This has been boiling in me for a long, long time, and I need to get it out. Why? Well, last night the power went out at my house, not uncommon here in Marin, where the homes are old and the weather rainy. It came back on in about five minutes, and nothing much changed in our world.
Until my wife and I got upstairs and snuggled up in bed, ready to watch our sacred 45 minutes or so of Tivo’d television.
Now, allow me to explain. I got Tivo back in the Series 1 days. I love Tivo. I have written about it here many times. I love its approach to user interface, I love its corporate attitude (I know it can’t keep it up given the reality of the market), and I even love its shortcomings. It’s the Macintosh of television.
And Comcast, Lord knows, is the Windows. And not Windows 3.1. Windows 1.0. Or worse, if there is such a thing. But back to the narrative. Or rather, the backstory.
A few months ago my spiffy Series 2 Tivo (my kids use the Series 1 downstairs) started sputtering and blacking out. It got so bad that I had to retire it to the guest room, never to be used regularly again. (I thought. But it turns out it was not working because I had turned it on its side, and the hard disk did not appreciate my realignment of its gravitational kharma. But I get ahead of myself).
Well, having put my second Tivo out to pasture, I thought I’d splurge. After all, I was having a good year – The Search was a bestseller! – so I bought my very first HD television set (on credit, natch, it takes years to see any royalties, and hell, who knows it they ever really come). And since I’m no fool (I thought), I ordered up Comcast HD service to go along with it. Even I know you need HD service to enjoy an HD set.
That’s when the trouble started. First of all, it took weeks to get the service hooked up, but as you are surely quite familiar with how hopelessly lame cable companies are when it comes to customer service, I won’t attempt to add to the literature in this post. The truly evil portion of the install process came when the cable guy unwrapped a new cable box for me – a box that I had to use in order to enjoy Comcast HD. It included Comcast’s very own DVR, their HD version of a Tivo. (That link, by the way, is to Comcast’s website. For a preview of just how lame Comcast is, try to use that site for more than two minutes.)
Now, I had read about Comcast and its ilk getting into the DVR game, and what I had read was not pretty. But I figured there was no point in buying another Tivo till I give this a test drive.
Good Lord, it doth suck. The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse. This is a product built by people who fundamentally don’t understand the computing paradigm. That’s it – they really don’t get television as a database. Imagine the folks at DEC trying to build a Macintosh. That’s Comcast’s DVR.
Not to mention, the damn thing is slow – beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon. And the remote? My God, what a piece of sh*t!
But that’s not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot. Turns out, the f*cking Comcast HD DVR *does not have a hard drive.* That’s right, when the power goes out, the f*cking box loses ALL OF THE SAVED PROGRAMS!!!! Are you KIDDING ME? The damn thing uses RAM instead of a hard drive!?
Yup. To close the loop on last night’s experience, that’s what my wife and I discovered when we turned on the television last night. Our entire lineup of shows was wiped out.
Those cheap bastards. Those unholy blasphemers! It took me about ten times as long as Tivo to use their crappy search to figure out how to program the damn thing to record my favorite shows, and in one five-minute power outage, I lost every single episode of Battlestar Galatica! Every Rescue Me! Every goddamn Daily Show, every Gray’s Anatomy, every random movie I thought “hey, I’d like to watch that sometime.” (I was halfway through The Guns of Navarone, for God’s sake! Oh, the humanity!!!!)
And when those programs were lost, Comcast, you lost me. I will never, ever use your box again. Tivo HD, here I come. And not a minute too soon.
There, I feel better already. Thanks for listening. Now, back to watching TV the old fashioned way…shiver. At least until I get my new Tivo HD….
Update: Hey guys, I NOW KNOW IT HAS A HARD DRIVE. I was wrong about that, I thought maybe it was some kind of client server thing with a bit of RAM inbetween. Still and all, it blows….thanks for all your great comments, and your helpful advice.
hi john,
the dvr certainly isn’t as nice as tivo, but you’re mistaken about the storage. look through the vents at the top of the box: there’s a hard drive sitting right there. 100+ gb of ram would be extremely expensive and impractical.
Absolutely perfect description of the debacle that is Comcast DVR. My wife loves Tivo and hates this thing. I don’t think the user interface could be worse, the performace slower, or the overall crappiness more crappy.
You are aware, I hope, that Comcast will be offering the TiVo guide and software on the Motorola HD-DVRs by the end of the year. It’s expected to cost an extra $5/mo.
They’re also rolling out new HD-DVRs, made by panasonic, soon.
