So, just after Time Warner called me and told me they aren’t seeing any “serious issues” on my line, and that whatever they have been seeing is “minimal and well within acceptable guidelines” I experience this bit of macroblocking awesomeness! Take a look at the channel outage here.
As you can see TBS HD is completely blacked out and if you pay attention, there is about a 2-3 second delay with macroblocking when switching to a new channel, and it does some odd resizing move. At the end of the video, thats the “Cricket” monitoring device. If you look closely you can see the bottom left LED “signal loss” lit solidly, next to it is the “reporting” LED which is not activated (they are both that hot pink/purple color when active) which leads me to believe that not all of my outages are being “phoned home” by the device.
Sometimes the macroblocking is accompanied by channel lockup, meaning the picture freezes as if I had paused it (I gave up my DVR long ago) then will macroblock in and out of the freeze up. You can see what I mean in this video below, family guy is completely frozen for a few minutes while I go to grab my camera, when it starts back and macroblocks it’s way right into another freeze.
Keep in mind, Time Warner maintains that these issues are well within acceptable guidelines and tolerances. This is what they stated when responding to the public utilities commission and closed out my case. On a whim when these issues happened I called the Time Warner representative assigned to me and let her know of the issues before I called anyone else. Two days without a response and I made a new call to the PUC. Over a week later and there is still no callback. how is that for “executive customer support” Time Warner?
