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Any Dishnetwork subscribers here??

S

slackerinabox

Lifer
Wondering about a few things... Instead of adding another post I'm editing my old one (about their PVR)- sorry for the confusion...
I'm thinking about switching from digital cable to Dishnetwork - anyone have any good or bad experiences to share? How's the dropout rate? I noticed that my DirecTV would drop out whenever it rained - does Dish do that as well?

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I'm thinking about switching from digital cable to Dishnetwork and wonder how good their PVR service is... I don't expect it to be as good as my beloved TIVO but is it decent? Does it do the job? The lack of a monthly fee makes it very tempting...
 
It does allow you to watch one show and tape another.. But still, how does it stack up to the competition? DirecTivo seems great but Dishnetwork has a cheaper package...
 
Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
It does allow you to watch one show and tape another.. But still, how does it stack up to the competition? DirecTivo seems great but Dishnetwork has a cheaper package...
Click to expand...

I love our DirecTIVO, the quality is great but it's only 35 hours 🙁

I wonder how easy it is to upgrade with a larger hard drive.
 
Originally posted by: RossMAN
Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
It does allow you to watch one show and tape another.. But still, how does it stack up to the competition? DirecTivo seems great but Dishnetwork has a cheaper package...
Click to expand...

I love our DirecTIVO, the quality is great but it's only 35 hours 🙁

I wonder how easy it is to upgrade with a larger hard drive.
Click to expand...

Not hard:

"Hacking Tivo"

Hacking the Tivo

AVS Forums

:beer: for the grand nagus (wtf is nagus anyway)
 
I have the PVR for DISH Network.

It's a lot quicker than when I had the replay TV.

I just use it to record shows that i wont be able to get up for early in the morning.

As for losing signal in the rain ? It's probably a bad unit ( the thing that attaches in front of the dish ). Mine use to lose signal but I had that replaced and now I get signal even during heavy down pour.

 
Originally posted by: konichiwa
Originally posted by: RossMAN
Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
It does allow you to watch one show and tape another.. But still, how does it stack up to the competition? DirecTivo seems great but Dishnetwork has a cheaper package...
Click to expand...

I love our DirecTIVO, the quality is great but it's only 35 hours 🙁

I wonder how easy it is to upgrade with a larger hard drive.
Click to expand...

Not hard:

"Hacking Tivo"

Hacking the Tivo

AVS Forums

:beer: for the grand nagus (wtf is nagus anyway)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links, you don't watch much Star Trek do you?

Google it.
 
The older DirectTV small round dishes are more susceptable to dropout than the larger oval dual LNB dishes Dish will have you use. Folks have an original RCA, 10+ years old now, all original - always has had problems with rain. My Dish500 system has only dropped out on me twice, once when there was POURING rain and even then it was only a couple of momentary interruptions, other time was just overcast in my area - checked the weather map, big storm clouds right in it's path. That's all in two years of use that I've noticed.
 
DishNetwork Vs Digital Cable.

i have had experience with both. Comcast Digital Cable and currently on DishTV.

I found that Comcast had as much Drop out issues as the Dish TV does. and Dish gives you cleaner and better pictures than Digital Cable.

I see NO reason to get Cable of DishTV.
 
Originally posted by: RossMAN
Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
It does allow you to watch one show and tape another.. But still, how does it stack up to the competition? DirecTivo seems great but Dishnetwork has a cheaper package...
Click to expand...

I love our DirecTIVO, the quality is great but it's only 35 hours 🙁

I wonder how easy it is to upgrade with a larger hard drive.
Click to expand...

I've done it twice now. The first time, when my original Quantum 30 GB drive seemed to be dying, I replaced it with a 60 GB Maxtor drive. 15 months later, that drive was starting to get pretty whiny, and the picture would occasionally skip (same symptom as when the original was dying, though not as severe yet). Just last night, I upgraded to two 120 GB Seagate drives, for a total of 240 GB. (Thanks, hot deals!) On my stand-alone Tivo (using software rev. 3.0-01-1-000), 240 GB yields over 298 hours of recording time at basic quality. (Basic quality is 298:45, medium is 176:28, high is 133:05, and best is 81:55).

As long as you have a CD-burner and a PC with a BIOS that will recognize the full size of the HD(s) you intend to use, it's no harder than you would expect swapping some IDE drives around to be.

If you intend to keep your recorded programs, the backup-restore process to a new drive will take several hours. If you can accept deleting all the stored programs, the process is pretty quick.

If your Tivo uses a single drive but has an additional drive bay (most of them have two drive bays and can use two drives seamlessly in a master-slave configuration), you can add a second drive just as quickly, keeping your original drive and recordings intact.

