Cable Box periodic Reboot

vining

Here in CT most of my customer use CableVsion which uses the SA cable box. These are manufactured worse every year and where occasionally they would just drop the digital audio out they now just start acting erratic. Sometimes tell change channels but sometimes they won't and of course when ever this happens, the first thing the customer thinks of is that the TPs must not be working correctly. Has anyone adopted a policy of issuing a nightly reboot say around 2am (if not in use) to keep this from being an issue that affects the customer. If so how much success have you had?

Spire_Jeff

We discussed doing this, but I opted to just add a help page to our cable boxes and tuners. We explain to the client that the help page is for when there are problems with the device (no picture/erratic behavior). There are two options:
Step 1 - Issue the power on command.
Step 2 - Reboot the unit.

There are a couple of sentences that detail what to expect (ie no picture for 1-2 minutes while box reboots and no guide data for a while). We make sure we go over this in training and explain that this is a problem with the cable boxes. When the client inevitably forgets about the help button and calls us, we just have them hit the help button and then the power on or reboot button as necessary.

To make this all work, we use the SynAccess IP controlled power strip.

The reason I didn't like the specific time reboot is that I KNOW that it will bite me in the ***. It doesn't matter what time I pick, I will ruin some important event or cause the guide data to be missing when they need it most or cause a recording to be missed. I also like the fact that it gives control over the situation to the client without encouraging them to root around in the rack and create more problems in the process of trying to solve one

Jeff

vining

Spire_Jeff wrote:

To make this all work, we use the SynAccess IP controlled power strip.

The reason I didn't like the specific time reboot is that I KNOW that it will bite me in the ***. It doesn't matter what time I pick, I will ruin some important event or cause the guide data to be missing when they need it most or cause a recording to be missed. I also like the fact that it gives control over the situation to the client without encouraging them to root around in the rack and create more problems in the process of trying to solve one

I give my customers a reboot button as well and use the Ethernet Power Controller from Digital Loggers to do so. I was just wondering if anyone had success doing a periodic scheduled reboot, didn't really think about the DVR possibly recording at the time though. Hmmm.

Spire_Jeff

I did play with putting an LED sensor on the Record LED to override the reboot, but then I had a box lock up while recording and that kind of defeated that idea

Jeff