Hi,
Found this forum when I was browsing for answers on the web, and it seems to be a great place for sat/cable information. Thought I'd try posting a question here.
At home we have Verizon FiOS, and have been really happy with it and with our DVR/cable box. Our remote has a skip forward button, and you can get into the DVR settings and even program how far ahead in seconds it skips. Very nice to skip over commercials quickly.
We were lucky to find a small vacation/retirement home we could afford as a second house, and bought it a few years ago. We can't move yet because of our jobs, so in the meantime we rent out our little place for vacationers, usually by the week or weekend. We go ourselves whenever we can, like for some holidays and long weekends.
There is little OTA TV reception, so we signed up for the local Charter cable, didn't get a DVR, and have been okay with it as a basic cable service. But, having a DVR at home, we were going crazy at the lack of DVR there, so we upgraded our plan to get an HD DVR from Charter on this Thanksgiving visit. So far it's working okay, and this is our first experience with HD, which is also something that will spoil us (we'll have to get it at home now too). The box is a Cisco Explorer 8640HDC, and we haven't really done much exploring to see what we think of it. I read that if you stop a recording in the middle, then go back to it later it will start playing from the start again instead of where you stopped it, which would be sucky. Haven't tried it yet.
The remote is a standard silver Charter thing: two buttons only at the top, On/Off and Power, and the bottom of the front has QS printed on it.
It doesn't have a skip forward button, which is a little frustrating. After spending some time finding and reading stuff on the web, I gather that whether or not a skip forward is available is a function of the DVR box software, so I don't even know if the 8640 would support that. But even if it does, without a dedicated skip forward button on the remote, I would need to program an unused button to generate the code to access that function on the box. Has anyone done this successfully with this box and remote combination?
At home for FiOS I have the skip forward set to one minute, and the skip back set for 30 seconds. With that combination it's usually easy to skip over the commercials and "adjust" things by going forward and back to find the boundary between the commercials and the shows quickly. I'd like to be able to do the same thing at the vacation house. There is a skip back button on the remote, but I'm not sure how many seconds it's programmed for. I'd like to be able to reset that as well as create a skip forward button.
Thanks in advance for any help/advice, even if it's just to say "nope, you can't do that." Maybe when we move here we'll get our own DVR that allows more customization, but as long as the house is mostly for vacation renters, I want to keep the Charter hardware, in case anything goes wrong - easier to just call Charter to come out and fix it when we're not there.
-- garyZ
Found this forum when I was browsing for answers on the web, and it seems to be a great place for sat/cable information. Thought I'd try posting a question here.
At home we have Verizon FiOS, and have been really happy with it and with our DVR/cable box. Our remote has a skip forward button, and you can get into the DVR settings and even program how far ahead in seconds it skips. Very nice to skip over commercials quickly.
We were lucky to find a small vacation/retirement home we could afford as a second house, and bought it a few years ago. We can't move yet because of our jobs, so in the meantime we rent out our little place for vacationers, usually by the week or weekend. We go ourselves whenever we can, like for some holidays and long weekends.
There is little OTA TV reception, so we signed up for the local Charter cable, didn't get a DVR, and have been okay with it as a basic cable service. But, having a DVR at home, we were going crazy at the lack of DVR there, so we upgraded our plan to get an HD DVR from Charter on this Thanksgiving visit. So far it's working okay, and this is our first experience with HD, which is also something that will spoil us (we'll have to get it at home now too). The box is a Cisco Explorer 8640HDC, and we haven't really done much exploring to see what we think of it. I read that if you stop a recording in the middle, then go back to it later it will start playing from the start again instead of where you stopped it, which would be sucky. Haven't tried it yet.
The remote is a standard silver Charter thing: two buttons only at the top, On/Off and Power, and the bottom of the front has QS printed on it.
It doesn't have a skip forward button, which is a little frustrating. After spending some time finding and reading stuff on the web, I gather that whether or not a skip forward is available is a function of the DVR box software, so I don't even know if the 8640 would support that. But even if it does, without a dedicated skip forward button on the remote, I would need to program an unused button to generate the code to access that function on the box. Has anyone done this successfully with this box and remote combination?
At home for FiOS I have the skip forward set to one minute, and the skip back set for 30 seconds. With that combination it's usually easy to skip over the commercials and "adjust" things by going forward and back to find the boundary between the commercials and the shows quickly. I'd like to be able to do the same thing at the vacation house. There is a skip back button on the remote, but I'm not sure how many seconds it's programmed for. I'd like to be able to reset that as well as create a skip forward button.
Thanks in advance for any help/advice, even if it's just to say "nope, you can't do that." Maybe when we move here we'll get our own DVR that allows more customization, but as long as the house is mostly for vacation renters, I want to keep the Charter hardware, in case anything goes wrong - easier to just call Charter to come out and fix it when we're not there.
-- garyZ
