3 mb service of course. Better yet if you are in a browser press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + D to see line diag info. See chart of Nextflix speeds for US ISPs at http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa Check your settings, check Netflix your account is set to stream at HD to get HD. When I checked mine I found was set for HD but to get Ultra HD or stream more than 2 shows at once I'd need to pay $4 more per month. I also found you should have 40 mb of available bandwidth to stream Ultra HD. Yikes! Try a diff device, I have the 300 mb service and I never saw 1280 x 720 in the above tests so I tried House of Cards as well. According to Netflix diag info I had 40 MB of through put but still only saw 720p. So I tried the test video via my TiVo and got the expected 5800 kbps @ 1920 x 1080. No apparent reason as to why. Sure would be nice if there was some easy to find guide or explanation why or at least what to do to get 1080p without having to experiment. On a side note if you have a Time Warner DVR and are seeing issues, the DVR has a web interface as well. Looking at http://192.168.1.202/Authorizations-Package_or_Tier for example. 192.168.1.202 is the address of mine of course. If you don't know yours get a tool like advanced-ip-scanner to locate it on your network.