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.
I was forwarded your post by a friend of mine who knows that I share your feelings about both the TiVO (perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically, but certainly relative to…) and the Comcast HD-DVR. I had a Series 1 (given away to an old girlfriend) and have a Panasonic-branded Series 2, as well as the POS Comcast Motorola HD-DVR box. I hate the latter like the Taliban hate freedom.
I know others already have posted the correction that the box does have a hard drive. I admit that I didn’t read all of the preceding comments, so someone may have mentioned this already, as well: It doesn’t wipe clean after a power outage. Here’s how you recover both the already recorded programs and the scheduled upcoming recordings (which you’ve entered using the worst interface since Burroughs made computers):
(1) Call up Comcast and sit on hold listening to that bad cover band “bluesy” wait music, then tell the service rep your problem so she can send a signal to the box;
(2) Despite the fact that the whole problem was caused by a power outage, unplug the box for 30 seconds or so while you’re on the phone with her.
Once you plug it back in and she sends her signal, your prerecorded programs will be there and once the guide info slowly downloads, your scheduled recordings will be there.
I’ve had to go through this process about three times since I got the thing in May/June.
Don’t get me started on how my TiVo S2 upconverts everything to 720p, but with the Comcast Motorola box, if it ain’t in HD, it stays in 480i. Or how unreliable Comcast’s On Demand service is. Or….
There are at LEAST 2 versions of the Comcast DVR software for Motorola Boxes. Washington state has a version developed by Microsoft and their MSTV division (which is ironically based in Mountain View, CA, not Redmond), developed specifically for cable boxes. The rest of their boxes are mostly using their own in house created software.
Anyone in Washington willing to offer their opinions? Is it any better? Since you wrote this in Marin, I’m assuming you have the Comcast software.
You are a complete noob. Yes, sorry to stoop to typical internet name calling. But your nice little article read like a rant by someone who simply lacks the ability to adjust to something different and is so technologically inept as to make ignorant assumptions that school children would find laughable.
I have three comcast DVR’s, all of which are the same model as the you have. They aren’t perfect, but they certainly aren’t anything like your low brow rant would lead one to believe. My only complaint with them is the small size of the HD and the occasional (once or twice per week) input lag I experience using the DVR. THe most recent software update may have helped that though, as I haven’t experienced it since, but time will tell there. If the remote control is difficult for you, maybe you should go back to twist knobs. I haven’t seen a remote control for any device that I found difficult in over a decade.
I also switched from Tivo to Comcast DVR when I bought my first HD set about 5 months ago. I’ve had a similar experience, including losing all of my saved shows on one occasion. Now I’m just waiting for the Comcast DVR with Tivo to come out at the end of the year or wait for the Tivo S3 to come down in price.
I have the same Comcast DVR, and agree – it is far from perfect. I’ve never been blessed with Tivo, but it is not dificult to imagine the Tivo is far superior. The Comcast box sets the bar so incredibly low, almost anything would be better.
However, in defense of the otherwise useless box – it’s never lost programming. I’ve had my box crash a few times so badly that it required unplugging to free it up, and every time it reboots I find all my stored programs intact. What I do lose, is the Guide data, but that eventually gets re-downloaded.
The one critical task, which is to record and store programs, it does in fact do.
Usability is a mess, and the occaisional remote lag is infuriating… but in the end it’s usable because it accomplishes that one critical task.
_Am
I also have 2 Moto 6412 Comcast boxes. I was a very long time ReplayTV series 5000 owner, loved them, but had to let them go to make the jump to HDTV.
The input lag that I, and many commenters above, experience isn’t isolated just to the Moto DVR boxes from Comcast. A good friend has the non-DVR Moto box from Comcast and he experiences exactly the same thing. That’s what leads me to doubt that the promised TiVo software for the 6412’s will solve that problem. It’s a Motorola problem, not a Motorola DVR problem.
I also do not lose recorded shows after power failures. Not clear what’s up with that, the unit has a hard drive.
I have Comcast, and I live on the coastside in El Granada, where the power goes out all the time. It works terribly. The interface is awful. But in Phoenix, where I also live, I have Cox, and the Scientific Atlanta HD DVR box is worse than the Comcast. And you are right, neither is as good as TIVO. Why the cable companies didn’t just license Tivo at the outset is beyond me.
