FiOS just keeps getting better and better

Posted on December 16, 2010 by SmileCitrus

This firewire card served me loyally since 2004, now it's time for him to meet the great OEM in the sky

That’s my firewire card. Or at least it was. It’s dead now. There’s a connection here between the title of this post and the image, which I’ll get to presently.

Apparently the FCC requires that television service providers offer consumers STBs with active IEEE 1394 ports. I just learned this recently when I was idly wondering whether or not it was possible to copy recorded programs from my Verizon DVR to an external storage device or the hard drive of my computer.

It turns out that you can’t. In the process of confirming that though I found out that Verizon STBs not only have an “active” firewire port but that you can actually capture live television programming by connecting the STB to any computer with a firewire port. You can also play a recorded program on the DVR and capture it as it plays to your computer via firewire.

It’s always been my default position, more or less, to view the FCC as fulfilling some sort of adversarial role with respect to the goals and ideals of the tech crowd, but this development may force me to modify my views. I really don’t understand what purpose such a law could serve other than making life easier for copyright infringers.

Hell, I bought my Hauppauge HD-PVR more or less to exploit its component connections to record whatever I wanted from broadcast TV. That was before I had a DVR though.

Which brings me to the next thing that I’m astounded at: you can record 5C encrypted programming on Verizon DVRs and play it back! Of course, you can’t play it or anything if you record it via firewire, but if you just want to play it back on your DVR then it actually works!

Not that I’m complaining, but that doesn’t make any sense. I figured that with a Verizon DVR you’d be able to record clear QAM channels only. But I can record anything it seems, even premium channels like HBO.

The ability to capture programs via firewire is great though, since I don’t have to spend money on a capture card this way. I don’t get degraded recordings this way either like I do when I resort to using my HD-PVR. The firewire recordings are the actual MPEG transport streams themselves, so you get the untouched video, audio and even closed captions. This is nice for both pirates and honest people like me. Pirates can give the TS to their encoder friends who then share the file. Honest folks like me also benefit though because I can encode the file however the hell I want. I can do a low CRF x264 encode for archival purposes if I don’t care about storage space, I can do an SD XviD encode to play on my hardware player, I can make an iPod or PSP version of the recording, author a Blu-ray disc, video DVD, etc…

One complaint that I have about the firewire recording though is that some of the HD local channels are 5C encrypted even though they’re not supposed to be. For example, CBS HD is 5C encrypted and cannot be played back if recorded via firewire. CBS SD though is not. It’s mildly irritating since I kinda thought that this was illegal. The only HD channels that it seems one can record via firewire and actually play back are NBC, Fox, ABC, 9 (the one that used to be UPN) and 11. Possibly PBS too, I can’t remember. Ultimately it makes the utility of this discovery somewhat limited, but it’s still pretty far out that it was the government that mandated it.

Anyway, as soon as I found this out I started getting cryptic BSODs here and there when starting D-VHS, the program people seem to use for firewire captures. After getting such a BSOD my PC wouldn’t turn back on for quite some time, about thirty minutes to an hour. No beeps, no BIOS splash screen, nothing at all. After leaving the PSU switch off or unplugging the computer for some time it would eventually come back alive and function normally as though nothing had happened.

After a few days of successfully making firewire captures (with progressively more BSODs) I came to the realization that it was my firewire card that was causing the problem. I could use the PC for hours without a BSOD as long as I didn’t open D-VHS. Once I did I was certain to get a BSOD. So I removed the firewire card and now the PC works fine again. I don’t know what the hell happened. I always thought that a PC component either worked or it didn’t work, not that it may sometimes work and other times prevent your PC from turning on at all.

This all happened within a few days of my discovery of the “active” firewire port on the STB. I feel ripped off. As soon as I discover something great that the government has done for me, some unrelated technical issue prevents me from actually taking advantage of the FCC’s goodwill.

I’m now eagerly awaiting my new firewire card to arrive in the mail. In the meantime though I can still record onto my old iBook G4 using some programs included in the Apple Firewire SDK.

I finally got FiOS

Posted on October 20, 2010 by SmileCitrus

I can’t write a review of it yet or anything, but the installers did, in fact, come yesterday and managed, more or less, to complete the installation. I must say that these installers were some of the most professional and friendly people you could every hope to meet. To say they knew exactly what they were doing would be an understatement. I cannot praise them enough. There were four installers, which seemed like a really smart move, since three of them worked on the wiring while one of them worked on mounting and testing the ONT (which turned out to be defective, though they had extras with them).

