The Dish. Now to be honest The Dish’s 2-room solution is very, very slick. We liked it a lot. The prices were OK. But we had to cancel it because some contract negotiations between The Dish and Major League Baseball fell through and The Dish stopped offering the Extra Innings package. As a big Red Sox fan stuck in NoVA, this is a requirement. They didn’t announce anything, the package simply just disappeared from their website. Only with a ton of inquiries (followed by complaints) did The Dish fess up and tell people what was happening. It was still a month into the season before actually came out and said, “We’re not offering it.” Prior to that was, “We’re really trying to get it. Hang in there!” Bullfuckingshit. They saw their customer base dwindling and reacted with lies. THEN they say things like: “You can still watch your favorite teams on your local networks as well as cable networks like ESPN.” :rolleyes: Umm, do they even know what the MLB package is?
Result: We left The Dish for DirecTV.
DirecTV. They sent an installer to my house that a) didn’t know what the fuck he was doing – at all and b) didn’t speak a lick of English. He left without having the system working properly (would be searching for satellite signal every 5 minutes or so). After spending over 12 hours with customer service and getting nowhere, I decided to cancel.
Result: Back to cable TV.
Cox Communications. OK, look, you’ve been pushing the same shitty DVR appliance since 2002. What the fuck? Improve your equipment!!! The interface is clunky, the system works unpredictably, and you can’t search for programs. Its ease-of-use is that of a VCR from 1986. Not only that, but their base DVR only records 40 hours of TV, and it does it very poorly. Just recently I began having constantly bouts of pixelization and sound skipping on anything that traverses this cable box. Everything else is fine. All other TVs are fine. I called and spoke with the “technician” who told me several times that it was the connection to my house, not the box, and that they’d have to schedule a service call, which would only cost me $30. Yeah, right. I’ve done my own troubleshooting and I’ve narrowed the problem to this specific box, but he wasn’t hearing it. So, I’m going to go Monday and replace the box.
I have a long history (like many of you all I’m sure) with cable installation and repair people. It’s degraded enough through the years that I only allow them to ensure that they have good signals coming into my home. They are not to touch anything I own.
Result: Hey, let’s check out TiVo.
TiVo. I have a TiVo Series 2 DVR already with lifetime service. The two biggest drawbacks (and why we stopped using it) are that it changes channels VERRRY slowly with a digital cable box and it only has one tuner. So it’s essentially a glorified VCR. So I go looking at TiVo’s site for different products. Hey, look at that. It’s the newish Series3 and it does HD. Sweet. $600. OK, maybe. Since I already bought the lifetime service, let’s see if I can transfer that. Of course not! I’d have to spend another $300 for 3 years of service, so that $600 just turned into $900. So I have a box sitting here with a lifetime service that I paid for but can only use with THIS box.
The one cool thing have these Series3 DVRs is that they have slots for CableCards which essentially eliminate the need for a set-top box. So I called up the cable company. How much for these CableCards? $1.99 a piece and I’ll need two. Great. Oh, but you’ll have to pay for two digital subscriptions at $7 per month because it’s essentially two set-top boxes. Uh, ok. Oh yeah, you can’t slide the cards into the box yourself. “We don’t allow that.” Yes, he actually said that. We’ll have to schedule an appointment with a professional installer. I can’t slide the CableCards in my $900 TiVo myself? No. OK, how much is this service call? $30.
Result: No thanks. I’m feeling very nickled and dimed at this point. I’m not buying TiVo Series3, not going with DirecTV, not subscribing to The Dish, and am stuck with cable for the foreseeable future. Whatever. Like my wife said, “Let’s just bow out of this mess until something comes along that’s economical and worthwhile for us.” She’s usually the voice of reason.
Dish Network is excellent. Just cuz you couldn’t watch your baseball doesn’t mean you should slag the whole system, dude!
But wait! I remember going through a similar thing when they couldn’t decide if they were going to continue to offer CBS and other Viacom programming. So, yeah, all systems suck to some extent.
But DVR beats the pants of “live” tv. You just gotta take the bad with the good.
It’s like any relationship…there’s always going to be something that irritates you about the situation and you have to decide which things are deal breakers.