You are going to LOVE the Tivo Series 3…it’s EVERYTHING the Comcast is not. We’ll all expect a post after you get it on just HOW GREAT the new Tivo HD is. It truly is the Mac or Lexus of the DVR world….
Note: Even when the Comcast box is working it randomly lags (buffers) it’s input commands up from 1 – 5 minutes…completely ruining your tv watching experience when using any of it’s DVR functions.
John, in a scary way you and I are on the exact same cycle right now. I picked up a new HD set at Best Buy in Marin City last week and then got the Comcast HD last night. My take away – this is a lot of effort and money for a relatively lame experience (except for the 5 shows and 2 sports programs that look great). As if to put an exclamation point on the issue you rant about, I recently purchased a beautiful 24″ iMac. The comparison of the consumer experience isn’t even fair. I think I’ll just use the Mac. 🙂
Kinda makes you wonder why TiVo and Comcast can’t get a deal done? TiVo his the UI and IP and Comcast has the distribution.
TiVo you should be a software company!!! Stop selling boxes….
Comcast you should care about bringing best of breed solutions to your customers instead of purely leveraging your oligopoly power for max profit.
Bring on the IPTV!
Bring on RSS distributed video!
Many, many points in your rant are true. I find the Comcast DVR to be a real pain in the ass to use most days; it is horribly slow and prone to weird hiccups. Then again, my TiVo was doing the same things after the last software update.
This entire issue really boils down to pricing and marketing tactics.
The Comcast DVR is $9.99 per month for dual-tuner HD recording.
The TiVo Series 3 is $16.95 per month… plus the outrageous $800 purchase price plus whatever your cable company charges for cable cards plus you still need the cable.
This makes the difference, not the software or hardware issues. The price.
“Just get a TiVo instead” is a glib and ridiculous answer to the problem. Few people I know can afford to plunk down an additional $800.
A FEW TIPS & TRICKS TO EASE THE COMCAST AGONY…
30 SECOND SKIP BUTTON FOR YOUR “COMCASTIC” REMOTE:
I couldn’t live without this and missed it from my Tivo so I searched out this little pearl…
Please read carefully and remember, once the button has been programmed, it is permanent. My suggestion is to use the [Help] button for the 30 second skip function. I have only set this up on the Silver remotes and have not set it up on the black remotes yet.
Take your remote:
· Hit the Cable button – It’ll blink
· Press and hold the Setup button until the cable button blinks twice
· Enter 994 – The Cable button will blink twice
· Hit setup (do not hold)
· Enter 00173 on your keypad
· Hit any button that you don’t use (like FAV or Help or a button close to your 8 sec rewind)
Now that button will be your 30-second quick skip feature.
COMCAST SAVINGS:
If you have Comcast Cable and want to save some money call them and ask them what specials they are currently running. The lady on the phone just told me that every customer is entitled to 2 promotions per year. For example, my Silver Package is $76.99/month and I just got a special for three months for $49.99/mo for three months. My last special was the Silver Package for $39.99/mo.
Guess it is taking a while:
http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2005/03/comcast_and_tiv.html
It’s amazing that you posted this story as I was complaining about the same crappiness last night about the Comcast DVR. I was trying to delete some shows while a HD show was playing in the background. After about five minutes of the DVR being completely unresponsive (the dang thing queues commands, so will execute them quickly after it frees up and then lock up again!) and sporadically issuing commands, I turned off the TV and went to bed. Figured I would take care of it later.
Hopefully if what is said about the Tivo software and Panasonic DVR’s above is true, I will swap out my DVR soon!
i hate hate hate hate hate my comcast dvr. the one i had w/ time warner last year was much better, though not available where i live now.
first of all, sometimes my dvr just won’t record a program, even though it’s in there, confirmed, etc. oops! who knows why!
second, i find that the comcast dvr, in comparison to the time warner dvr, cannot determine when a program is new and when it’s a rerun. i have it set to record, let’s say, all new episodes of the colbert report. well, it apparently thinks this is all episodes of the colbert report, as long as they’re the “new” episode that ran the night before. meaning, it will tape 4 episodes during the day while i’m at work, unless i go through and specifically tell it not to. it’s not just that show, either. it’s so frustrating, so clunky, and sometimes when i turn it on, it’s muted, and i can’t get it to unmute unless i power down, and power up again, missing minutes of whatever show it was taping.
thanks, comcast! you’re truly and industry leader.
