[mythtv-users] (US) Dump Comcast for a dish, good Mythtv decision?

[David Schlenk]

>    I've been using IR blasters "since the dawn of time". I have used them
> with landline monopolies (analog and digital) as well as Dish and DTV. I
> have found the Dish boxes to be the most problematic. The older boxes that
> I used had the nasty habit of "getting hung up" if you tried to tune in an
> invalid channel. They would throw up a dialog box that required human
> intervention to get past.
>

You just have to make your channel change script capable of handling
that. This plagued me a lot at the beginning of my Dish subscription
but I've got it pretty well worked out now. The annoying things now
are that sometimes in the middle of a movie airing in the middle of
the night the box downloads updates and reboots itself. I curse, shake
my fist at Charlie and then delete and rerecord. That and sometimes
the STB overheats and I lose video until I reboot it.

Overall I find Dish to be a bit cheaper than Comcast was with less
service outages. If Comcast had clear QAM, reliable service and more
competitive rates I'd consider it, but I got really sick of the
service outages and the constant price hikes. I have better things to
do with my time than try to get 3 month discounts by serially
threatening to cancel.

David

(my channel change script for dish is available at:
http://schdav.org/mythtv/scripts/change-channel-lirc.pl)