F/U: Yes, Comcast's crap DVR did trash my receiver...

[Will Collier]

Pioneer VSX-921 A/V receiver, the Crapcast Motorola DCX3400 DVR killed its HDMI ports in less than 24 hours. Nothing will play through it any more, audio or video. It's a brick as far as HDMI is concerned. Little Googling revealed that model DVR has a long and sordid history of HDCP issues, and I'm not the first victim to get their property trashed by one.

After a couple of useless service calls (one a no-show on the tech's part) and some major Twitter company-shaming on my part, Comcast agreed to reimburse me the cost of replacing the receiver (it would have cost even more to have Pioneer repair it).

So, morals of the story: Don't ever use Comcast's gear. Get a Tivo, or better yet, get DirecTV. Second, don't waste your time with the customer-no-service phone lines (which will probably go offshore anyway), when you have a major issue, go directly to Twitter and embarrass the crap out of them if you actually want anything to get done...

[bazookaman]

Social networking DOES have a use.

[rgG]

I broke the pencil on Comcrap about 20 years ago. DSL may be slower, but I don't have to deal with Comcrap, so it is still a better deal.
I like my Dish DVR just fine.

[cbelt3]

Wow. That's just evil. At least you got some support from them after pain.

[gabester]

Will,

This is disheartening on several levels.

1) That it is possible in this digital era for a video connector to "die" due to poor copyright-enforcement implementation.
2) That Comcast's normal support channel is so poor.

Out of curiosity about how many twitter followers do you have? Me not doing social media, I have to wonder if I found myself in a situation like this if there's some minimum number of followers you'd need to have otherwise they would just ignore you for lacking sufficient social influence. That could be my #3...

g=

[hal]

My comcast/moto/pioneer receiver setup has work alright (different models), but perhaps you'll be pleased to hear that my comcast/moto box fried a while ago. Comcast replaced it...

so it's comcast 1 - pioneer 1

[pRICE cUBE]

It sucks to know that Comcast continues to sell substandard DVR machines.

[Carm]

pRICE cUBE wrote:
It sucks to know that Comcast continues to sell substandard DVR machines.

Correction. They rent those shitty machines.

[space-time]

Comcast agreed to reimburse me the cost of replacing the receiver

Please post a follow up when you actually get the check for this.

[Will Collier]

Answering questions/points from the thread:

I have about 1500 followers, mostly football junkies (I write a column for one of the big Rivals sites during college football season). Also, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) RT'd my main gripe, and he has, um, an awful lot of followers. I'm sure that helped.

It is indeed outrageous that Comcast will put a device that is known (even occasionally) to BREAK customers' gear. I bet you I could buy every single HDMI product at a given BestBuy and not have the same problem. Just inexcusable.

Finally, regarding the reimbursement, yep, I will believe it when I see it. Until then, I'm getting everything in writing...