New DVR coming from Comcast and Panasonic
By Matt Burns 
posted Jan 18th 2006 3:32PM
posted Jan 18th 2006 3:32PM
Your old
Moto 6412 DVR from Comcast might soon be replaced with state of the art HD set-top boxes from Panasonic.
The new cable boxes will encode in both MPEG-2 and H.264. It has USB 2.0 for connecting digital cameras and MP3
players. Best of all though, these boxes comply to the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). This is the most important feature, even more then the
250 GB hard drive, as it allows people to interact with their HDTVs a bit more then ever before including using a
single remote for a Comcast box and Panasonic home theater equipment.Think of OCAP as an operating system that interacts between the devices on the cable network: video on demand and a variety of interactive services. This system has been in test markets (New York; Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wis.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Waco, Texas later this year) for some time now and it seems to be going well.
Note to developers of OCAP: we would like RSS feeds on our widescreen TVs. This cannot be that hard to do. Eventually we would except to see teleconferencing like in the current season of 24; work on the RSS feeds first though.
If you could add features or benefits to your cable system, what would they be?
MY current MOTO box is utter shite. I am praying that these new boxes will roll out quickly - and without added expense. Good luck, right? Perhaps HDTiVo is the answer... Who will get me first??
I've had Comcast's Moto DVR for over a year now, I believe. The box had a few issues in the early days, but nothing to bad. Over the last two months or so, that has really changed. The box has turned to complete crap. Freezes for minutes at a time, won't decode channels, sound cuts out - all kind of things that require the power cord being yanked about every three days or so.
I'm this || close to trying out DirecTivo. My wife is ready to take a hammer to the thing, and friends that we recommended the Comcast box to are tired of it. Fortunately with spring right around the corner, I won't be catching much TV so I can be patient with them. If there's no new box by mid-summer, I'm out of Comcast.
This is interesting considering the Comcast Tivo box will be out middle 06. I wonder if the Tivo box will actually be an entirely new box, or just a software udpate for the existing boxes? All I know is the new Tivo Series 3 shown at CES is by far the most impressive DVR I've ever seen and I'll be buying/leasing one the very day they are released. I can't wait to get rid of the buggy comcast dvr and replace it with a Series 3 Tivo!!
This would be sweet, and I would love to swap out my DVR for the new one, but comcast is SO slow to get anything done. I was supposed to have OnDemand in my area last summer...
I can't wait, and by that I mean I will probable have fired comcast again long before they can release these, comcast release cycles being measured in decades. The Current Motorola dvr comcast has with MS foundation completely suck (we have two), the guide data for HD is totally useless, and the boxes are buggy as hell. At first I thought it was ok but the longer I leave with it the more problems I find, the db self corrupts, the guide data dumps on a reboot (which is needed a lot), the dam thing simple fails to record often or will only record a couple seconds of show. It has no error tracking or records. There is no way to even transfer your scheduled stuff so if you have 50 plus things getting a new unit represents hours of work and that is after it takes the POS DAYS to rebuild it's complete guide data. I switched from a direct tv HD tivo, and it had it's issues and certainly suffered from a lack of love. Poky as the UI was at least everything worked, it never ONCE failed to do what it was supposed to do, corrupted it's own data or just plain failed to execute. *sigh* Hell the dam things don't do anything useful in way of interfacing with MCE of course, and of the dozens of ports they have none of them work (probable thank comcast for that).
My point? These things might be better they might not, cable companies suck, in fact all providers do, go OTA and bit torrent if you can.
For a less rosy view on OCAP:
http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2006-01/ocap-whos-capping-whom/