The installers were scheduled to arrive between 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM. They arrived right on time at about 10:00 AM to look around the apartment before unloading and bringing their equipment inside. Unfortunately, Con Edison was digging up the street for some reason. Meanwhile, some other construction crew was digging up the street for an unrelated reason on the next block. It was bad timing because it meant that the Verizon installers didn’t have anywhere to park their truck. Since all of their equipment was in the truck it ended up taking an hour and a half for them to load it all up onto some handtrucks and wheel the stuff the several blocks from the truck to my building.

So if you include the time it took them to get the equipment from the truck to my place the whole installation took about 8 hours. But that’s not a complaint really, it wasn’t their fault that it took that long.

They actually finished most of what I expected to be the difficult bits of the installation in about an hour or two. That is, they ran fibre from the hole in the wall through which it enters the apartment to the place where they ONT was going to be installed. They finished that in about an hour. This was really where having four installers was a great idea, since three of them worked on running the fibre while one of them mounted the ONT, which presumably sped things up quite a bit.

Of course, I already had coax in all the rooms as well as in the hallway from Earthlink, so that also sped things up considerably (it was also cheaper since they may charge for running coax around an apartment, depending on what exactly they need to do). They actually got me a working Internet connection in only about two hours (four hours if you include the time spent waiting for them to get all their stuff into the apartment).

The rest of the time they spent doing various things, such as finding out that the ONT was somehow defective. I missed exactly how they figured that out, since the Internet connection had, at least, worked using the first one, but the guy said that one of the other installers had told him that he had performed some sort of test and that he had determined the ONT was no good. So they went ahead and got another one from the truck which was apparently working.

Once it was determined that the second ONT was working, it was just a matter of connecting it to the existing coax. Setting up the set top boxes was very easy; as soon as they were connected to the coax they did some sort of automatic activation procedure that took about ten minutes per box (had to restart that procedure for one of the boxes). I wasn’t actually required to do anything for the activation; the STBs just did it automatically without any user interaction being necessary. Afterward they all worked fine.

There are three telephone lines here. Two should be POTS and one should be what I think is called “FiOS Digital Voice”, which, to the extent that I understand it, is similar to VOIP but it never actually leaves the Verizon network, so it’s not exactly ever reaching the Internet. In any case, the digital one worked as soon as they replaced the bad ONT with the good ONT, but that’s the fax line. The two other lines are for voice calls. They didn’t work while the installers were still here. The installers said that it was not a problem with the setup here in the apartment or with the ONT but rather a bureaucratic issue that can only be fixed by someone essentially “turning on” the two telephone lines by changing some records in a database somewhere and that I should more or less just wait and see what happens. Though I was skeptical at first, the installer said to call him directly if the phone lines didn’t start working some time tomorrow (since by that point it was ~5:00 to 6:00 PM) since he could get through to the proper department that could make the fix more easily than I could. Sure enough, the phones did start working this morning. At this point the only thing that is not working is caller ID.

Now for the most important part: the speed tests. When the installer did a test using Verizon servers he got about 42Mbps downstream and I think 40Mbps upstream. Now that’s obviously amazing, but it wasn’t a proper speed test since it never left the Verizon network. Actual tests that I’ve been doing to non-Verizon servers are much lower. I like this website called Speed Guide, since it lets you look at results from other people based on hostname. So, for example, if I wanted to only see speed test results from FiOS customers in and around the New York City area, I could filter the search results to only view speed tests from people with RDNS ending in “nycmny.fios.verizon.net”. It also lets you save your own speed test history, so now I can look back at my results from my ADSL connection and marvel at how I didn’t kill myself. The top six tests below were from yesterday, right after the installers left at around 6:00 PM.

The nwrknj tests were not done with my connection. They were done elsewhere with a 15Mbps/5Mbps connection.

So I wasn’t getting the best results even when I used the New York test server. At other speed test sites I was getting mixed results, which were often much better than my results at any of the SG servers. I got carried away and ended up taking 40 speed tests at speedtest.net using servers in various places around the world. I was really surprised at the 42Mbps download speed from Nuuk, Greenland.

The router they gave me was an Actiontec MI424 WR Rev. F. It seems fine so far. They even let me keep my old ADSL modem/router that they initially gave me when I got the ADSL connection, not that I have any use for it now.

Torrent upload speeds vary. I have not yet hit 4MB/s, as I should theoretically be able to do based on some of the speed test results I’m getting. I did hit 1.7MB/s upload once though. The fastest I have uploaded to a single peer so far was 800KB/s to another FiOS customer in Syracuse, NY, but I’ve also managed to upload to a few Japanese peers at a sustained ~700KB/s. I still think that I need to do some reconfiguring of my client, such as increasing the maximum number of peers I connect to per torrent and the number of upload slots per torrent.