Think about it. Comcast’s DVR is their way of getting people to hate DVRs and stop wanting them.
John, thanks for this post. I was going to go and pick up the Comcast HD-DVR tomorrow, but now I think that I will wait for other options.
Does anyone have anything positive to say about this beast? Are there any other options if you are on comcast?
You are so right, John. I’ve been using this box on Mediacom for a few months, and it is truly crap. Guess I’m stuck with it because I’m not willing to shell out for a Tivo or build a PVR, so I won’t whine too much…but you’d think they could release a firmware update or something.
The remote lag is truly odd. And while I don’t find the interface so horrid, it’s not very good.
Sometimes it will simply refuse to record a series. It seems to accept the new series recording, but no dice.
Worst of all, like you I often lose recordings for no reason I can understand. If I don’t catch it in time, I’ll lose subsequent shows as the box won’t record anything else until I unplug to reset it. After that the programs come back. Maybe that’s the problem for you.
FWIW, Mediacom insisted it has to do with a bad cable connection, which they “fixed” (squirrels chewed through cable at the tap)…but it still does it.
ComCast’s HD DVR absolutely sucks. I went through 4 of them because of overheating problems, guide sluggishness, tiling, and so on. I also had this same unit while living in a different state using COX. This Motorola DVR is just junk. Get a TiVo instead.
Welcome back to Tivo. Thanks for the heads up on inferior Comcast units. FWIW the DirecTV DVR is not bad, we use that in our guestroom.
John your box sounds very broken if it lost all your recordings I have movies that I have saved from months ago.
I guess I’m the only one that doesn’t mind the Comcast DVR. I have the 2 tuner unit and it has a HDD. It doesn’t lose my recordings after a power outage but it does lose the guide for a bit until it downloads. I’m a PC geek type person so I guess a few hitches don’t trouble me.
It does bug me that it’s response slows down at times and I have had to unplug it once or twice to clear it and call Comcast once for a reset when it wouldn’t let me play a program (took under 5 min to fix).
Why I like it more than TIVO. Works with my cable system and I can record all channels I get. 2 tuners so I can record 2 things and watch a 3rd that I recorded earlier. Yes you can do that. I don’t have to buy a box for big $$ and pay a subscription fee.
My one problem with all DVR’s is that they feed my TV addication.
I haven’t read through all of the comments before mine, so it may have been said already, but I wanted to say that I’ve had the same experience losing DVR recordings. My girlfriend and I moved to a different apartment in the same building, in which our box (a Motorola 3412) was unplugged for a couple of days. After moving into our new place, we wouldn’t have cable right away, but we had a box full of shows, so we thought we’d just watch them while we wait for our technician. When we plugged our box in, we couldn’t see the shows and we called Comcast multiple times. Some reps said we had to have concurrent cable service to access our recorded shows, some said it should be working fine without cable service. Once we had our cable service moved, the shows were still missing. We finally got a tech who was probably not supposed to give us the straight truth, but told us that when a box is unplugged, it’s really 50/50 if the shows will get lost. ugh. I’ve read about transferring shows from the box to a PC using a firewire. I’m going to give this a try soon.
Amen, brutha!
My girlfriend and I almost went insane with this thing. I took it back ASAP and we waited until we could get our hands on the 3rd gen Tivo. I would list the crazy details of my rant, but you have sdone it ever so elequently!
The Moto box may suck, but all I care about is the ability to record 2 HD shows at once. The only other option is an $800 Tivo box + $17/mo. to run it.
