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GUIDE PLUS --- Who's in charge?

I have two RCA TVs, for years, with Guide Plus. About two weeks ago, the Guide Plus on the 25" started to act flaky, not showing program detail. I went through the "99999" reset deal, etc. Then we had a black out for about 2 hours. Battery backups faded away.

After that the 27" TV started to act weird. I got a message that there was no signal and to contact cable operator. Despite this message, the Guide Plus info displayed correctly.

In the meantime, I emailed Tiome Warner Cable to see if they had dropped the Guide Plus signal. They informed me that Gemstar had full responsibility.

Both TVs eventually stopped all Guide Plus program displays, indicating could get a signal.

Yesterday, both TVs came back with correct Guide Plus displays, without my intervention.

Questions:

  1. What is the nature of the Guide Plus signal? Frequency, where does it come from, etc.
  2. Who is responsible for fixing problems that must be truly Guide Plus related, and how do you contact them? The cable provider says "Gemstar." The Gemstar web site doesn't acknowledge that they could have a problem, they refer you to TV manufacturers. The TV manufacturer can only walk you through the Guide Plus signal check out steps. "Catch 22"?

JoeK

Reply to
joekool1
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The data is transmitted during the VBI part of the video signal on one or more TV channels. The TV (or other device) scans channels, looking for the frequency.

Some details here:

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Since it's in the VBI, it's possible for it to be lost if your cable company converts or otherwise alters the signal. It's not unusual these days for even local channels to be digitized for ADS (analog-digital simuilcast, where digital tuners will pick up a digital copy instead of the analog), and then reconverted back to analog for transmission to analog tuners. Some cable systems are dropping extended basic analog channels, and maybe even ALL analog channels (Chicago seems to be the first big experiment.)

The original channel may have had a problem, or it stopped broadcasting the data and your TV eventually found another channel.

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Reply to
Andrew Rossmann

Gemstar contracts with PBS member stations to broadcast Guide Plus data. Gemstar owns the equipment, and when it fails they send out another unit to be swapped in place of the deader.

As another poster mentioned, it is possible that the cable company is stripping out the VBI data for some reason. Many video processors have the option of deleting specific VBI lines. NewsGuy.Com - $19.95 Unlimited Bandwidth

Reply to
UHF

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