I’m not sure how uTP will work with this router yet. It always crashed the old Westell ADSL modem/router as well as my Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT. I haven’t gotten around to trying uTP yet since I tend to have it turned off in uTorrent by habit.

All in all, I’m really very pleased with this.

UPDATE: Oct. 20 at ~4:00 PM caller ID started working. Now there’s not a thing at all that’s not working properly.

I am finally getting FiOS

Posted on August 21, 2010 by SmileCitrus

FTTH

There is now virtually zero doubt about it. I can say with almost complete certainty that I will have FiOS at some point within the next one to three months.

Verizon has been digging the bejesus out of the building, to use what I find to be a surprisingly charming phrase, making a lot of noise and dust while they’re at it. This is, of course, all perfectly fine with me since it means we will all be getting FiOS in the apartment complex soon. At one point they even screwed up the plumbing and broke something, causing the whole building to smell like sewage for a day or so, until the janitor used some powerful air freshener thing that smelled like some kind of scented candle, which was almost as bad. Tenants received notification in July that they’d begin the wiring work at some point in September and that service should be offered soon after that. I was skeptical about taking that at face value, since the last time any upgrade to the building wiring was done were at least eleven or twelve years ago when the place was wired for Time Warner cable TV and Earthlink cable Internet (the only non-ADSL ISP available here for the entire time; not even Road Runner is available).

Anyway, there’s no need to dwell on the miserable Internet situation of the past anymore; it’s in the past. The future is FTTH! This will be almost as good as living inside a datacenter. Or Korea. I just hope that Verizon doesn’t introduce any bandwidth caps. It seems inconceivable to me that they offer a service like this and don’t either have a bandwidth cap or throttle customers who do more than check email once a week. As far as I understand it, most FTTH providers simply have no choice but to have very low bandwidth caps. I know at least that that’s the norm for most ISPs in Japan. It just seems too good to be true that I could have 5Mbps upstream (or, dare I hope, maybe even more?) and be allowed to actually upload at that rate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can understand why my ISP doesn’t currently care that I upload at 384Kbps 24/7, since that’s probably not even making a dent in their network, but 5Mbps is not small potatoes, as it were.

I’m alarmed because I read someone complaining somewhere the other day about a newly-introduced transfer cap for FiOS in his or her service area. He or she didn’t mention what area that actually was though so it was more frightening than actually informative. It was pretty restrictive though if I remember correctly. I don’t recall the actual number, but I do remember that it was significantly less than 200GB (more than 100GB though). The whole point of FiOS is to upload something like 30GB a day, so a 200GB monthly transfer cap (where both uploads and downloads are counted equally) is complete and utter fail. It more or less defeats the purpose of having a fast connection for the end-user, though I don’t deny that it’s most likely completely rational for the ISP. If I were an FTTP provider, I’d probably also use transfer caps and some insane “network management” techniques to prioritize content that my investors had an interest in.

The fact that it may be rational and understandable, however, doesn’t mean I’d be any less devastated if I were affected by these practices as a customer. Of course, the terms of the contract are not yet available for me to read, since the installation is not yet finished and, as such, I’m not technically even a potential customer yet.

I shouldn’t jinx things though. If I just think positively I know they won’t throttle or cap me. I’ll expect the best. Besides, Verizon says right on their website that they don’t throttle, at least:

Some Internet providers will resort to “throttling,” or slowing down your Internet connection if they decide your usage is too heavy. Verizon doesn’t. FiOS is always blazingly fast.

I really hope they offer the 35Mbps/35Mbps plan to me. It’s not listed on the main Verizon web site though, so I’m a bit concerned that maybe it’s discontinued. If it has been discontinued, then hopefully I can get the 25/25 plan. It’s cheaper than the “best” plan, which is 50/20.

One of the biggest questions about FiOS I’ve had though since I first heard about it has been, “How the hell do they install those ONT things?”. Verizon’s goal is to have every single NYC resident (yes, all five boroughs) eligible to receive FiOS service by 2014. Why they would choose a place where so many people live in apartment buildings was a mystery to me though. It seemed like a bad idea as far as I could tell. How do you do that? Do you just drill a hole in the customer’s wall, thread the line in and then mount the ONT in the poor bastard’s living room? Actually, at least in my case, they have a better method. Since I live underground, they just went ahead and put the ONT on the outisde wall of the building. They did drill a small hole above the door from the outside into the building (not the door to my apartment though) and that’s how the ONT is connected to the inside wiring. I already have a hole in my living room wall for cable TV/Internet so presumably that’s how I’ll get connected to the ONT (otherwise it’ll have to be through the window!).

