I was thinking about getting a TiVo or ReplayTV, and it turns out that my cable company, Comcast, offers a proprietary HD compatible DVR for about $10/month (I already own an HD compatible TV).
My questions:
Does anyone have any experience with this?
Do you have to use Comcast’s DVR or can you go with TiVo or ReplayTV?
I’ve checked out the description on Comcast’s website, but I wouldn’t mind having the opinion of someone who has actually used it.
Thanks,
h.
Yes, you can go with Tivo if you decide to do so.
I have Comcast cable and a TiVo standalone unit.
The Comcast DVR is rather notorious for being substandard to what TiVo can do. Fewer features, crappy interface, the works. There was a Pit thread about Comcast’s shitty service on this a few weeks ago, I seem to recall.
Go with the original. There is no substitute.
I’ve been using Comcast’s DVR for about a year now. Having never used TiVo, I can’t honestly compare the two, but I love my DVR.
The main con is the loss of picture quality. When you use DVR, there is compression artifacting that I find noticable, but my wife does not (YMMV). It’s really not all that bad, however. I prefer the picture quality of live TV, but a DVR’d show is still very watchable. The image loss seems to be more pronounced if we’re watching a fully DVR’d show, rather than playing “catch-up” after pausing live TV for a few minutes.
I have no idea if this is a problem with TiVo or not.
The only other problem we’ve found is reliability. We actually had a Comcast tech here this morning to give us our third DVR box in the past year. They seem to crap out pretty easily. This has lead to us losing some shows that we were looking to forward to watching, but I’m not about to look at losing a TV show as the end of the world.
I’m actually glad that it died this time, however. If the tech hadn’t have come out, it probably would’ve been quite awhile before I found out that they now have a HD DVR box. So Comcast will be out tomorrow morning with a new new box for us. 
I’m stoked about that. That was something I had always been upset about – having to choose between watching in HD and being able to pause the show.
So, all in all, I’m happy with the Comcast DVR service. Hopefully, however, someone here will have been a user of both services and will be able to give you a more experienced viewpoint.
I have an Adelphia DVR (NoTaTiVo). While I can’t imagine any cable company being more crappy than Adelphia, I guess I could be wrong.
The sales rep who sold me the DVR said it could hold 60 hours of programming. The tech who installed it said it was actually closer to 50. Both of them LIED. I’m lucky to get 40 hours recording time out of it. What’s worse, any time I try and record a show now, it wants to delete 3x the space it needs. I had to delete 5 hours of shows to record a 2-hour movie today.
When I tried to hook the NoTaTiVo to my computer (to record the shows I wanted to keep to DVD) I was in for another surprise – the s-video & audio jacks on the back didn’t work! I complained to the office, and the brainless tech said, “Oh, we haven’t activated those ports yet.” Wonderful.
I have noticed that the analog channels look much worse with the NoTaTiVo, whether I’m in “live” mode or not. The digital channels, however, look just fine. That’s okay with me since most of the shows I watch are on digital TV anyway.
The good news is…having a DVR rocks. Ever miss a line of dialogue? Just rewind. Phone rings during the final minutes of Mythbusters? Pause is your friend. And I don’t even watch commercials anymore – just tune the NoTaTiVo to the channel beforehand (or set it to record) and join the show 15 or 30 minutes after it starts. Even with a crappy DVR, I’d never go back to “regular” TV again.
Oh BTW, if you subscribe to DirecTV, you can get a DVR with actual TiVo technology. Everyone I know who has one swears by them. Unfortunately, I can’t get satellite because of a BIG FREAKING TREE that covers the only place where my apt. complex will allow me to install the dish… :mad:
Thanks, all, you’ve given me somthing to think about. I suppose I could always try Comcast’s DVR for a few months, and if I find I crave the TiVo’s features, I’m only really out the installation fee (DirectTV is out for me, too.)