Betty has had an HD DirecTV box for a while now and she loves it. It’s based on Tivo so it’s easy to use and she was able to go from my first Tivo hand-me-down to this with no trouble.
I decided if I’ve got a 55″ TV I should at least see how it looks with HD so I started checking DirecTV to see what they had. They no longer offer the Tivo based unit that Betty has but have created their own. They must have paid Tivo a pretty good chunk of money to get out of the deal they had with them.
The new DVR(HR20) works very well but it’s just not Tivo. The main thing I miss is being able to 30 second skip. It has a 30 second FF but it isn’t instant like Tivo. It also won’t handle off-air HD for another month when DirecTV will roll out a software upgrade. They forgot to mention that at Circuit City when I bought it but it didn’t take long to find out.
It’s not a bad machine but I did get spoiled with Tivo.