This makes some degree of sense I suppose. While the ONT is, in fact, smaller than I thought it would be, it would still be a pain to have this thing in my living room. Of course, even if I did have to have it in my living room it would be a small price to pay for true FTTH, but with it outside, things are even nicer. The downside is that it’s gonna be damned hard to access the ONT. That grid-looking thing above the ONT in the picture is the fire escape for the apartment one floor above me, so it’s quite high up there. I don’t own a ladder either, so that’ll be annoying. Hopefully I won’t have to mess with it myself. This is definite progress though.

Apples taste much better when chilled or frozen

Posted on July 7, 2010 by SmileCitrus

It was 102° Fahrenheit here yesterday and I wanted to eat an apple. I like apples, but the problem with them is that there’s no consistency of quality amongst supermarket apples. When it comes to a good Fuji apple, for instance, the word “good” doesn’t cover it; it’s more of an otherworldly experience in appley delight. The trouble is that only a small fraction of the apples you buy are going to live up to that standard. A bad Fuji can send you into despair in a single bite.

That’s why I’m always very excited when the Honeycrisp season begins. Honeycrisp apples are always equally good. Even the runty, tiny, misshapen ones that settle to the bottom of the display basket and get ignored by inexperienced apple consumers still have the perfect flavor, consistency, and degree of juiciness. Scientists have finally done something useful by bioengineering the Honeycrisp, which is, of course, the world’s most perfect apple.

You can only buy Honeycrisp apples though for a few weeks before they’re out of season. For years it was the most painful thing in the world. Once Honeycrisp season was over you wouldn’t necessarily be guaranteed another delicious apple for an entire year. Sure, you could buy lots of Fuji apples just hoping they’d be up to par, but you’d have no real assurance of quality.

Well, I’ve always known that you can make a terrible apple taste slightly better by chilling it. You can also increase the shelf life of your apples after purchase for a bit by keeping them in the refrigerator instead of on a fruit dish/bowl/platter (protip: having a fruit dish/bowl/platter on display, like on your coffee table or something, makes you a snob and an asshat anyway, so don’t do it).

However, it wasn’t until yesterday in the 102° F heat that I thought of actually freezing some apples. This makes apples with poor flavour much more tolerable and prevents succumbing to despair. Please consider this option the next time you’re sitting and crying in the bathtub, cutting yourself and contemplating suicide after buying yet another apple that, though attractive on the outside when you chose it in the store, turned out to have a putrid taste when you brought it home and tried to eat it.

Why can’t I have nice things?

Posted on May 14, 2010 by SmileCitrus

I’ve often asked myself that. Today, however, I am happy to announce I have acquired a nice thing. It’s a monitor/television, depending on what you choose to do with it.

I bought it to finally replace my old monitor. My old one weighs 31 kg or a bit more than 68 lb. I’ve been afraid for years that one day I would place some small item on the desk absentmindedly, such as a pen or coffee mug, and it would prove to be just enough to cause the desk to crack in half. Simply put, the monitor is dangerously heavy. It also probably consumes more electricity than I’d be happy to be aware of.

Here’s what it looks like, finally disconnected and off of my desk:

Despite it’s shortcomings, however, it must be said that CRT has served me well. It only cost 3 USD.

I made a ceremony of unpacking the new monitor. It’s an ASUS VH236H. I’ve never even seen, let alone used, a monitor this large before. I only paid 140 USD for it though, so it wasn’t a bad purchase at all, especially considering how well it’s worked out for me.

But it was because I couldn’t actually mentally picture what a 23 inch monitor would look like that I was so astounded at the size of the box it came in:

Opening it slowly, savoring every minute of the experience…

A nice bonus was that ASUS includes more or less all of the cables and connectors you could possibly require right inside the box:

They included the power cable for the monitor, an audio cable, VGA cable and a DVI cable. The only other thing that might have been useful to include, that I can think of, would be a VGA to DVI adapter, but I already had half a dozen of those lying around.

