I’m just now mourning the loss of the extreme usability of my old standalone dvr. Everything about the multi-room dvr is sluggish, with around a 3-second delay between pressing a button on the remote and the dvr responding to it. So if something flashes on screen, no chance to rewind and pause it to see what it was.
My standalone dvr responded instantly to remote control commands, and could FF and rewind as reliably and responsively as watching a video on your hard drive. It also included slow motion, frame advance, and picture zoom. On that dvr, if something flashed on the screen I’d just skip back 10 seconds, kick it into slow motion after around 5 seconds and then eventually pause it into frame advance to get exactly the frame I wanted to see.
For example, I used these features to transcribe some Survivor rules that flashed on the screen. Also to analyze a confusing helicopter crash during Chernobyl.
I’m almost certainly going to take a step backwards in terms of responsiveness and feature-rich controls like that no matter what solution I end up with. If I even do? Maybe our best bet is going to be to just drop down to basic cable and switch to mainly streaming. HBO Max is roughly the same price as HBO costs on our cable bill.
Speaking of HBO Max, does that include their current in-rotation movies list? For example, I think Birds of Prey and Charlie’s Angels are both currently in heavy rotation on the dozen or so HBO channels on my cable service. I typically go through the guide once a week and record around a dozen or so movies. (Around 50-60 a month, maybe?)
But if all those movies currently in rotation on cable HBO are also available on HBO Max, that’d be one super easy decision and partial solution all by itself.