All the Tivo upgrade tools run under Linux, which boots from the CD image you download and burn. DO NOT LET YOUR PC BOOT TO WIN NT/2000/XP WITH THE TIVO DRIVE ATTACHED, OR WINDOWS WILL CORRUPT YOUR TIVO OS. You will lose everything and you will need to do a fresh "install" of the Tivo OS (downloaded as an image) and go through the whole long guided set-up process again. It's not the end of the world, but what a pain! To be safe , DISCONNECT your Windows C: drive. (Don't ask me why, but I never seem to succeed in setting the BIOS to boot from CD before C: on the first try, so be safe, not sorry.)

If you want to make a back-up as the instructions suggest (I didn't bother, but what worked for me may not be for everybody 🙂 ), simply find an old homeless 1.6+ GB HD to use as a destination drive. Don't attempt to use your windows drive as the destination (an NTFS partition can't be used as the destination anyway). This back-up, should you need it, will restore all your season passes, wish lists, and other settings, saving you from having to start over as if the unit was brand new.

Go here for the instructions and links to the upgrade/backup utilities (print them out unless you have an extra computer to display them while you're working), and here when you screw up. 😉
 
Doesn't Dish have the new SuperDish and associated new boxes coming out soon? Have you read around at AVSForum (HDTV link in my sig)?
 
A happy Dish Network customer here. Great picture quality in comparison the crappy digital cable we had for awhile and I love my Top50 pacakage. But if I were a potential NEW customer there's a few things you should be aware of.

I love my DVR. Yes, it's inconvenient that you can't record and watch two different shows at the same time (well you CAN, you just have to get the higher end PVR lines which most don't) but I rarely encounter issues where that's a pain (plus we still have cable on an A/B switch thanks to having cable internet so I can use that as my backup/alternate - not to mention that we have 3 other TVs in the house to watch on anyway.) The lack of a 'Season Pass' feature is another disadvantage over Tivo. The best you can currently do is simply set a specific record time each day/week. Works fine 90% of the time, but if they move a show's time around you have to change it manually. I didn't mind the absence of these two features when I first signed on with Dish. That was when you didn't have to pay a monthly DVR fee (kind of like Tivo's monthly fee) so it was yet another area of cost savings Dish had over DirecTV. But now all new subscribers have to pay a monthly fee just like Tivo (I don't because I've got a grandfathered in 508DVR) yet you don't get the personalization features like 'Season Pass' which is annoying - they're charging an equivalent fee to Tivo (and in some cases DOUBLE the fee if you only subscribe to the Top 50) for less features. The fact that you can also get dual tuner Direct Tivos now for fairly cheap at startup is a nice selling point too. The only bad thing about the Tivo units is that the base models currently only have about 1/3-1/2 the record time a base model DishDVR has. You can add a hard drive as outlined above, which probably isn't a problem for most technical folks here, but still has potential issues if you make a mistake and might have an effect on your warranty.

The two biggest things Dish still has going for it right now is the fact that their base DVRs have substantially more record time right out of the box (100 hours on the current base unit.) Dish is also still the only one with a Top 50 package which is a good bit less than then 100-channel packages from Dish and DirecTV. That's what I have and we love it. I went through the channel lists and realized we'd only actually be losing about 3 channels we only semi-regularly watch by going with the Top50 instead of the Top100, yet we'd be saving ~$10/month so it was a no-brainer for us. We used the money we saved on those 50 superflous channels and got the Starz Superpack for movies and watch that all the time now (I usually surf through the movie lineups every night before I go to bed and set up recordings on the DVR for us to watch later.)

If I were starting over right now, however I'd probably go with DirecTV for a couple reasons. Their DVR prices have finally gotten competitive with Dish's on startup packages and have dual tuners for the base models. The tiny record space sucks (my 60 hour DishPVR508 is almost always 90% full - I can't fathom going backwards by having a great feature like 'Seaon Pass' yet only having 30-40 hours of record time; it almost defeats the purpose.) And if you're going to have to pay a monthly fee for DVR usage it would be nice to get the Tivo personalization options. If Dish would offer a 'Season Pass' like option like Tivo for the same price (and not scale prices differently according to the number of DVRs and channel packages you subscribe to) then I'd probably go with Dish since the Top50 is a major selling point in their favor.
 
Thegonagle,

Thanks for the great pointers. I won't have any saved programs, I just record them, watch them once and delete them.

I will definitely heed your advice about disconnecting the C: drive.

Is there any reason people seem to prefer Seagate branded hard drives for TIVO's? Ours right now isn't whisper quiet and has an audible (whirl) kind of sound, it's difficult to describe accurately.

Is there any particular Seagate model which is highly recommended and where did you buy yours from?
 
It depends on where you are.

I have no trees, and I've tighten the dish very tight. Got over 110 in signal strength. I only remember it drop once or twice and only couple seconds.
 
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