Does Charter do DVI?
By Richard Lawler 
posted Mar 31st 2006 1:08PM
posted Mar 31st 2006 1:08PM
HD Beat reader Chris wrote us about a problem he is having trying to connect his cable box via DVI,
and found that it was not enabled."Just thought i would send a little experience your way tonight. I just spent half an hour on the phone with charter cable. I have all my services through them and through the 8 months we have had service with them, they have been great. Until today. I just ordered a DVI cable and received it. My wife and I get home to hook it up, snuggle and bask in the DVI HD glory in our home. But wait, it isn't working. What??!?!? that isn't right it wouldn't work.
I contacted charter for a little assistance and they tell me that the DVI option is locked out on all the boxes because no one uses them. How the hell do they know that? They don't give anyone a chance to try it out! I spoke with several folks about this because i was ticked. I love HD. with the component cable hooked up, but I was just plain excited with the idea of hooking it up with DVI and now Charter has shot it down.
Charter claims they have to pay a third party to unlock that feature on the box. what a crock! After searching the web, it turns out other folks have run into this also!"
Chris is in the St. Louis area and has a Motorola BMC9012 Moxi DVR. This review of the box noted that several featues (including DVI) are disabled, but an update provided that capability if your provider chooses to enable it. This thread on AVS Forums provides some more insight, hopefully the update will be rolled out soon. Any other HD Beat readers run into a similar situation with their cable provider or know of a way to get that perfectly good digital output working?
Apparently Comcast does the same thing in Massachusetts. My brother-in-law can't use the DVI output on his Motorolla box.
My theory is that the cable companies don't want to supply high-end cables (HDMI or DVI) to consumers because of the cost. By disabling the digital output the companies try to completely side-step the issue. They supply a cheaper component video cable and figure most people don't know/care enough about the connection.
Strange, when I had my satellite setup, they didnt include a HDMI cable, but I got one and it works fine. They told me (before they knew I had one) that they wouldnt supply the hdmi cable because of the cost, but it still works. Thats pretty damn shady of the cable company if you ask me. I hate how you pay for something, but you dont get it. Blah.
Hope it gets resolved dude.
Strange...
I live in St. Louis and I have Charter HD service with their regular set-top HD box and I have no issues using the DVI / component or IEEE-1394 to connect to my HD set.
So I have Charter here in Los Angeles and when they came with the Moxi box it didn't come with high def cables - only the standard AV cables. The cable guy said to use those to hook up the HD signal. I laughed, but he was serious.
After futzing around I dug up an extra DVI cable (thank god I'm a geek) and plugged it in. Works dine. DVI to my HD set using Charter and moxi.
Maybe this is on a region by region setting?
Hoe this guys gets it taken care of.
Why they locked out DVI by default? I didn't know about it? : Next time when I will buy.
I have a Charter HD Motorola Box in the Asheville, NC area and my DVI port works great. My other box, an HD DVR has several USB ports and things on it that are "non functioning" according to the installer. That's like Ford saying, "Yes, I know your car has headlights on it, and I'm sorry they don't work. We MAY in the future turn them on for you." Well, not really, but you get the idea.
I have a comcast motorola 6200 hd box and I wanted to use the 1394 ports. I called comcast to see if it would work and they said they were disabled. I asked what the point of having them and not using them was. The lady said most things are disabled like the smart card slot in the front. I asked her what that slot was for and she told me that in the future we would be able to put credit cards in there for informercials or home shopping network type things.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Funniest thing I ever heard.
Charter subscriber - Worcester, MA
I have a Scientific Atlanta 8300 series HD cable box. I have the DVI output and tried it out. It was NOT disabled. It actually worked.
I had a previous box that had the DVI output locked out. ???
Also, Charter never told me about setting up the HD output feature on the box. If you look up the manual for this cable box, their is a procedure you go through to setup the output resolution to match your television. You have to shut the cable box off, then hit something like guide and info at the same time. This menu pops up that asks you what type of resolution your HD set displays(480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i). Before running this menu this the box was displaying everything in 1080i, even the 720P stations. So watch out for this!
Another strange thing that I found, and I don't know if anyone else has experienced this while they were messing around with their outputs, but, I found that the DVI output looked crappy when compared to the component output. I was very surprised by this. I would have expected the opposite. I used a DVI to HDMI cable.
Kinda weird. Anybody experience this?
Charter subscriber--Richland, WA
So my Moxi has DVI disabled as well. The 4 (yes 4) USB ports are disabled. The Ethernet is not technically disabled. Its enabled, just does not do DHCP. I connected it to my PC with a crossover cable, couldnt get anytype of access to the box. my guess is you have to have software loaded on your PC to connect to it. If anyone wants to change their PC address to one that can communicate with your moxi, the default address on my moxi is 192.168.0.2. Remember you will need a cross over cable (or a switch, not a hub) to make a connection. dont forget to set your computers IP and subnet correctly. if you dont know how to do this, google is your friend.
****if you do this, you are at your own risk****
on your moxi press and hold menu and the OK button at the same time, it will bring up all the diag menus for you moxi. It would be interesting to see what some of you are getting for software versions. my moxi is a 9012 and running version 3.2.171.11LR-S.113955. my last update was 12-8-05.
I do have a major complaint with this box, the Analog channels Look like crap. fuzzy as all heck, why do i need to watch analog channels when i can watch HD you ask? becuase only PBS, ABC, NBC are in HD in my area...lovely. I have had Charter techs out multiple times and they just shrug thier shoulders and say yup, its a moxi problem. anyone else have this issue?
Hey #7, by law, the cable company is required to have the firewire ports working. You should try getting a hold of your cable company and exchanging your box.
I have Comcast cable with a Motorola 6120 HD box. The DVI works, but if you have problems with it, Comcast doesn't support it.
The members over at AVS found out that the DVI on the moxi was enabled in 3.2 and most Charter areas support it. You must plug the DVI in and restart the moxi box, it only initializes on startup if something is pugged in. So try that and see if your DVI starts working after the reboot. I know that the Charter in Western NC works fine with DVI so long as it's plugged in during the boot up cycle. Let me know if this works for you.
just another datapoint for folks - Hadley, MA Charter subscriber here. The DVI port on my cable box is also locked. The installer had no clue as to why. His guess was that if I leased the DVR box from them that that box had the DVI port unlocked, but I have no use for their DVR.
I am a charter employee in ft worth tx, and ill set this straight guys. The DVI port !!!!! IS !!!!!! active ( ft wort i know, i dont know about other regions ). BUT... we dont support it. Confusing? yes i know, let me explain. When we say we dont support it, that means we dont trouble shoot, we dont work with you ( at all, unless you get me, cuase i know )on it, and dont recommend it, just becuase like everyone else says, im sure, its just expensive. Plus we dont get training on it, and if we did, that would be even more of an expense, so there are alot of things that factor into us "supporting" it, other than having it active. Hope that clears it us a bit.
another thing you might want to try is the "Hd wizard"if there are issues with the pic quality or no pic at all like - 8. Charter subscriber - Worcester, MA - stated earlier.
Hey Charter Employee in Ft. Worth, I'm thinking about getting Charter HD service (in Ft. Worth) but I want to know what HD box does Charter supply. I'd like to know if I'll have the option for component OR DVI to connect to my LCD and digital projector. I called Charter customer support, but they are clueless. They took down my number and said they would have to call back, which they haven't yet. Any info?