There is no way im trading my HD for a “better interface”. Thats like choosing to drive a Acura over a Lamborghini because it has AC and and an Ipod dock…
Thanks so much for the review – I just moved from NYC to Chicago and have encountered all the problems with Comcast cable which is preinstalled in my building. I got their basic cable box which blows – counter-intuitive/retarded in every way – you can’t tell which shows you have set to record by looking at the onscreen menu nor can you tell when the “to record” list maxes out; the box has a tendency to reset itself; the controls on the remote don’t work; …
And I thought that Time Warner had problems.
If this is their competition then T-W should move in for the kill.
I have just signed on to TiVo – thanks again before I rant too much about Comcast’s terrible products and services.
Is anyone having a problem with the Comcast DVR box losing sound in the recording process? We experience a lot of signal break-up, as well as random audio loss, although the audio loss often happens without any distortion in the video portion. The end result is just as if the mute button is being used randomly during the recording. (And I swear it knows the most crucial audio to lose — especially on murder mystery programs!) We’re on our second Comcast DVR box trying to fix this problem, which Comcast denies ever having heard of before.
Man you people are a bunch of whiners. If you don’t like the comcast DVR, don’t use it. Go out, buy your $1,000 series 3 Tivo and then bitch and whine to comcast to allow cable-card use, that’s all it takes.
The Motorola 6412 box can be frustrating at times, that’s for sure. But it absolutely should not lose recorded programs when power is lost. Never has for me.
Maximize your experience with this less-than-perfect box (and minimize frustrations) by bookmarking and reading the excellent and well-maintained Wikipedia information on it here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR
John-
The outpouring in this thread is pretty amazing. Do you think that anyone at Comcast is listening? This really is the beauty of the local monopoly that Comcast and the other cable companies have.
I remember picking up my first DVR (ReplayTV) and marveling at the simplicity of the device and how well it worked. Even then I thought, if these things catch on, the cable and satellite companies will crush Replay and Tivo by leasing these boxes to their customers. I mean, the software was simple, right? It sure looked that way.
And therein lies the rub. The software isn’t simple, it’s made to look that way. Both Replay and Tivo started with some great design and iterated like hell. The mundane details like automatically buffering the ends of the program, resolving conflicting recordings, disk space management, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The point is, Tivo delights us and Comcast kicks sand in your face. Tivo has to compete like hell and Comcast counts the money rolling in.
We have 2 Comcast HD/DVR boxes and have had to replace both a few times when they just stopped working completely. I hate having to reprogram all of my shows, but I love DVR and can’t imagine not having it. I did notice the weird mute issue. One one tv, I can just increase or decrease the volume to unmute but on our other tv, you can’t do anything to bring the sound back until the program you are recording is finished. That’s annoying. Has anyone ever had this happen– the TV turns itself on or off at the beginning or end of a recorded program! We used to think there was a ghost in the house but then I realized it happens when recording is starting or stopping. It’s an adventure for sure…
It did cost quite a chunk of change, but I’m glad I have Beyond TV and a terabyte of hard drive space on my HTPC which allows me to record a lot of SD and HD. The system has passed the wife test with flying colors, and the HD looks glorious on a 50-inch HDTV screen.
There really is very little for me to add – we got the HD TV and then this P.O.S. DVR from comcast and it has been nothing but the nightmare that John describes.
Here’s where I’m tripping and would like some further invetigation: we lost everything (all recorded programs and all scheduled to record) on Nov 1st…does that map to John’s loss? (He posted on the 2nd and referred to the incident as happening ‘last night’.) We had no power outage, our machine just randomly shuts itself down, which is what happened this time. Methinks there is something larger going on here…
The amount of feedback and commentary on this post is incredible. Tivo stock has had a pretty volatile run over the past two years. I keep coming back, however, to the fundamental thesis that they will eventually start making money because of very comments made above. I think the name Tivo is probably worth $500mm alone. I live in Mill Valley and have both a Tivo and Comcast HD DVR. There is no doubt that I will pay the $5 additional to have the Tivo software on my box as soon as it becomes available. Let’s hope that the rev share on the Tivo side is enough to keep them in business.
JN
Category: Comcast Cable Television
Sub-Category: Service
Dear Comcast,
I agree with the opinions expressed on the Comcast DVR in the following article.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/003055.php
Without an option, I remain a subscriber. Will there be a better product for
Comcast DVR subscribers soon?