I’d say both are worth a shot before you drop $800 on a crippled S3, not counting service.
If it has a hard drive, why on earth does it lose the programming? I tested it, it loses it every time.
Also, losing your recordings following a power outage is not normal. It is normal (and annoying) to lose guide data with this model after a power outage, but you won’t lose configuration, saved recordings, or scheduled recordings. It sounds like your box is broken 🙁
The box has its share of other problems that you haven’t encountered. Like the 12/31/89 recordings that you can’t delete and that lock up the DVR until you cut off its power. That sucks.
Your take on this box is right on..
I have a Tivo and this Comcast abortion..
Tivo is great, and the Motorola box
needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
Recently I was contacted by Motorola for
a job doing set-top box testing. I had
to think about it for a while before I
decided.. needless to say it I think there
would be some job security– unless the
whole development team gets sacked for letting
such an terrible product out the door.
For Shame Motorola !!!
Comcast– well, I wasn’t expecting too much
from you– hell, I’m still stuck with your
poor service 10+ years later.. but don’t worry–
your time is limited.. Verizon will be installing
fiber soon enough.
I guess this isn’t a PayPerPost….
The Comcast HD DVR – that is, the Motorola 6412 HD DVR that Comcast gives to their customers – does in fact have a hard disk. However, like John I’ve discovered that it doesn’t necessarily keep track of information like the program guide and what has been recorded using the hard drive. Evidently that would be, like, hard, even though any first-semester CS student should be able to implement it in their sleep. Seriously, it’s that bad.
I agree with nearly everything you said about how horrible the GUI and features of the HD DVR are. However I’m not sure why your bos loses all of its information after a power outage, but mine has never lost stored shows after one or even after pulling the cord out of the back of the box. Maybe you have a defunct box – as if they’re not all defunct, anyway. If Ed is right about the Tivo stuff coming to Comast, I’d hold out – otherwise I’d run back to Tivo, also.
Wow John, what an impressive, and oustanding, rant. We love our TiVo. We love our Macs. I am glad to have read this for when we make the move to HD, we too will be sure to avoid this Comcast horror. Good luck to you and your wife. Maybe with the TV taking a breather, some of your future snuggling could not involve television at all?
John,
I have also been using TiVO since the series 1 and all I have to say about it is great things as well. Its simplified the way my wife and myself and my 4.5 year old son watch TV!
I started with the SONY SVR2000 Series 1 TiVO, then upgraded to the TiVO Branded Series 2 (this one was abused in our move SF to LA) and then this past year got the famous Dual Tuner Series 2 w/ 80GB HD… which is sooooooo cool… as now I can record two shows at once and never wory about running out of space!!!
I too have had the worst luck w/ Comcast (thats what my cable provider was in SF), I am always open to trying out new UI (its my job after all), and the Comcast DVR was in my house for less than a day… I returned it to the local office and never looked back!
Side note for your readers: a great DVR/PVR related site for information and inside tips on TiVO and other devices is PVRBLog.com.
I have one of these craptastical boxes too, and it makes me wish I could smash it into a pulp… one tiny thing I have discovered is that you can call Comcast’s 800 number and have a rep send a reset signal through the wires, which, sadly only temporarily, clears up the lagging and backup of commands. At least for me, it doesn’t erase my recorded programming.
When it comes right down to it, I miss my Tivo… I really hope Comcast comes out with something better soon, but the rep I talked to yesterday to reset my box yet again said it’s not coming before the end of next year and had no idea about any potential Tivo integration. Paying for something this awful hurts.
Awesome post John! I too am a huge TiVo fan, and you have absolutely captured the perfect metaphor for it. TiVo is the Macintosh of the TV world…
Reminds me of a great article written by Rick Reilly in the 12/23/2003 issue of Sports Illustrated, describing TiVo as ‘The best invention ever. Period.’
I was a Tivo Series 1 person as well, and a convergence of that box showing its age and Comcast rolling out an incompatible, non-DVR cable box caused me to try their lousy DVR. After many missed programs, having the DVR record 5 minutes and then crap out, having the DVR mute itself and be unable to un-mute without turning the damn thing on and off again, and having to reboot it about every other day, I gave up. I now have Dish. Their DVR, while not a Tivo, is a nicely designed box. The only drawbacks are not having those wacky Tivo suggestions and a less robust search feature, but I can live without those things. Plus, it’s a better price than cable.