The monitor itself is pretty damned elegant:

It’s a plug and play monitor. It worked right out of the box without any special drivers or anything for me in Windows 7 64 bit and Windows XP 32 bit. One of the really nice things about this monitor is that, while you have up to three devices connected simultaneously — one via HDMI, one via DVI and one via VGA –, you can cycle through the different inputs using the input select button on the unit itself. This is not just a novelty; it’s incredibly convenient. I hate having to disconnect all devices except for the one that I actually want to use. I like having all of my devices connected simultaneously so that, when I’m ready to use one of them, it’s already connected. I wish my television were like this. My television won’t work with more than one device connected. You need to physically disconnect all but the one device you actually want to use for the television to “activate” that input. If two or more inputs have something plugged into them, none of the inputs work at all. It’s extremely inconvenient. Switching between input devices on the ASUS monitor, however, is, quite literally, as easy as pressing a button.

The picture is just beautiful. Before today, I had never actually seen 1080p in my life, I don’t think (though I have seen 720p), so I’m certainly not qualified to say whether it’s a superior monitor to others that are comparable in price, but as a layperson, I’m still amazed that something like 1080p even exists at all. There’s no word for it other than “breathtaking”.

I haven’t used the speakers on the monitor yet, but from reviews I’ve read, they’re nothing spectacular. I imagine that’s probably true.

I got my Hauppauge 1212 working in GB-PVR on Windows 7!

Posted on March 5, 2010 by SmileCitrus

I bought this thing several months ago, but getting it to work has proved such a Herculean task that I gave up after some time. I just don’t know enough about AV technologies for this. At least, that’s what I thought. I assumed it was one of those tasks that would be laughably easy if I had even the slightest idea how an H.264 decoder worked, but that, since I didn’t, proved tantamount to asking Sciurus carolinensis to glide in the air as gracefully as Glaucomys sabrinus.

Actually, however, it wasn’t that hard once I figured the process out. The trick to getting this thing to work is to use GB-PVR. Narrowing down my procedure to the things that worked, here’s how I managed to get the HD-PVR to work flawlessly:

Install GB-PVR (I used version 1.4.7)

Install Arcsoft Total Media Extreme. The purpose of installing this software with such an asinine name is not to actually use it, but to get the Arcsoft video codec. Using ffdshow/libavcodec in GB-PVR will not work so we need to use the Arcsoft codec. The HD-PVR should come with the Arcsoft software for free.

Click Start->All Programs->Accessories and right-click on the Command Prompt icon to choose “Run as Administrator”. Navigate to the codec directory:

cd C:\Programs Files (x86)\Arcsoft\TotalMedia Extreme\Codec

regsvr32 ASVid.ax

This will let you choose the Arcsoft video codec in the GBPVR configuration utility. It won’t up on the list of available codecs otherwise.

You should have gotten a confirmation window after hitting . Now in Windows Explorer, navigate to

cd C:\Programs Files (x86)\Devnz\GBPVR

Copy the file named “config.xml” to the desktop. Now open it and add the following line (but note that you need to delete the single space after the opening brackets; I had to add those because WordPress is giving me problems with preformatted text):


< PreferredHDPVRAudioFormat>AC3< /PreferredHDPVRAudioFormat>

This should enable audio in LiveTV mode.

Now open the GBPVR config application. Choose “Capture Sources” and “Add”. Look under “Analg HiDef Recording Plugin”. Then choose “Hauppauge WinTV HD-PVR”. I don’t have any channels or guides configured since I connect this to a set-top box and use the guide feature from the cable provider, but this is where you would configure guides and channel listings if you planned on using them

In the “Playback” tab choose “EVR” for the renderer, “Arcsoft Video Decoder” for “Video Decoder” and also for “H.64 Decoder”. I left everything else on “System Default” and it works.

Now if you start GB-PVR you should get both audio and video in LiveTV mode. Until I read about the line that must be added in config.xml, I had been using GB-PVR for recording, but when in LiveTV mode I would have to pause the video before I got any audio. If I paused for just one second and then unpaused it I would get audio and video just fine, but it was still irritating since it meant that I had to actually be recording the video to hear any audio (and I’d have to remember to empty the Temp directory for Live recordings every so often). This way though, you shouldn’t have to hit pause at all to get audio and video.

Verizon upgraded my service!

Posted on October 2, 2009 by SmileCitrus

I have 65KB/s upstream now! This is incredible. I’ve never had better than 50 to 55KB/s before in my life.

I feel so European…

It’s not exactly an “upgrade” though, since I pay for 768Kbps (96KB/s) service. It’s more like they’ve just bumped my service closer to the rate that it’s supposed to be at, based on my bill.

ADSL has never looked so great.

Smile,Citrus

With all due respect…

Category Archives: Triumphs