Comcast Digital Cable and the Black Rectangle
Has anyone ever experienced this before…
Through my Digital Cable receiver I am now seeing a large black rectangle from the middle to the bottom of the screen on what would be considered your analog channels (2-99 and some low 100′s). The “Music Choice” channels as well as the “On Demand” programming do not have this issue. Also, on my TV which is hooked up to the analog cable jack I do not have this issue. So my guess is that it has to be something to do with the digital receiver. I have a request into Comcast to see what they say, but any pointers would be greatly appreciated in the meantime, as we kind of have a big football game here in town tonight (complete with the Indianapolis Police Department picketing).
UPDATE [1:41pm]
I sort of figured it out…I turned closed captioning completely off on my television and the black rectangle went away. Though that doesn’t really pinpoint the behavior that I was seeing. Oh, well, it’s back to normal now and I can watch the fool’s ball this evening.
December 29th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Yep, that also happend to us. We also have Comcast. After reading to turn the tv off for at least 4 hours (we waited over 9 hours) to reset it, it still did not work.
I further searched the internet and read to switch the closed caption to C4 (or CC4 as was our case) and it took care of it. I read that certain upgrades the cable companies make mess up the closed captioning.
And my husband was playing a game on the internet at the same time and said the cable was acting funny, so I would venture that they were just doing the upgrades right then.
December 16th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I have 3 TVs in my home that produce black rectangles with the Closed Captioning turned off. The makes are Citizen, Orion and Electrohome. They all seem to use the same type of electronics and remote control device and I beleive are all owned and made by the same manufacturer. The black rectangle seems to only appear during “Opera” and during some Global News(and its commercial) transmitions. I can only turn the black rectangle temperarily off by pressing the mute or the volume buttons. I can’t seem to get a permanent fix for this.