I guess the question really is: how does Comcast’s DVR compare to Tivo? I’ve had Tivo for years and love it. I’m about to upgrade all my stuff and am wondering about having one less box to deal with.
Has anyone used both? Are they similar? Equal? Or does the Comcest one pale in comparison.
Thanks.
I have a Tivo, but spent 3 months a couple years ago living in an apartment with a Comcast DVR. There’s no comparison between the two - the Comcast was a pain in the butt to use, so much so that we simply didn’t use it very much at all.
Tivo’s user interface is its biggest asset, IMO. It’s just so easy to use it that you do use it. It’s not that I couldn’t figure out the Comcast one - I could - it’s that more often than not I didn’t want to screw around with it.
What features do you like? What do you use?
We have had Comcast DVR for several years and love it, but maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
The Comcast DVR lacks many of the features of a Tivo. For example, there are no wishlists and you can’t transfer shows to another DVR or to your computer. Tivo’s interface is easier to use. The Comcast DVR sometimes leaves you guessing where to find the few features it has; Tivo’s doesn’t do that. The Comcast DVR does do a few things that Tivo can’t. The major thing it does better than Tivo is that it always shows you the current show in a small window when you’re navigating menus. On a Tivo, you’re either watching something or using the menus - there’s no window.
That said, if you’re just using the DVR in a straightforward manner (recording shows that you select from the program guide and playing them later), the Comcast DVR will probably be fine. We had a Tivo for a couple of years and then had the Comcast DVR for a couple and then got another Tivo. The Comcast DVR did the job of recording and playing shows without much hassle but we wanted to use some of the advanced features that Tivo has and Comcast doesn’t, so we went back.
I have a Motorola DVR from Comcast, and it has some bugs. Like if I’m moving through the channel listings, it tends to freeze at times, and sometimes the audio cuts out. (I can usually correct that by hitting the button to rewind 15 seconds.) Another thing I don’t like is that it can only store twenty hours of HD content. I think Comcast has a couple of other DVRs. I need to see if any of them are any better. On the bright side, it makes it easy to watch On Demand content and to watch any of the digital channels. That can be difficult with a non-cable company DVR unless you get a CableCard installed.
Can anyone speak to the price difference? We rent our CC DVR for about $13 a month. Does a Tivo completely eliminate the need for a cable box?
ETA: That’s the bit that sent us to CC in the first place, and it looks similar. The box itself is a couple hundred dollar investment, then you pay $13 a month for the service. When we last looked the lower-end boxes (in the $200 range) only had one digital/HD tuner, not two like our CC box.
If you’re upgrading and only want one box, go with a TivoHD, which uses a cablecard (you get that from Comcast for about $3/month). It has two tuners so you can record two different things at once. The only real disadvantage is that you lose the Comcast on-demand.
But, you might want to wait until after March 2nd to buy anything…supposedly Tivo has a big announcement scheduled for that day.
Two or three years ago, Tivo and Comcast announced a joint venture under which Comcast DVRs would run Tivo software. I think there was a test run in the Boston area, but I don’t know if they’ve made it available anywhere else.
BTW, does anyone have any experience with getting the cable company to install and support the Cablecards? From what I’ve read, they insist on sending a technician to install them and their support is really reluctant and half-assed.
public service announcement for comcast motorola dvr owners:
If you haven’t already go to wikibooks and program a 30-second skip button onto the remote. You’ll thank me later.
They’re working on an agreement. It sounds like eventually they’ll have it available everywhere, but not in the near future.
Comcast and FIOS both insist on sending out a technician. Usually they are pretty clueless, even though they only have to put the card in and read a couple of numbers off the screen. Nevertheless, it usually takes them a couple of hours.
You can do this with (most) Tivos too…hit “Select - Play - Select - 3 - 0 - Select”. Then your “->|” button will be a 30 second skip button.
We’ve been fans of TiVo for several years now. Our old SD Tivo unit worked with the new HDTV we got last summer, but of course picture quality was crappy unless we bypassed it and tuned the TV directly to one of the (few) HD channels available under the standard basic cable service plan.
So with the new Comcast HD service last we activated in September, we had two options:
buy a new HD Tivo unit. For one with a large-capacity hard drive, the purchase price is close to $500, and monthly service agreement is around $15, plus $3/month to Comcast to rent a couple of “cable cards” to enable the Tivo to tune in to their signal.
Borrow a DVR from Comcast. Free to take home, monthly serivce cost about $10. This also grants access to Comcast On-Demand, which offers a mix of free and for-cost streaming content.
With zero cost up front, option #2 was risk-free, so we went for it.
It was ass, through and through.
The downers:
-For as much as they advertise/hype On-Demand, the available content is surprisingly limited, and appears to have low resolution/image quality. Fast-forward and rewind don’t move very quickly; this appears to be a consequence of the fact that the video is streaming over the network - which is to say that the technology isn’t quite ready for the job.
-The DVR menus aren’t very intuitively laid out. Maybe this is just a consequence of being a new system, but it’s occasionally hard to figure out how to find what I’m looking for.
-TiVo occasinally recorded “Tivo Suggestions,” programs it thought you might like, based on your viewing habits. This occasionally turned us on to new programs, or picked up stand-up comic performances we otherwise would have missed. Comcast’s DVR does nothing like this.