Thank you,
Ken
Dear Ken,
Thank you for taking the time to write us.
The DVR has undergone 2 updates in the past year. It is possible another update
will be available to address any issues in the future. With the feedback
provided this will help us to improve the service.
Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance
with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be
happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your
business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via
Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit:
http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/
Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits?
These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the
Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the
Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit
http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide.
Sincerely,
Brian
Comcast Electronic Customer Care – New England
I have the HD Tivo and while the product itself is predictably elegant and easy to use keeping its two CableCards working smoothly has been a hassle – I’ve had to call into Time-Warner Cable once a week or so and have them re-send the EMMs that authorize the cards to decode the premium channels. Other than that, it’s great – although I’d been a ReplayTV user since PVRs came on the scene, and I do miss the Replay’s superior pause-live-TV handling.
Ladies & Germs,
I feel your pain. . . I’m on my third Comcast HD/TiVO box in maybe 5 mo. Understand, I had no previous experience with TiVO but did have a DVR for another TV with the analog channels. Pretty straightforward to run.
Anyway, Comcast box 1 sounded like a jet engine, so I took it back and exchanged it. Box 2 would make programs disappear – or perhaps they were never there – intermittently. I knew I was recording them, saw the red light on while watching something else in some cases.
As an additional FYI, I shut down the TiVO box at night – sometimes programs stayed on the hard drive (yes, there is one) and sometimes not. Called in again and was told it might be a bad hard drive.
Tech came out and replaced the box – so far, I’ve got shows that are stored on there that haven’t gone away yet. It’s all a great mystery to me!
great rant…if you want to see the latest Battlestar Gallactica check out this link :on not legal but it still is there…youtube…http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=frrackkit
Kind of funny that you jumped to the conclusion that it doesn’t have a HD. Typical non-technical idiot Mac user.
Comcast DVR licks the sweat off a dead Tivo’s balls.
wow, LOTS of commenting going on here, I think you found a hot topic! a similar situation happened with me and directv. My directivo died (probably because I modded it and put a second hard drive in, and it tended to overheat) and so I went back to best buy to get another only to find that they didn’t sell them anymore. All they had was the directv version, no tivo. So I reluctantly bought one for $100 (and the guy informed me that I DON’T OWN IT EVEN THOUGH I JUST BOUGHT IT AT A RETAIL STORE) and brought it home and started using it. That didn’t last long. It just does several things so very wrong that tivo demonstrated how to do the right way. I eventually almost stopped using it altogether. Then a few months later I moved and canceled my directv. Now they have sent me a box saying I need to send them the receiver back or I owe them $479. What the crap is that?!?!? I guess I will see if it is an idle threat because I sure as heck ain’t sending them a damn thing.
but I also heard from a friend that tivo series 3 is pretty bad too, like they reverted back to series 1 for a lot of features. haven’t used it firsthand though.
No hard drive? I have the same model from a Canadian Cable company, and it has a hard drive, I find it hard to believe it records only to memory, HD programs are around 5gigs an hour!
I have the Washington version of the 6412 comcast DVR. While the user interface looks fine, the navigation is still abysmal compared to my older ReplayTV. There have been several bugs like FF sticking (you had to wait for the entire show to FF before the unit would respond) and having all your recordings get lost when you switched to daylight savings time and each time Comcast has released a software upgrade they’ve broken something new.
The hardware is underpowered. It responds very sluggishly to remote control commands and it takes at least a full minute when you try and resolve conflicts before the box comes back.
However it’s dual tuner, records most of the time in HD and I’m smart enough to have a HTPC as a backup unit. Ths cost is worth it ($10 a month) compared to dropping a grand for a series 3. The biggest issue is that the box reboots itself at least 1x a day, usually at a very inconvenient time.
I too have one of these, coming from the HD DirecTiVo. So craptacular!
It does in fact have a hard drive, but neglects to store the file directory on it, only the data, so after a power outage it doesn’t know what’s on the drive anymore.
John, i feel your pain man. We renamed ours 🙂
…More on the Comcast DVR
We just yanked all the comcast and directtv crap out of our house and replaced them with series 3 tivos. And to those that are excited about the tivo software on the motorola platform. Good luck that box runs the temp of the sun.