Build your own. Hubby is finishing the supercalifragelistic hard drive right now.
Until then, we are sticking with TiVo, especially since we have Cox (a more aptly named cable provider does not exist) and I heard a nasty rumor that soon you won’t be able to fast-forward past commercials on their DVR unit… :eek:
It’s not the actual unit, it’s a specific arrangement Cox has made with ABC/Disney to disable the fast-forward function on some of their Video-on-Demand shows.
What model of DVR do you have? We’re with Cox (Omaha) and have 2 Motorola 64xx and have had a few problems with them, but overall have been very satisfied with the equipment.
The Motorola boxes are no great shakes either. I’ve been through four of them. One had a failed hard drive. Another would just randomly lock up. One would spontaneously reboot itself every few hours. I could have lived with that, except these boxes literally take days to download the guide information after a reboot, so that box never had more than a few hours of guide data in it.
They’re incredibly slow. If you’re watching HD, you can press a button on the remote and sometimes wait as much as 10 seconds before the box responds to it. So you have to pause the show before you use the guide. They have many known bugs. A particularly nasty one is that on occasion the box will decide the hard drive is full and stop recording your shows.
All DVR boxes seem to suffer from some problems. I don’t know if it’s because the standards are garbage, or that the cable companies don’t have their act together and download buggy software to them, or that the infrastructure is too chaotic, or what.
Yeah, mine has a few problems, too. I’m waiting for Comcast to roll out the TiVo interface on their boxes. I hear it’s available in the Boston area now. They should roll it out in Arizona around the first of the year if we’re lucky.
Time-Warner Cable in NC uses the Scientific Atlanta 8300 DVRs too, and I have occasionally noticed problems with pixelization and sound drop-out (mostly the latter). The timing on some of the recording is sometimes off, but I don’t know if that’s the DVR or the transmission. I haven’t noticed any particular delays in response time on the remote, however.
Another thing that bothers me is that I have found several references online that indicate I should be able to connect my DVR to an external hard drive and transfer recorded shows to it. When I asked Time-Warner about this, they said that the only way to re-record anything on my DVR is by connecting the audio/video outputs to a VCR.
Ya know, I had the same problem with DTV when I had my DVR installed about a year ago. I love their service, but the contractors they hire are the worst. If you’ve ever been to dbstalk.com you’ll know that the majority of complaints are about that.
However, having said that …
DTV is just now bringing their new satellite online which is going to give them many new HD channels, and the newest HD boxes are coming out now with VOD available… it’s a pretty sweet setup.
Actually, that’s the wrong model. That doesn’t support CableCards. Part of my spending money on a TiVo is so that I don’t have to use their archaic infrared channel-changing system.
Yeah there was no way in hell I was buying a Series 3 for ~$800 or whatever they were, but $300 isn’t bad. I’m very happy with my Tivo HD. The only criticism I have is that the interface is a bit sluggish, but either I’m getting used to it or a recent software update helped it. Oh, and if you are going to hook it to your network wirelessly, you HAVE to buy a Tivo wireless adapter. I tried the adapter I was using with my Series 2 and it really doesn’t work. On the plus side the Tivo adapter figured out my (unsecured) wireless network automagically, I didn’t have to enter any info.
I so love my old-fashioned DirecTV/Tivo integrated receiver that when DirecTV sent me a new, *free *receiver with DVR (they don’t partner with Tivo anymore), I sent it back and paid to upgrade/fix my DirecTV Tivo instead. It is wonderful, I love it, it is my Preciousssss.
http://www.weaknees.com/ has them. IMHO, it is well worth it, because Tivo has patents on some cool features (especially the jump-back corrective when you stop FFing), but the new external Tivo boxes don’t play well with the other hardware, and so are sluggish and annoying (my mom has one).
The TiVo Series 2 is a single tuner? I didn’t realize that, because I can watch one show and TiVo another, or TiVo two separate shows at the same time. I think the only restriction is that only one of them can be on a premium channel, but otherwise I often have 2 shows being recorded simultaneously.
And we just switched from the nightmare that was Comcast, to Verizon Fios. Loving it.