Forum Discussion

Moonsofjupiter's avatar
Moonsofjupiter
New Contributor
2 months ago

Disappointed in the Contour 2 4K set top box

I’ve been fighting for weeks to keep my older Contour 1 Hard Drive based dvr, but I have to give up now. The new box with its cloud based storage is decidedly inferior. 

This is the end of my month long endeavor to keep my old box. 5 visits to the local store and hours and hours of hold time and ineffectual tech support. Not that it’s the techs fault, as cox is discontinuing service on the old boxes and will not let them back into service. 

I brought this on myself when changing other aspects of my service I said “sure, I’ll try a 4K stb” I did not think it would be such a big disappointment with no way to revert back to the older tech. 

I had the 6way tuner before and I could buffer up to six channels of live TV, returning to each and being able to rewind back to the point where I was last watching and watch what ever I missed while I was on another channel. This is incredibly useful for watching multiple sports games at one time. 

the Contour 2 is also very glitchy with playback of recorded shows. The ff and rw functions are a crapshoot as to where it takes me. Very imprecise. Sometimes it just kicks me out and makes me play back from the beginning. 
There’s no clock or channel info on the front of the box. 

Using the ‘last’ function is about a 5 second operation now. With Contour 1 it was about  a one second time to acquire the previous channel. Makes a big difference when I’m watching two games and I’m trying to see who is going to break the huddle first. 

I am very dejected and demoralized that I have to deal with change that I don’t like and don’t want. 

Contour 2 set top box is a big letdown. I will be looking at satellite or Verizon fios or anything else to see if they offer what cox has taken away. 

🙁😢😤😱🤢🤬😡😠😟

  • LaToyaW's avatar
    LaToyaW
    Moderator
    2 months ago

    Hello.

    Thank you for being a part of the Cox family. I'm sorry you are experiencing issues with the Contour 2 system. When you have a moment, I'd like to look over the account and services. Please email your full name and complete address to Cox.help@cox.com.

  • mfinn7's avatar
    mfinn7
    New Contributor
    2 months ago

    I agree.  My old DVR box was acting up a couple of years ago.  They swapped it out for the new cloud box.  I now have about half of the recording capacity I had before, and the box is slow and unresponsive.  If I click on a recording to play it sits there a grinds for about 20 to 30 seconds before it comes up.  It used to be much faster.  Rewind and fast forward is harder to control than it used to be.  Basically the new service is crap compared to previous.

  • mfinn7's avatar
    mfinn7
    New Contributor
    2 months ago

    My old DVR box was acting up a couple of years ago.  They swapped it out for the new cloud box.  I now have about half of the recording capacity I had before, and the box is slow and unresponsive.  If I click on a recording to play it sits there a grinds for about 20 to 30 seconds before it comes up.  It used to be much faster.  Rewind and fast forward is harder to control than it used to be.  Basically the new service is crap compared to previous.

    Like

  • MasterMyDomain's avatar
    MasterMyDomain
    Contributor II
    2 months ago

    My Cox office in North San Diego County still had hard drive DVRs when mine died 30 days ago.  It's an Arris AX013ANC.  It does daily updates in 5 minutes but a recording has disappeared twice after a daily update.  This problem has been covered in this forum for at least 7 years.  If you have more than one Cox office near you, give them a call to see if they have any hard drive models.

  • mfinn7's avatar
    mfinn7
    New Contributor
    2 months ago

    As usual, the changes that "the geeks" make are rarely an improvement and are frequently not as good as what was replaced and are usually inferior and harder to use.  I think they change things just to justify their own existence.

    • WiderMouthOpen's avatar
      WiderMouthOpen
      Esteemed Contributor
      31 days ago

      Leave geeks out of it. The push to IPTV is to stop using QAM to free up bandwidth for internet. Also, it is easier to install and pushes more people to use Cox's Panoramic platform. The problem is if your wifi connection isn't good at the spot where your box is, the service the box gives won't be good. Try hooking it up with ethernet and see if anything improves.

  • C65's avatar
    C65
    New Contributor
    31 days ago

    My hard drive DVR has been acting up. Will not reboot most of the time after automatic update runs at night. So I’ve gotten into the habit of moving the scheduled time forward as far as possible so it will never run the update. Sometimes I forget and have to unplug the box multiple times before it will come back up. It just shows the “t” and nothing else. Last night after over an hour of fruitless efforts I decided to unplug my client box in the bedroom to see what happens. When I walked out to the living room the box was rebooting correctly. Now I’m wondering if that had anything to do with it. I’m going to leave my client box unplugged and let the auto update run tonight and see what happens. After reading all the bad reviews of the cloud DVR I want to hold out as long as possible. Will post my results.