-TiVo’s “info” screen packed a ton of info. You saw the title and plot summary of the current program; a list of what programs were playing on the next ten channels; and the programs playing for the next several hours on the current channel. All while the program plays in the background. Comcast’s info screen? Four channels at a time; programming for the next two hours, with truncated titles due to space limitations; and the first few words of the current program’s plot summary.
-erratic response to commands issued from the remote control. Hit channel-up/down or pause, for example, and once in a while nothing happens, even though the command has been issued. You think the command hasn’t been received, so you push the button again, but the DVR is playing with your head: suddenly it will execute both of your commands (yes, it heard you the first time) and you’ll go up/down two channels, or quickly pause/unpause your
program, and so on.
-The Tivo allowed you to see what each of the two tuners was tuned into, and switch between them, maintaining a buffer of program content on each tuner. The Comcast DVR is dual-tuner, but we haven’t figured out how to tell what each tuner is tuned into, or how to switch between the two tuners.
-The Comcast DVR’s program guide lists about 400 channels that we don’t receive, e.g. all the HBO/Cinemax variations. WHen scrolling through the listings, I can’t do anything but wade through them to get to the other side, or else go back down through the list. There doesn’t seem to be a way to remove these inaccessible channels from the listings.
-When fast-forwarding (through commercials), when you push play, the two DVR’s behave very differently. Tivo backs up 5-15 seconds before beginning normal-speed playback. This accounts for the fact that you’ve already shot past the end of the commercials and into the program; if you’ve got reasonable reflexes, you need do nothing more, and your program will resume in a few seconds. With the Comcast DVR, normal-speed playback resumes at exactly the point where you pushed play; this means you may need to back up through 5-15 seconds of programming to find the end of the commercials you were just fast-forwarding through. Add in the occasional erratic command response described earlier, and this can sometimes become an exercise in frustration.
After about ten days of dealing with that piece-o-shit, we ordered a TiVo HD-XL from Amazon. It’s been bliss.
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I never had a Tivo, but really got sick of the Comcast DVR. Any loss of power (which happens fairly frequently here) would completely wipe out any movies or shows that were “in the can” for later viewing. I’ve now got AT&T Uverse and have never experienced any erased shows on the DVR.
I was an early adopter of Tivo HD with dual cable-cards, and getting them to work consistently with Comcast was a nightmare – big chunks of channels were unavailable, and nobody on the phone at Comcast seemed to be able to get them to work.
Then we moved. Comcast sent a technician to install at the new location; he looked at the Tivo and said that he was a subcontractor, and not authorized to work on cable cards. He went away, and a few hours later 2 real Comcast technicians showed up. They wrestled with the installation for hours. But to their credit, they were doggedly determined, and would not get off the phone with HQ until everything was up & running. We’ve had zero problems ever since.
Back to the OP: I used a Comcast DVR for the brief period when I had an HD TV, but Tivo had not yet released their HD DVR. It was a POS, and the second the Tivo HD came out I bought it and never looked back.
The ony thing the Comcast did that I wish Tivo would do: give you a current percent of capacity being used.
I have a TiVoHD on one TV and a Time Warner DVR on another. I assume the TW is similar to the Comcast. IMO, TiVo is MUCH better. I’ve been using TiVo for years (this is my 3rd DVR with them) and I’m used to the interface, so that is part of it. On the other hand, I have the TiVo on my home network and can show pictures wirelessly from my PC on my TV; I can transfer recordings from TiVo to my PC to watch if I want; I can watch YouTube directly on TiVo. The menu system on the TW DVR is clunky and not user-friendly. The one downside is having to use a tuning adapter to get switched digital channels, but it’s not really a big deal.
I see that Joe Frickin Friday has already resolved his issues by going back to Tivo, but I just wanted to provide solutions to two of his problems with Comcast in case anyone else is experiencing them.
If you check your list of recorded programs, the most recent two (the ones currently being recorded) are at the top of the list. I do this all the time to verify what’s being recorded. You can then select one or the other to begin watching immediately. If you’re watching one program live, you can hit the channel button, and a screen will pop up asking if you want to switch to the other one.
In order to pare down your channel listings, you need to create a Favorites list by going to Menu and choosing the Favorites section. Then you can see just your selected listings by hitting Menu and choosing Favorites. Once your Favorites list is created, you can scroll through your Favorite channels by hitting the Favorites button on the remote.
Now for my question:
Doesn’t Tivo require you to have a phone line available? I only have one phone line, which is used for both my telephone and dialup (yes, dialup). I’m not sure I’d be able to add Tivo as well.
Not if you connect it to your wireless network. It requires a wireless USB adapter, but it works great.
I hate Comcast DVR and I literally wish every single day I could go back to Tivo. Comcast DVR is a piece of shit joke. I find something new to hate about it every single night. In fact, it makes me hate watching tv, and I love watching tv.
Let me put in perspective how much I prefer TiVo over Comcast’s horrible DVR. The only reason I switched to a Comcast DVR was that I had bought a HDTV, and at the time TiVo didn’t have any models that supported HD. When TiVo finally came out with the Series3 – their first HD device – it was priced at $800. I bought one the first day they were available, without thinking twice. And I haven’t regretted it for a moment. I will never go back to a Comcast DVR if there’s any possible way I can avoid it.
HD capable TiVos are, of course, available for far less money these days, but I’m glad I didn’t wait.
Thank you. I almost posted it here, or in CS.