Living

So I’d just gotten out of the tub, watching CSI, having a libation or two and relaxing post-chiropractor appointment. I go to turn on the TV and notice that strangely enough, it’s stuck on PBS-HD. While entertaining, this is not terribly useful when what I want to do is catch up on heroes. So I power toggle the box at the plug, shortly after the box goes through it’s usual boot process. Good, so far. It hits the screen first screen OCAP Middleware load screen, the progress bar fills, then the box goes to PBS-HD again (utoh) and finally to the Mystro countdown screen. It hits L-13… and stops dead, turns to E-13. I sat for a moment and thought: I could say screw it, and go play WoW — and I nearly did. But against my true nature to leave anything broken alone… I had to fix it.

I call up time warner cable and after about 5 minutes of wading my way through various voice menus and having my phone number read back to me after I’d input it… The CSR answers the phone and I told her what was going on. The box is stuck on E-13. She’s never heard of that error. She says did I leave it off for a minute… I think not but of course I say yes… That couldn’t possibly be it (it was in the end.) The box came back up just fine and I’m watching PBS-HD (Nature) now as I write this.

So what the hell is OCAP? And what do Mystro and OCAP have to do with the fact that my cable box (and possibly yours) lock up? Well, here’s the gist of what the CSR and I discussed on the phone while the torturously long proccess of an Explorer 8300 HDC damned boot sequence trundles along like an overweight crippled oompaloompa. Remember that description, it’s important for later.

The answer? OCAP, or OpenCable Application Platform is an open standard on which software for DVR functionality is run, much the same way my desktop and laptop run windows as a general purpose operating system. OCAP is half way between the hardware and the functionality of the DVR (or STB, Set Top Box, CPE or whatever) and the actual functionality (receving, displaying and timeshifting content.) This is why OCAP is known as Middleware.

So what provides the actual DVR interface? The front end, Mystro in this case. It even has a Public Blog but it don’t appear to be very popular at all. Why’s that? Because the box may have some nice features, but in a lot of ways it falls flat on it’s face.

This overweight oompaloompa of a cable box is born of OCAP - and apparently boxes designed like this have been mandated by the government, so they can get something that is very good for conumsers into the field: Cablecard. According to the cable company CSR (and I’m not sure I believe her), OCAP was pushed out the door to meet the cablecard deployment guidelines. It was “not able to be fully tested and still has regular problems.” Might be on par with windows, maybe a little worse. It’s sure as hell not linux. I’d love to blame this on the fact that the OCAP and the software it runs are probably (judging by the logos on the load screen) written in java. And you all will come to know that I hate java with a passion. It’s also possible that Mystro as a front end just sucks completely, too and that OCAP may actually be solid. I am unsure of the OCAP on the 8300 HDC is 1.0 or 2.0, but either way the 8300 HD (non-OCAP) is more reliable yet it is being taken out of service because of the new cable card regulations - a trade off that sucks for the consumer in more ways than it’s good. I don’t need cable card, not until it’s possible to just slap it into my PC, and would love to have a more stable box. Also, think of the waste of these boxes being pulled from service. Yuck.

So why is this a problem? This new technology (something we didn’t have in my area in State College) is wonderful, no PC involved, fairly quiet, functional. What does it lack? A lot of things. Firstly, the menu systems and interactivity in general are amazingly slow and sluggish for something that is supposed to be next generation technology. There is basic functionality lacking, things my XP MCE box has. Forward 30 second skip (probably abandoned because it makes it infinitely easy to skip commercials.) The fast-forward and rewind functions when resuming normal play have about 3 or 4 second response display on HD content. My PC (E6750, 8800GTX) can do this almost instantly, but i can’t very well get a cable card for it, can I? Thanks to the greed of the entertainment industry, we have DRM (Digital Rights Management.) You also can’t pull content off this box and archive it in a neutral format of your choice outside the DVR - something you can do with many other DVRs (which may require some hacking in some cases.) Also, it amazes me that cable co boxes haven’t caught up to where DirecTV boxes were 7 or 8 years ago. Once upon a time, I had a DRD-420RE and the menus were wonderfully zippy (although it was not capable of HD content, but neither was my TV at the time.) I’d expect the same thing from my box today, but I don’t get it.

The take home message should any cable company executives be reading this: quit kneecapping your equipment, enable and allow video to be pulled out the firewire port, develop better middleware or hardware or front end software any number of places the fix for the laggy menus and terrible unintuitive user interface (what the Fudge, A B and C buttons? - go look at a tivo or XP MCE remote!)

This has been a public service announcement, rant session, and the first post on my new blog. I hope for there to be many others like it.