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.
I ran into similar issues with my Dish DVR. It has some nice features (HD, dual input, dual output), but it lacks a lot that made Tivo really friendly. Tivo’s searches are much more sophisticated, menus easier and in general it just works better.
My Dish DVR crashes on my once in a while. Tivo had some minor bugs, but it mostly just worked.
Comment by Daryl — Wednesday October 18, 2006 @ 11:37 pm
I’ve already had one crash with this new box. It was playing a recorded show and did something so I couldn’t get a response from any of the remote buttons. I had to unplug it to get it rebooted.
Comment by Don — Thursday October 19, 2006 @ 6:54 am
Since I don’t have any prospect of HDTV any time soon, I will just keep my DirecTivo. I often wish it had more capacity, but don’t want to go through the effort to upgrade the hard drive. Although thinking about it, maybe I should just because the drive is now a few years old and could be worn out. Maybe a new drive would be a good idea.
Comment by Richard — Thursday October 19, 2006 @ 11:41 am
Adding a hard drive is actually pretty easy. Here’s a website that has instructions and kits.
http://www.weaknees.com/
Comment by Don — Thursday October 19, 2006 @ 7:50 pm
Adding a hard drive to supplement one that is already there is pretty easy, but that won’t address your concern that the one you have is getting old. If you add a hard drive, and the original one dies, you still have to replace the original one WITH an OS installed.
I backed my OS off onto CDs when I first got my Tivo, and it turned out very useful a year or so later when I had to reinstall it. However, if you try to back it up now, I think the backup will include not just the OS but all the programs you have recorded, and will therefore be very large. Maybe you can find a newer utility that will get just the OS.
Anyway, I recommend you plan ahead so you’re prepared for when it does die!
Comment by Daryl — Saturday October 21, 2006 @ 7:17 pm
The link I gave has instructions for both types of upgrades.
Comment by Don — Sunday October 22, 2006 @ 8:58 am