I dropped $800 on a TiVo Series 3 because I felt that the Comcast HD-DVR was having an adverse effect on my quality of life. I would swear out loud at it daily, typically because of the infuriating remote queuing issues. I hated it in a way that I have hated very few things in my life. Pre-S3, I had no other options for HD DVR via Comcast. Even at $800, I ordered one the day it came out, and I’m not looking back. I’ve owned an S1, S2, and now an S3, and I’ve loved them all with iPod-esque passion. Your comparison with Audi is great, I drive one of those too 🙂
Hey GRFBWM: Regarding your nicety: “Typical non-technical idiot Mac user” – listen dickwad, turns out I’ve been in the business for 20 years, and I thought they were using some odd architecture of VOD and minimal local RAM or flash. I figured the main bits were being stored upstream, and the system was improperly architechted in the case of power failure. Turns out I was wrong, and I’m happy to admit it. But man, I bet you never are wrong, are you?
Dennis asked about residents of Washington state. I live in an Eastside suburb of Seattle, and have had a Comcast HD DVR for about a year. I can’t compare the UI experience, never having seen a TiVo or ReplayTV unit in person; the Comcast unit is a little clunkier than the non-DVR version (with the phone-line download) was, but it’s livable.
I’ve had to have the box reset once, following a major power failure (several thousand people out for more than a day), but everything was in place following the reset and the guide download. I’ve never lost a recording, lost a schedule, or lost the audio on a recording.
And as for the Mac haters out there: I’ve been a Mac owner since the First 100 Days, back in April, 1984. (I’ve never owned anything else since, and the original still works if I bother to power it up.) At the time, I was a systems programmer in a university shop transitioning from an Amdahl 470/V8 under SVS to an IBM 3081 under MVS (I wrote the conversion utility for the differences in JCL) and putting in networked e-mail on the DEC-20s. (I wrote all the interface code to make the dialup setup look like an SMTP network connection–when SMTP was brand new.)
I went from that shop to a well-known private university in the heart of Silicon Valley, where I was the systems programmer and operations chief for 4 DEC-20s, 2 IBM 4381s, Ultrix on VAXen and MIPS, SunOS 3 and 4, AIX on PC/RT and RS/6000, Macs and DEC Rainbows (running MS-DOS and CP/M-86).
I worked for the largest networking equipment manufacturer in the world, then for the founder’s next startup (which brought me to Washington). I currently keep two privately owned DEC 20s running, in an XP environment where I have 6 versions of Linux running in VMware on my desktop.
So that establishes my technical chops.
And I still prefer using my Mac to do my personal computing, writing linguistics and classics papers, presiding over the board of a homeowners association, and everything else that life requires. Were I to build my own DVR setup, I’d start from the Mac, too.
I’m going to chime in here as someone who’s had this DVR box for the past year. I considered also getting a Tivo – but wanted Dual Tuner capabilities and the ability to record in HD, and at the time, neither of those were easy (nor particularly cheap) options with Tivo. Having said that, the Comcast box provided that straight away from the get go once installed.
Yes, it’s not a Tivo, but it’s design and functions allow me to accomplish what I want to do – namely record and watch television programs using series recording as well as one-off recording. While the interface and such could use some sprucing up (which may occur if the Tivo/Comcast partnership ever produces anything), this product accomplishes what I need it to.
I’ve never lost any programs due to power outages, and we’ve had several over the last year.
I will consider Tivo products in the future, if I don’t have to mess around with all kinds of setup just to get it to do what my comcast box can do right off the bat.
I live in Bellevue, WA, having moved recently from Palo Alto, CA where I was a very happy TiVo user. I can confirm that the “Microsoft Enhanced” version of Comcast’s DVR is equally abysmal.
Does anyone have any real substantive information about a possible TiVo box from Comcast? I have heard the rumor many times but the Comcasts techs claim to have no idea about it.
And if you are curious, as I was, to what “Microsoft Enhanced” means, and for an excellent articulation of the Comcast DVR experience for all you lucky TiVo users, read on… http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/03/this-post-is-microsoft-enhanced-tm.html