FIOS STB woes

[jgourd]

For over a year everything was great. Some time last week I started to see shows recorded that were a black screen stating to watch FIOS I had to push the menu button. This has happened three times in a week.

Is this happening to any of you?

[darcilicious]

More than likely it means your set-top box was rebooted remotely by the cable company. They do this for firmware upgrades, and for other operational/maintenance operations. When this happens, it is not returned to the powered on state, unfortunately. This is probably the cause if it's always happening say between 1a-5a.

(It could also possibly mean the set-top box is just spontaneously rebooting if it's going bad but that's a lot less likely)

[ericscottf]

Let me add another possibility i discovered:

I found that my cable box would start shutting off VERY frequently -- once per hour or so.

I found the show that preceded the problem, it turns out that with fios, if you tune a channel you don't get, the box will shut off in a few minutes. If you then turn it back on but don't change the channel, it will shut down again shortly thereafter.

Look through all your shows in reverse-chrono order (most recently recorded first), until you find the last show that was recorded well, and then the first one that was recorded blank. Is the blank one on a channel you don't get?
If so, remove it from your lineup.

Your other options, if the problem is very infrequent (once a month or so) are some kind of alert system or STBkeepalive (or some similar software). I have found that the fios boxes have a key combination that when pressed, will turn them on if they are off and do nothing if they are on. At least on mine, if you press MENU and then ESC, it will power up an off box and only blink the menu for a moment if it was already on. I have that set to run twice a day, 6:03am and 6:03pm on stbkeepalive.

You can also wire in a relay to the 120v outlet and tell the cable box to turn off the outlet when the box is off (it is a setting). Hook up a buzzer or a light so when the box loses power, the light or buzzer comes on. Might be annoying if it happened at 3am tho.

[aflat]

I have a batch file I run at 5am to turn on channel 5 on my STB so I don't have to worry about firmware updates resetting the box. I can't really use Sage for this, since it records channel 5 from my QAM tuners. But I want to watch the news on an analog TV not hooked up to sage, but off a splitter from the STB.

Check here for more info
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...19&postcount=6

[cslatt]

99 times out of 100, this is the problem. After a couple of minutes tuned to a channel that you don't receive, FIOS STBs turn themselves off and display that "press menu to watch tv" message.

For a quick fix, figure out which favorite is causing the problem and restrict which channels it can record from, or for a more final fix, go through your channel line-up and remove every channel you don't receive.

Originally Posted by ericscottf

I found the show that preceded the problem, it turns out that with fios, if you tune a channel you don't get, the box will shut off in a few minutes. If you then turn it back on but don't change the channel, it will shut down again shortly thereafter.

[jgourd]

All very Sage advice, thanks