DirecTV HD Receiver
I've wanted an HD DVR box for DirecTV for the past two years. I thought about the Tivo box, but it was just too expensive when it was first released (over [...] I think), but by the time the price dropped, it was technically obsolete. DirecTV has been launching new satellites and changing to MPEG4 encoding, and from my understanding the HD Tivo DVR didn't support those.
I've had the HR20-700 for the past month, and am satisfied with the purchase. If you must have DirecTV (for example, if you need NFL Sunday Ticket, can't get local cable, or live someplace with lousy cable), this is probably your best option. Before I got this box, I had the DirecTV Tivo for the past couple years. I've had other HD DVR boxes in the past, including the Time Warner box in Manhattan and the Comcast box in the Bay Area. This is my favorite box, but it's far from perfect.
Positives:
- Large capacity. My wife and I record a lot of TV (we probably have 15 shows regularly recording, including maybe 5 that are daily), and have not gotten anywhere close to filling up this box.
- Fast performance. The Tivo box user interface was really sluggish. This box is really zippy.
- You can change settings, set up programs to record, and do other things while watching TV (live or recorded). This is a really big step up from the Tivo boxes.
- Video quality is what you expect: HD quality. Honestly, I haven't tested this box side by side with other DirecTV HD boxes, nor have I compared it to cable HD boxes. I haven't noticed any weird video artifacts or noise (I'm using the component outputs). Other reviewers may be more critical.
Negatives:
- The new satellite dish is gigantic. If you want local channels in HD, you need to install the new satellite dish, which is twice as big as the old one and weighs about 30 pounds. And your neighbors will hate you.
- The support for over the air antennas isn't done yet (still not available in mid November).
- The box is buggy and crashes sometimes. Sometimes, the box doesn't respond when you press buttons on the remote. (This is a particularly large program with interactive programming, such as NFL games.) Sometimes, programs will get recorded that you can't play back. I assume that these issues will be fixed at some point in the future. (If you're reading this some time after, say, December 2006, this probably doesn't apply any more.)
- Fast forward and reverse are painfully slow. The fastest fast-forward is slower than the slowest fast forward on Tivo.
- You can't jump to the end of a program like you can with Tivo.
- The Tivo guys did a great job with UI design in some ways. For example, when you're fast forwarding through a program and click play to return to normal speed, Tivo boxes will back up a few seconds so that you don't overshoot where you want to go. Tivo engineers realized that people need a second to react, and compensated. The DirecTV box doesn't do this, so it's easy to overshoot.
- The new advanced features from DirecTV, like fantasy stats with DirecTV Sunday Ticket Superfan, are very, very slow. Unusably slow. (Honestly, if you're a big enough geek to buy this package, you probably have a laptop and an 802.11 network and monitor games on [...] anyway.)
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