I too HATE the moto/comcast dvr. I had a DirecTivo setup at my last house and I LOVED it. It didn’t get in the way and made watching TV something I enjoyed. The comcast setup just pisses me off. Pretty much every day the thing will get stuck for 30 seconds to a few minutes queuing up button presses.
It makes me upset just thinking about that POS!
we too suffer with one of these boxes at home. Comcast has replaced ours (twice) and has rest it remotely about 8 times in 7 months.
after TIVO and DirectTV (a combo we loved), the Comcast + motorola DVR combo feels like Microsoft Word 6…. bloated, slow, and pointless.
DirecTV made some poor choices when it dropped it’s TIVO offering as well… leaving consumers back at square 1.
we have found that bitching to Comcast gets a response, but no credits on our bill and a new device doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. Thanks for posting about this issue
hear hear!!! we switched from tivo when the new comcast (now time warner) boxen arrived… and man do i miss that tivo. we still make the noises ourselves when ffwding etc. just because we miss them so.
Don’t take this as fact as the person I heard it from may have it wrong. But I work for Comcast as an installer and I’ve heard that the current interactive guide is a Microsoft hand me down. It was apparently an early version of their interactive programming guide that they decided wasn’t good enough and Comcast bought it from them for their DVR’s. Explains a lot doesn’t it.
I recently acquired a Comcast DVR/PVR and wholeheartedly agree with everything you said about how BAD the product truly is. I don’t think I’ve encountered a more badly designed piece of consumer electronics and horrid example of UI design gone terribly wrong. I consider it basically unusable. I had been meaning to write to Comcast letting them know how badly they needed to dump the product and get something better as something definitely needs to be done. It definitely isn’t worth the monthly fee which doesn’t help them and doesn’t help anyone else. Why can’t they work with someone like Tivo and license their technology? Comcast could help a good company and product succeed while having a usable product to provide to their customers. A win-win situation in my opinion. At the minimum Comcast/Motorola should fire the current UI designer(s) and everyone who let this product make it to market and hire someone with even a slight amount of common sense to design their interface next time.
A-fucking-men brother!
Don’t forget all the mysterious glitches these things have. I’m on my sixth box…each lasts about a month or two before spazzing out.
The last one jusr randomly recorded whatever it wanted- like ten hours straight of Chinese television, or random 5-minute blocks. One stopped putting titles on the recordings…it was like having a pantry full of cans with no labels, you had to pick something random and hope you got lucky. The last one stopped letting me change the channel. The current version unschedules everything, but it’s the most reliable version I’ve had so far…
i made comcast come and take it away. seriously.
Funny how you compare the Crapcast DVR with Windows, because Windows Media Center just works. As a turnkey solution, it records standard cable and over-the-air HD without problems. The video quality is excellent, the interface is responsive, and the program guide is free.
Yes, Home Theater PC’s are an ugly and quirky solution. The beauty of Media Center is you can keep the big ugly PC in the office and connect an inconspicuous Xbox 360 to your HDTV. This works just as well as having the PC out in the living room, and the PC can be used for something else at the same time.
If you want to get fancy with Media Center, you can. Vista will natively support digital cable. In the meantime, there is an easy way to connect the standard Comcast box via firewire.
How about skipping commercials while the show is still recording? Start watching 10 minutes after it starts, and you’ll never see another ad. That’s also easy to set up. Want to keep it? Burn it to DVD or archive it as WMV, Divx, or whatever format you want. It can even save a whole season for you automatically.
Does MS include any of those nifty features? Well, no. But it’s really just Windows XP underneath, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s open! There nothing to keep you from extending the functionality. (Yes, MythTV is even more flexible, but there’s nothing as elegant or powerful as the Xbox 360 extender for linux)
Remember how we used to laugh at Soviet engineering, horribly misdesigned ripoffs of western technology, replete with armor-like chassis & fragile vacuum tubes when the rest of the world had gone to colorful durable plastics & tiny transistors?
That’s the Comcast DVR miscegenation compared to a TiVo.
The Comcast DVR is WRONG. So wrong you wonder if it was designed by folks who had ever used a television or were actually members of some previously unknown tribe of engineers who had heard vague rumors of ‘television’ and then been commissioned (cheaply!) to build a DVR based on those 3rd-hand jungle telegraph stories. So awfully wrong that you wonder if the Comcast DVR is actually some incredibly hip, sly, ironic commentary on the dysfunctional buerocratic nature of modern mass media and we’re all gonna be blown away by the sheer brilliance of the social hack when the culprits finally ‘fess up to it.
