The most painful thing about this experience is losing any recordings you may have had. I know they don’t normally do it, but was Charter willing to try and recover your programs?

The moxi box supports a external hard drive,if utilized you won’t have to lose any data in the transfer to the new moxi. I have a 500 gig. ext. hd and have massive data backed up.

i have a friend with a moxi, and i have the newer version (motorola) DVR with an interface identical to standard, non-DVR boxes. i prefer my motorola DVR, but the moxi has some advantages. for instance, with the moxi if you flip channels and flip back, it still holds previously revorded television in the queue (for instance, if you pause live TV for 5 minutes, come back, flip channels, once, flip back, you will still be 5 min behind on the old channel as long as you have two tuners available). my DVR loses all previously recorded television on a channel as soon as you flip off of it which has lead to some frustrating accidental “channel up” button presses! BUT the one thing i love about mine is that i can enter the guide and type in “770″ to jump straight to the HD channels for browsing. with the moxi, my friend has to hold down ‘up’ to scroll through 770 channels to get there. that could be a deal breaker for me!!!

plevin– that is awesome!!! MLB HD recently aired game 7 of the 2006 NLCS in its entirety and i wanted to record it for preservation’s sake (such an amazing game!), but 3 hours of HD recording was taking up a massive 10% of my space, which is already pushing 70% because i am a television packrat as it is…

As I understand it, the external hard drive becomes seamless with the Moxi hard drive and enlarges storage but doesn’t back up what you have recorded. Plevin, do you have it configured some way that this isn’t correct? If so, how? Because I asked and was told no, no backup. And Jay, no, my Charter tech (who knows his stuff) said nothing can be recovered. That is the only real downside of using a DVR. By the way, the new Moxi requires an eSATA external hard drive if that makes sense to you.

NSR, with the Moxi, on the Channels list, you just punch in the number (like 770) and it jumps there. It’s always worked that way.

To bad charter still only has around 30 HD channels. I switched to AT&T after my charter rate jumped from $100 to $179/month. I now get like 80 HD channels with U-verse. I miss the moxi but it wasn’t worth $79/ month and 50 less HD channels.

We had the original Moxi and loved it, until it burned out a year ago. Some friends told us they’d just gotten the Motorola and it had more capacity, so when Charter came out we switched to that. We HATED the Motorola-both its functionality and its interface. We just switched back last month to the Moxi and are much happier, except there’s less recording space.

I’d never heard that you can use an external hard drive (though I’ve often wondered about the USB ports on the front). What kind do you need?

Do you know if the new Moxi has more recording space and/or if they have fixed the overheating problem? I’m surprised that the interface is slower; that’s odd for new equipment.

All first-generation Moxis are at least three years old, so yours probably has a limited lifespan, Jeff. So exercise caution. Those who know confirm to me that although an external hard drive will expand storage capacity, it’s tied to that single Moxi and isn’t a backup. Anyone who thinks they’ve backed up, hasn’t. (Don’t think the first generation takes an external hard drive, though.) The new one supposedly runs cooler and has extra venting. The hard drive is double, the same as the “multi-room” version.

I had the old Moxi and loved it. When it expired, Charter replaced it with the ‘new and improved’ Motorola. I’ve had 4 or 5 of them now…replacements for one reason or another…and they all have had the same ‘fault’. Every once in a while it will refuse to record, saying ‘the disc is 100% full’. I keep a couple of 1 or 2 minute segments recorded so I can delete one of them, and when I do the content drops to the real amount recorded…almost always less than 20%. Charter says it’s a ‘hardware problem’…Motorola says it’s a ’software problem’, and neither one will admit that I’m not the only person with the problem.

I really dislike my new Motorola DVR (Moxi burned out a few weeks ago). It has a terrible interface compared to the Moxi.

UverseUser - I’m sure Charter would have given you another deal for a while. (Also it’s 50 fewer channels.)

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Why pay extra for all these problems? Use GB-PVR or MythTV for free, or something like SageTV or BeyondTV. Just buy some tuner cards for your PC and away you go. I am in total control of my system - adding storage, backing up data, creating DVDs from recordings, etc., are all possible. Also, the system analyzes each show after recording and marks the commercials so I can skip them instantly. Unfortunately, the TV providers would rather I pay them 10-15 bucks a month for an inferior product and are trying to make home-brew DVRs impossible (via encrypted signals and required STBs). I don’t want their product that badly, so when I can’t use my stuff I’ll ditch the TV.

Another option: AppleTV or another hardware box with Netflix on demand or Hulu/Vudu/etc - just watch shows when you want.

unpaidbill: You are not alone. We had the same problem, which was the excuse we used to give back our Motorola and get the Moxi again (see my earlier post).

