I had a strange problem with my Motorola DCT 6412 III DVR last night. Everything live on cable played through the tuner just fine, but nothing recorded would play. Instead it showed a black screen with no progress on the play bar. You could fast forward or rewind, and it remained at 0:00 played and a black screen.
I tried recording something new and then playing it, thinking maybe the old files corrupted. This resulted in the exact same behavior. Finally, I did some looking out on the Internet and noticed some things. First of all, Insight Communications has lousy self-help on their website. Really, it sucks. Second, there wasn’t a lot of help for troubleshooting to be found; most people seem to post questions trying to figure out how to steal TV shows off of the DVR.
After a bit of looking, I stumbled upon a single suggestion. Unplug the DVR for a while and it should work again. Eureka! That did, indeed, make the DVR start working again. I don’t know what caused the problem or if it will recur. I wanted to post about it here to get this information in one more place out on the web.
There have been several times that I’ve had to pull the plug on my motorola reciever. I have this cool deal where HD content will lose sync between the audio and video. The only way to fix it is to do the hard reset. Every time I do this I just hope the device will die. I have an 80GB recorder and I’ve heard that the new ones Insight gives out are 250 GB and up!!!!