It used to be that the USA was where the world went to see what tomorrow would be like. Broad orderly roads marching off to the horizon in neat right-angles. Clean efficient technology supporting a dynamic culture endlessly reinventing itself. Prosperity, security, superiority, a shining beacon to the world… Now we’re the poor sods with 525 flickery lines who can’t master HDTV, modern cellphones, or grok a next-generation DVR.
But lets not be abject TiVo-worshipers. It’s a great technology, brilliant interface, just a pity TiVo Corp. is the consumer electronics version of Novell. Great stuff, rock solid, oughtta own the market; instead they’re so mind-bogglingly incompetent they’re pissing it away with one half-executed strategy after another.
Home Media Option, thumbs-up-to-record-this, inserted advertising, self-destructing recordings, Netflix-downloads, TiVo-To-Go-(not-to-a-Mac), and the late-to-market, overpriced, underwhelming, HD TiVo. One disappointment after another as TiVo becomes increasingly less relevant, possibly to soon be nothing more then a trivia question & patent portfolio.
Oh, and TiVo-on-Comcast-DVRs, so many years coming ya gotta really wonder about the caliber of engineers at TiVo. This has taken longer then the whole Series 1 TiVo took to develop & build, and it’s only now going into limited beta testing. By the time they get around to rolling it out ranches in Idaho will have IPv6 fiber networks spewing RSS feeds of iTune’d Bittorrents for the asking.
Yes, the comcast DVR is a monster. I have had numerous problems in the year and a half I’ve had it. In retrospect, I should have stuck with Dish Network. But to be fair to Comcast, it does have some excellent features. For example, you can watch a program while recording another one on another channel. You can watch a recorded program while recording two other programs at the same time! Yes, the interface is a grievance, but it could be a lot worse. What bothers me most is the way you can’t fast forward through a show without being forced to watch most of it. Until a recent firmware upgrade, I couldn’t prioritize shows to save my life. They were showing up with the same number on the priority list and I couldn’t move them up or down. Fortunately, Comcast upgraded the reciever overnight and it worked great the next day. Yes, it has problems, and yes, they are way too slow being fixed. But in all fairness, I’ve never lost all my programs from a power outage. I’ve lost the guide functions, but they usually come back after about an hour.
To be honest, Comcast sucks, but you’re unlikely to get anything that’s truly better from the competition. I’ve tried Dish and it was excellent, but it had serious problems as well. Anyway, great post!
Yes. Same goes for Time Warner Cable (presumably the same box)…
Our Tivo started crapping out, and the cheap ($0 down, $8.40/mo) alternative from TWC seemed like a no-brainer. Well, that’s who made it, alright. Jesus. Your “NEC making a Mac” analogy is perfect. Someone do something.
John-
Excellent post. I have the same crappy ass box. I made the move to Comcast HD when moving households and left behind my previous DishNetwork HD setup, which I loved.
My biggest complaints are that it constantly reboots itself and the remote is unresponsive and then decides to catch up…
Crap, the box just now rebooted while I was trying to pause a program.
I could not agree more. I have this same piece of junk – which I pay a LOT of money for, and I’m stuck with it because I live in a building without access to a DirecTV dish.
I have to call Comcast to zap the damn thing over the air every 6 weeks because this pile of crap gets progressively worse over time. The image starts mirroring in two halves at first, then it just starts going black until you’ve played a saved video, then it starts recording only a fraction of your recordings (only 6 mins of The Office, for example), then one day, it just stops working entirely.
I’ve never had a single piece of electronics in my home that was this poor in quality. It amazes me that Motorola was irresponsible enough to release this piece of junk.
why must we continue to dumb down everything. Macs exist so that morons can use a computer without actually having to learn anything about them. Same must go for TiVo given the analogy. I’ve had a Comcast DVR for several years and have never had a problem. If you simply spend 5 minutes and learn about it everything makes sense.
It’s funny how TiVo and Macs both attract the same type of person… people who sacrifice functionality for ease of use…
Your link “I have written about it here many times” should be without the space between “site:” and “batellemedia.com” . Now we see results from all the web for the three words in stead of only “tivo” from the “site:battellemedia.com”
(In this comment I took away the space in the link).
We have the dual tuner Comcast DVR too. We have had it wipe our recordings several times as well. If you can, I’d see if Comcast would trade this box for a single tuner DVR. We had that one for over 2 years before ‘upgrading’. The single tuner box never lost it’s programming in that entire time. It doesn’t have series recording though.
