<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Gavin Peters <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gavin@ytz.ca">gavin@ytz.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 03:37:59PM -0600, Matt White wrote:<br>
><br>
> It would be nice not to need the receivers, but everything works very<br>
> well, so I won't complain. It's a heck of a lot better than the<br>
> Dish/ExpressVU PVR solution...<br>
><br>
<br>
</div>Any thoughts on what's wrong with the Dish solution? I recently switched from<br>
an ExpressVu HD dual tuner PVR to myth, and there's things I miss about<br>
the ExpressVu PVR, but the balance favours Myth.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
- Gavin<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5">_______________________________________________<br></div></div></blockquote><div><br><br>An invitation to bitch about my Dish DVR? You just made my day!<br><br>I have a DISH ViP 612 DVR (dual tuner + OTA HD, single output), and I *hate* it. In fainess, I have high standards, having spent 6 years with Tivo and MythTV before moving to Dish. I didn't move to Dish directly from another PVR, though, having gone without a DVR entirely for the first 8 months after I went HD ( 90% of what I watch is live sports and DVDs). <br>
<br>Anyhow, here are the things I hate about my DISH DVR:<br> 1. If you are watching a recording in progress, and the satellite signal drops out momentarily, playback resumes at live TV. For example, if you are watching a close football game in the fourth quarter, 15 minutes behind live TV, and there is a dropout, you will find suddenly find your self watching the postgame show. This particular bug is really the dealbreaker for me. I have a very marginal view of the DISH satellite, and I get frequent glitches whenever rain moves through the area. I can live with dropouts, DISH is not to blame for my neighbor's trees being in the way, what I can't live with is the DVR's handling of these glitches.<br>
<br> 2. If you exit a recording in progress, you may only return to that recording at begining or live tv. I got in the habit of flipping back and forth bewteen two simultaneous baseball games when I got my first dual tuner DirecTiVO back in 2002. Now I can't do that anymore. <br>
<br> 3. If the signal drops out while watching OTA live TV, it immediately goes to a "you can't recieve this channel" screen...*and stays there*. It won't rejoin the program in progress until I bring up the program guide or exit to a menu and return to TV. My neighboor's trees also play havoc on my OTA signal, so I this bug tortured me until I finally started my move back to Myth. I currently have a hybrid setup - MythTV with an HDHR for OTA and DISH for pay tv. I have WAF issues that will prevent me from moving fully to MythTV - I'm impulsive and enjoy tinkering with computers. My wife likes to watch tv so much that she chose a career in TV. Due to her job in TV, she likes to watch commercials and has little use for time shifting. Given my inability to resist breaking anything that can plausibly be modified and her desire for a a simple and stable TV delivery platform, DISH is probably a good fit for us (coincidentally, we met while we both working at a TV station- she was a director and I was an engineer).<br>
<br> 4. No buffer by default. Say you sit down, watch live tv for 5 minutes, then turn away for 2 seconds and miss something you were interested in. So you try to skip back five seconds to hear what you just missed. Too bad! There is no buffer until you hit pause for the first time. <br>
<br> 5. No buffer at all when the tuner decides to go elsewhere. Say you are watching Thursday Night Football on ESPN. It's 11:29, you are 25 minutes behind real time in the game, but there are only 3 minutes left on the clock. It's a 2 point game so it will in all likelyhood end well within the 25 minute buffer you have built up. A bubble pops up on the screen that says, "the DVR would like to record 'The Colbert Report' at 11:30 on channel 107'. You say to yourself, "fine, whatever, that's after the end of the game" and you push OK. All of a sudden 90 seconds later, *BAM.* You are watching "The Colbert Report" and the last 3 minutes of that football game are bits in the wind. <br>
<br>Those are the things that I realy hate about the current DISH DVR. It really is an unfortunate state of affairs. 11 years ago DISH first made the widely adored ReplayTV available to its customers (featuring automatic commercial skip!). Almost 8 years ago I had a DirecTiVo the met my DVR needs admirably. Unfortunately, TiVo owns a lot of important DVR IP, and Big Content decided to lock TiVo out of the HD transition. As a result, all of the cable/sat providers offer complete shit DVRs because they are stuck in the middle of an uncomfortable triangle: upstream content providers will balk at anything that gives customers too much control over content, in house sales departments will balk at anything that helps cuastomers avoid advertising, while TiVo stands outside with its patent portfolio that grants it a virtual monopoly on customer satisfaction. <br>
<br> Yeah. So that's how I feel about DISH.<br><br>-chris<br> <br> <br><br><br><br><br></div></div>