Has anyone bumped into this new “feature”?

Unfortunately, there is a bug. In a multiple room system the customer turns ON room ‘A’ with the Infinity remote and both ‘A’ and ‘B’ come ON with room ‘B’ displaying the Rewards screen saver. We have a Samsung TV in ‘A’ and a Sony TV in ‘B’. There are three other rooms that don’t have this “feature”.

It’s been really hard to troubleshoot because the system must be idle for a while before the “feature” kicks in. And I don’t have a good idea what this “while” might be. Likely, it’s related to the cable box idle time setting. The boxes were old and I thought that replacing them would help, so we installed two new boxes. This seemed to fix the issue — for about 36 hours. Now the “feature” is back. These are RF controlled boxes and all five boxes are in a closed door closet.

My thought is that there might be some MOCA communication causing this, but I could imagine some freak IR cross talk between the boxes in the closet. There is also a Xantech IR repeater matrix in the closet, without any emitters attached to these two cable boxes.

System ‘A’: Samsung TV, Yamaha Receiver
System ‘B’: Sony TV, Sonos Beam

There is a common DVD player attached to an HDMI splitter serving four rooms.

I have some MOCA and CEC isolators on order, but at 36 hours or so for each trial this will be a tedious series of multi-trip to the site trial period. The customer has no interest in shared recordings so we don’t need full MOCA communication, but three of the boxes require MOCA. I don’t know yet if blocking MOCA to ‘B’ will cause issues.

One obvious trial will be to swap boxes ‘A’ and ‘B’. ‘B’ can record, ‘A’ cannot.

The CEC blockers you have on order should do the trick. That is the ONLY way the cable boxes can be turning on the TVs.
Put those on the output of the cable boxes and done! Unless of course the CEC blockers cause the HDMI signal to not work. Murphy is always waiting for a good laugh :(

I'm not familiar with that feature, but I was surprised a while back to find a CEC feature on an Xfinity box. It was under Settings / Device Settings / Power Preferences. I'm sure you already checked it...

Maybe I have this resolved, but my confidence is not high.

I had to install CEC blockers on Cable and DVD inputs of the Sony TV. It is curious that Samsung IR power commands would turn-on the Sony TV, but not turn-off the Sony. Sony power commands had no effect on the Samsung TV.

Last week as I was testing, I had to allow a “rest” period for the Sony TV before the Samsung power command would turn-on the Sony. At the end of that session the Sony was not responding to Samsung power commands, suggesting that I may have fixed things, but about 36 hours later we were back to square one. During today’s testing, we rarely saw the “Rewards” screen saver.

While I don’t have much in the way of proof, I suspect that the Sony TV is responsible for the mess.

hmm... I didn't think comcast (and the Cox licensed clone boxes) had CEC.

Are Xfinity area has had it for awhile. Plug-in the HDMI cable, go into the remote program menu for the cable box, and it automatically reads what TV brand and model is connected and controls it thru CEC. No need to program codes into the Xfinity remote.

This has been my experience. I’ve simply been asked to confirm that the TV is under control.

I have not plugged in a cable box in 6 months and CEC was a common thing then for Comcast.

They only stream in Aspen?

A lot of satellite systems I would guess. Hard to get cable service in many areas.

Even two or three years ago I would have scoffed at the idea of a wireless cable box, but they have been working just fine in some recent builds. We have a customer who temporarily has annexed the adjacent rental unit into his condo complex. Of course, I wanted to run network and coax from the original space, but that plan got nixed on a couple levels and it would have been a lot of work for a rental space. We simply threw a couple wireless cable boxes behind the wall mounted TV’s and they’ve been working fine for a little over a month. I was not optimistic.This adds another log onto the “isn’t everything wireless now?” fire that I’ve been bravely fighting against.

It’s a never ending battle to stay current.

As WiFi6 is finally beginning to take hold, a WiFI7 proposal is circulating. And it looks like it could be a major upgrade.

I don't do a lot of work in Aspen. I am also doing my damndest to avoid all things HDMI these days.