@The Man – You obviously aren’t a regular user of TiVo (or Macs for that matter) since you make the statement that people are sacrificing functionality for ease of use. I own both the TiVo and the Comcast HD DVR and the TiVo beats the HD DVR hands down when it comes to functionality and reliability. I keep the HD DVR around because it’s cheap and it records HD.
However, I have gone through two Comcast boxes that have just mysteriously failed and taken all of my recordings with it. There have been several times when it hasn’t recorded a new episode on a season recording, not to mention it’s slow to respond. What problems do I have with my TiVo? None. It records everything with not a missed episode, I can easily transfer my programs to my PC every night with ease, the UI is clear and sensible and I can stream content from my PC (movies, TV shows, photos, music, etc.) The only way to get content off my Comcast HD DVR is to use my Mac (which I you don’t believe is all that functional). Streaming content from and to the Comcast HD DVR is not an option.
@John – I’m not sure where you got the idea that the Comcast box (Motorola 6412) doesn’t have a hard drive. It does and it shouldn’t erase everything when the power goes out. My power has gone out a couple of times since I’ve had my Comcast boxes and I’ve never lost content because of it. I’ve just lost content because the boxes were crap.
Great post, John, and right on. Very similar to a friend of mine’s experience – longtime TiVo fan, couldn’t get Dish or DirecTV at his house and got stuck with Comcast when he went HD. Sad, sad, sad.
Personally, I’ve been a fan of Dish Network’s DVR equipment going on 6+ years now. They’ve had their growing pains but I find the features, interface, etc. to be very good and I prefer it to TiVo (especially since until now TiVo was a poor choice for pure digital TV). Of course, their nice execution of DVR apparently came from stealing from TiVo …
Many people are down on the HD series 3 Tivo, and I don’t understand why. I’ve been using Tivo since 1999, and I bought a series 3 the day they were announced. I love it; it’s exactly like my old series one, except HD and it can record two shows at once. I have comcast cable, and they installed two cable cards with no fuss.
It’s simple, it works, and it saves me from TV schedule tyranny. Just like a Tivo should.
I have the Comcast box and have had no issues. I know I’m one of the lucky ones, because my in-laws have gone through five of them.
My one issue was with the remote. Ungodly slow and it would take 5 seconds to register that I had hit a button, but only sometimes. Simple solution – get a Logitech Harmony remote. If you already shelled out for an HD TV, you might as well get a worthy remote to go with it. The Harmony is not only instantly responsive, but it lets you access the 30-second-skip feature that Comcast doesn’t want you to use. Push that button six times and you’re through a commercial break in 2 seconds.
As for losing programs, I have tripped a circuit breaker several times and my programs have all survived. The guide data on the other hand…
Amen to the crappyness of the Motorola firmware (assuming that Rogers here in Canada uses the same firmware as Comcast, ‘cos it’s the same set-top box)! Even my wife prefers the interface on our MythTV media PC to the interface on the Motorola box. True, the Harmony remote does make things somewhat better, but there’s no fixing the fact that the UI is an unadulterated mess. Now if only I could hook my MythTV box up to my HD digital cable, I’d be set…
When I had Comcast the box would often reset for apparently no reason, each time losing all of the programming information. I eventually switched to RCN and was horrified to discover they used the exact same box and software! The good news is that at least RCN has gone through a software upgrade so the interface is a hell of a lot better now (but still no TiVo).
I love TiVo. I reviewed a pre-production unit and have owned 5 since, and given away 4 as gifts to friends and family. I have owned series 1, 2, and now 3.
I also have lived with both Comcast Motorola and Cablevision Scientific Atlanta boxes.
If I still lived in Comcast country, I would not have bought the Series 3. I got used to that box and while not as ‘fun’ as the TiVo, it was functional and basically free in comparison, and TIVo had no HD solution for the 18+ months I owned it. Sounds like you have a dud, because it is not that bad.
It also had some of its own innovations TiVo could take a tip from, like the very well done PIP feature so you can watch TV *while* you are using most menus, and the ability to ZOOM through the program guide by holding down buttons, while the series 3 simply *crawls*.
Add no guided setup, no hardware cost, no phone line or network adapter needed, no install (they do that for you), and the ability to pick up the phone and get a new one if it breaks regardless of warranty, and the Comcast box, while not the cutting edge, is actually a comparitively insane value.
The Series 3 cost me about $900 including taxes and shipping, plus about $20 a MONTH for subscription + 2 cablecard rentals. its truly fucking ridiculous.
Why did I get it? Well, because I have been stuck using a Cablevision Scientific Atlanta HDDVR in CT. If you havent used one of these, you have no idea what a bad HDDVR looks like, because it blows huge chunks.
