Tim's all excited about the news that DIRECTV will once again market TiVo's DVR, the combination of which is affectionately called "DIRECTiVo." The new DIRECTiVo box, to appear by the end of next year, will be compatible with the MPEG-4 compression that DIRECTV now uses for most of its HD content. (The old TiVo DVR could only decompress MPEG-2 video streams, so when DIRECTV migrated to MPEG-4 a couple of years ago the old MPEG-2 DIRECTiVos were unable to view most of the HD content.)
If this news would have happened a couple of years ago I, too, would be all excited. But I'm not, and here's why: DIRECTV's DVR has improved to the point where the TiVo doesn't offer many compelling advantages any longer. Yes, the UI's a bit slicker, it does picture-in-picture, the season pass functionality's a bit more robust, and it can suggest related content I might be interested in. But, the differences are slight even for a UI snob like myself, and I personally don't care about PIP or suggestions.
If DIRECTV gives me the choice of either unit for the same price I'd take the TiVo, but I'd be hard pressed to pay a significant premium to have a genuine TiVo again. Sorry, TiVo.
I'd pay a slight premium for a TiVo. Here's why:
- about once a month or so the HR-20 locks up HARD. As in push the red reset button and/or unplug it. Then it takes several minutes to boot up again. My old HR10-250 (the MPEG 2 DirecTiVo HD unit) doesn't do that.
- It loses HDMI sync/handshake/whatever at about the same frequency. Gotta unplug the HDMI cable, turn it off, plug the cable in and turn it back on. I won't say the 10-250 doesn't do this, but it has done it once or twice. The HR-20 does it often enough that it seems "routine" to mess with the cable. It shouldn't be routine.
- Weird software problems. Today I went to record "Fringe". Search by title, enter Fringe, pick the folder that says Fringe [HD], pick out the channel I want (2-1 KTVU over the air) and it says "Searching for programs..." I cancelled after about five minutes. Ultimately I had to poke through the 2-1 channel guide by hand to find Fringe and record it that way. I've never seen that before, and I doubt I'll see that particular bug again soon, but there's a whole class of this "That's weird, I don't know why that just happened" glitches for the HR-20.
The HR-20 isn't as bad as I initially feared, but it's definitely not a reliable as the TiVo software in the 10-250. Of course, we'll have to see how stable some new unit is, but TiVo has a MUCH better track record there than DTV does with their in-house models.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 2008.09.03 at 05:04 PM