Gail: Thanks for your help on all this. You do a great job on your reporting. What’s this about Moxi having a multi-room version? I just looked around online and saw some references to it, but does Charter offer this? You’d think they would want to tell their customers about this, especially with the competition from uVerse, but apprently not. From looking at Moxi’s website, I think the first generation ones do support an external hard drive, but I will check when I get home. That will be a must-have.

I plan to keep checking in with AT&T to seen when uVerse is available in my area (although I heard installation is a pain). I got a big price break from Charter when I threatened to switch a few months ago (I bluffed), and I’ll have to do it again once 6 months are up.

I just confirmed that the new Moxi has a 500GB hard drive, as opposed to 160GB for the old one. And it takes the external hard drive. The Moxi multi-room (or Moxi and Moxi Mate) has been available for a couple of years and it’s still available, but the new Moxi doesn’t have a Mate, which lets you watch shows off your Moxi in another room. U-verse DVRs have multi-room capacity, but U-verse still isn’t available in a lot of places. By the time it’s widespread, maybe we’ll know what the glitches are. A friend of mine was told that 30 percent of the AT&T phone users who get U-verse wind up with permanent static on their phones, as he did.

Motorola DVR - the swap button at the bottom of the remote will let you swap between the 2 tuners so you will be able to rewind. Moxi does this automatically for you

The external drive technically will not transfer the recordings from one box to another. Copyright laws or some other legal mumbo jumbo. I have heard that depending on the encryption of the recording it may transfer. I havn’t had any experience with a external hard drive yet. Unlike Gail, I don’t have entire seasons of Prison Break that I haven’t watched yet!

MOXI.com has some good info on it’s website.

The USB port on the front of the MOXI is for uploading photos. The external hard drives can only be hooked up to the back. Silver MOXI’s will use a USB ext drive and the new black MOXI will use the eSATA hard drive.

Gail,

I am interested in how easy it was to reprogram what you always record. Did charter have a way to automatic input this into new box (much like cellphone company can put your contacts list in a new phone)?

I would be afraid I would miss something I like, especially cable series that run on non-regular “seasons”.

No, all programs and programming were lost. It’s like when the hard drive in my laptop died — everything went with it, and that was a lot worse than losing “Fringe” and “Prison Break.” I’m starting to put my regular programs back in as series recordings, but it’s going to take some time, because as Suzi points out, a lot of them aren’t on now. I’ll just have to be vigilant for awhile.

First gen (silver) Moxis have 80gig capacity. My understanding is the retail version of the “new” Moxi (don’t know the model number) has 500gig capacity but the one the cable company is renting to customers (model 3012) has 160gig capacity, but I could be mistaken on that point. Both new versions have eSATA capability for adding pretty much whatever capacity you need.

The silver Moxis (model 9012) have USB ports in the rear for adding one external hard drive, which mitigates the smallish hard drive issue on that model.

I think the only “old” Moxi that had a 160gig hard drive was the one that pairs off with the Moxi Mate, model 9022.

The external hard drive gets encrypted just like the internal hard drive, and as such both drives are only viewable on that specific Moxi device. As for scheduling, the box supports web-based setup as well (depending on your cable provider).

It’s good to hear the new ones run cooler. The heat from the original devices was killing them, I think.

The new moxi model # is MC3. or at leaast that’s what I’ve heard them called. The new model also has a better power supply in it that should prevent the flashing 8’s

I said goodbye to Charter in October 2008. But I had gone through about 4 DVR boxes. I had a couple of Moxi boxes and they just burned up. I had the Motorola DVR too.

But UVerse is the way to go if it is in yoru area. Not only is it cheaper, better customer service, faster equipment but you can tape/watch up to 4 shows at one time. And there is a far better selection of channels. My internet is also much faster and doesn’t drop all the time like Charter.

And no I do not work for AT&T.

One other thing I forgot to mention is you can watch your recordings on any tv that has a uverse receiver.

Also my installation went fine contrary to what one person said down below.

I had the original Moxi, then the Motorola non-moxi DVR. The non-moxi was terrible in that it recorded the same watched shows over and over. It also had to be rebooted every now and then because it would show that it was 100% full when I had only 2 or 3 1 hour shows. After the restart, it would be right again for a while.

For a New Year’s gift to ourselves we purchased a TiVo HD XL. The rest of my family is all TiVo and Moxi was a good substitute for me, but the Charter DVR just wasn’t that good. I love my TiVo, and it can hold 157 HD hours or 1367 SD hours. Now, I’ll never have any stress about room. I highly recommend it.