The guide is 4:3 with grey sidebars. If you switch to 4:3 cahnnels you have to navigate a menu to stretch it. And once stretched, HD channels are ALSO stretched beyond the screen, so you have to go back to the menu! The program guide takes TWO button presses to get to. The interface makes the Comcast interface look beuatiful.
Oh it also goes into sleep mode so when you first use it every day you have to push a button on the remote and wait for it to ‘wake up’!!
I also have a couple of other beefs with TiVo. The series 1 was absolutely perfect. The series 2 left a very bad taste in my mouth, launching it with the ‘promise’ of ‘undisclosed’ ‘cool’ features, taking forever to launch them (for $199!!!), then never launching the 802.11g/USB 2.0 which you really needed to make some of them even usable without wiring your whole house for Ethernet.
I also owned one of the series 2 which touted the new ‘Extreme Quality’, which was actually worse, and triggered a class-action lawsuit.
Finally, and worst of all, TiVo left me in the HD lurch for TWO YEARS after the cable company boxes launched their HD-PVRs. And while they the interfaces werent as great, any HD owner will tell you that ANY HDPVR is preferable to watching stretched recompressed SD video on a 50-inch widescreen.
This is why TiVo is still in business in the face of competition from generic DVRs from pretty much every satellite and cable company. Bottom line: TiVo is just a far superior product. DirecTV stopped making integrated DirecTV/TiVo boxes, and users are clamoring for them still. In fact, users are moving over to cable to get the HD TiVo boxes that you link to – and that don’t work with DirecTV.
In analogical terms, and also in terms of marketshare, Tivo was and is the Microsoft of DVRs – simple, easy to use, but restrictive. ReplayTV was the Apple analogue. Whereas Tivo was always about reduced features and playing along with the content owners, ReplayTV was about giving people as much control as possible over their content. And ReplayTV paid for this by continual litigation and, eventually, market death.
We used to have the TiVo plus DirectTV combo until an unlucky lightening strike. The new DirecTV DVR sucks too. I hate it hate it hate it.
Michiel – I fixed that link, thanks! Great input, all, I guess I struck a nerve…
Ouch. We have Comcast cable, but a Scientific Atlanta DVR. It works perfectly and I like it a lot more than my friend’s TiVo. I’m astounded by how many problems people are having. Must have gotten lucky and gotten a non-Comcast box, eh?
I have two Comcast DVR’s (both Motorola w/ HD). While I can hear your concerns/arguments, the reality is that it does the job. It records/pauses TV while I’m watching it. And coupled with a Slingbox I can control/watch it from anywhere.
I agree completely with everything that was said. I decided to try the comcast/motorola DVR and I am shocked at how bad it is.
I have a number of discounts on my account so I figured why not try it out for free. I have three Tivos, so this would be a good chance to compare them for myself.
Yes, the UI, the software, the performance are all bad but
the hardware quality is terrible also. I have replaced the DVR 3 times in three weeks and the 4th is going to need replacing also. Audio problems, video problems, automatic resets while recording or watching programs. It is terrible. Then the customer service is even worse.
It will be great to have the Tivo software on the cable company’s box and only pay a monthly fee, but if the hardware quality is not going to change we won’t be any happier. I think the users will be even more frustrated having great software they can’t use because the hardware does not run.
John, of course the Comcast DVR has a hard disk. In fact, if you think about it for even a few seconds you’ll realize that the box could not possibly keep all the HD content you’ve recorded in RAM. A single program can occupy several gigabytes of disk space. You probably have a 160GB disk drive in that box, and to replace that with RAM would cost, at current prices, about $16,000. Not to mention requiring 160 memory slots.
You have a defective box.
Ed – yeah, I probably do. But the UI is not defective, no wait, it is, but they MADE it that way.
Replace “Comcast” with “Cablevision” and I couldn’t agree more. My Cablevision DVR pales in comparison to my Tivo Series 1.
For example, I can’t comprehend why on the Cablevision DVR if I stop watching a show in the middle and come back later, I have to start watching from the beginning again! #$%#$@#!
But, unfortunately, it took Tivo three years to come out with a HD Tivo, and at a $1000 price point (including service) to boot. For even the most loyal Tivo fans, that’s a large pill to swallow…
When it comes to Comcast’s web site, I think they got caught up in Web 2.0 hype.
My power goes out frequently during storms. I bought an $80 UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) which has worked very well. If it helps you decide on a UPS, my box draws about 30 watts.