I was talking about watching a program as it's being recorded. Watching it live works fine, but then you can't pause, rewind, etc.
On the bright side, I've been using my iPad the last couple of days, and I haven't experienced any of these problems. It's a pretty good substitute in general. It fits in the same stand I used for the 10" monitor I'd been using for a secondary display in Windows, where I'd watch in a full-screen browser in kiosk mode (no UI, so just like a TV). I can't use my keyboard shortcuts anymore, which gave me extensive control of playback (using Autohotkey to send them to the non-focused browser window as I used my main display for other things), but the touch controls aren't horribly less convenient (for example, instead of Win+Ctrl+Alt+Right arrow to skip 3 minutes forward, I have to tap the iPad like 7 times). The main drawback for me is that I need to use multipoint Bluetooth headphones, since I've got two Bluetooth sources now, my PC and the iPad. Single-point is usable with this setup, but it does require manual switching. It was less usable with an Android tablet, because switching the audio device back to the tablet caused the Contour app to put up an info window in the middle of the screen that couldn't be closed without stopping playback and restarting from the main UI. At least the iPad app doesn't do that.
Oh, and while I considered using the XG2 with the 10" monitor, it's 16:10 aspect ratio, and there's no way to configure either device to prevent vertically stretching the 16:9 image to fit. I'd also have had to add a Bluetooth transmitter and deal with latency problems, which really limits the choice of headphones. The nice thing about the apps is that they compensate for this.
I hear Cox offers their app on Apple TV now. Do you happen to have one? Haven't heard any reports on how good/bad it is however the hardware on the Apple TV is a lot better then anything a cable box offers.
I've got an Apple TV, but it doesn't help my situation WRT the vertically stretched picture, and to control it, I'd have to use a remote, which is less convenient than my keyboard for a PC web browser or touching the iPad screen right in front of me.
As for ATV performance relative to the XG2 receiver, it's much slower to start programs, and like all Cox apps, the ATV app doesn't support pausing, rewinding, etc of Live TV. I really wish they'd add that, because I miss it from YouTube TV and many years of using hard-drive based DVRs before that.
Any chance this problem will ever be looked at? It's been almost two months, and I've encountered exactly the same problems within an hour of trying to use web browsers because the experience with Apple products (iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV) suffers from annoying audio glitches that I talked about in another thread. Those glitches are reproducible and predictable, following a pattern, and when I have time, I'll start a new thread on that. However, I'd much rather go back to using a web browser, but the service has become completely unusable, and apparently, it's been that way since I reported it here almost two months ago.
