The new DVR - pros and cons
Con - it is not a TiVo. DirecTV severed their relationship with TiVo so they could hawk their own wares. It's so disappointing. TiVo rocks, plain and simple.
Pro - The new DVR holds up to 100 hours of programming and keeps up to 90 minutes of "live TV" in backup.
Con - The TiVo constantly records 30 minutes of live TV on both tuners. When you have DirecTV with a DVR, you have two tuner inputs, so you can record two channels at once. With the TiVo, if you are watching one channel, whatever channel the other tuner was last tuned to is also being recorded. What's cool about that is that you could literally watch two shows at once without having to be recording for posterity either one of them. You just press the "Live TV" button to switch back and forth between the two. When you press the "Info" button, you see the detailed info about the show you are watching, as well as what's on the other tuner. You can even pause the one tuner (for up to 30 minutes), watch in real time on the other tuner, and switch back to where you paused the other tuner. The new DVR only records "live TV" on the tuner you are watching, so unless you've selected to record something other than what you're watching, you can't switch between two tuners. That sucks.
Pro - When you switch to the guide, or to pretty much any menu option, it puts the show you are watching into a picture-in-picture sort of window, so you can still watch the show and navigate menus, the guide, whatever.
Con - you have to move a slider to TV and then hit the power button to turn the TV off or on, then switch back to DTV to change the channels on the DVR. With the TiVo, there is a separate TV power button that just turns the TV off and on. This won't bother me, but The Spouse will hate it. He already hates that he has to learn a new remote.
Pro - we can now record 4 shows simultaneously.
Pro - the new DVR has caller ID, so I can see on the TV screen who's calling, and don't have to find the phone and try to read its miniscule readout.
Summary - Having had a TiVo, I miss all the features I've become accustomed to. Someone who has never had a TiVo probably won't care. And some things are better than TiVo, but I'd have preferred a TiVo over this DVR if I'd had a choice. At least I still have the TiVo in the bedroom, so I can pretty much have my cake and eat it too.
The poor installer - he had to go under our house, which is a really nice crawl space with a light and all, but even with our sump pump running almost non-stop, there was still about 4" of water on the ground in part of the crawl space - the part he had to go into to install the multi-switch. He was wet and dirty, and I felt really bad. And once he got all the cables installed, and we turned stuff on, one cable in our bedroom was not providing a signal, so he had to go back down there and replace one of his connections. Ugh. It took about 2 1/2 hours. I spent the next hour reading the manual and programming the DVR. Then I went out and shoveled snow for half an hour, in the dark. Fun. Not.
