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HDTV DVR Options... Why do they suck so much?

R

Ramma2

Platinum Member
Cable company box - small hard drive, poor software and general suckness, plus monthly fees

Tivo 3 Series - 800$ out of the gate plus a monthly service fee. Ouch!

Media Center - No support for recording 2 HD signals at once, plus the cost of the software and PC

ReplayTV software - No HDTV support at all yet, and only support Hophog TV cards and from what I can tell they don't have any HDTV options either

MythTV - Computer costs and not very non-techie user friendly, looks pretty difficult to get up and running.

What other options are there?
 
My SA8300HD box from Time Warner is a little buggy, but it's easy to use and works great. My wife and I have never had an issue with HD space either. The monthly service fee is far lower than what we'd pay for an HTPC, and if there's a problem, we just exchange the box.
 
Relatively new tech so you pay the bleeding edge fee.

Ill wait for the TiVo unit to come down. Their units imo are the best in the busines, but 800 way too spendy for me.

The motorola HD DVRs Comcast uses are crap, utter crap.
 
I have the Motorola HD DVR from Verizon FIOS (leased, monthly fee). It's great. I was building an HTPC but I picked pretty much the worst possible combination of parts and had lots of issues, so I parted it out, selling everything.

So far, I haven't had any issues with the Verizon DVR. I believe it comes with a 160GB HD. I hate the guide because you can only see like 2 timeslots at a time because they chose a GINORMOUS font size, but other than that, it's great.
 
Originally posted by: Ramma2
Cable company box - small hard drive, poor software and general suckness, plus monthly fees

Tivo 3 Series - 800$ out of the gate plus a monthly service fee. Ouch!

Media Center - No support for recording 2 HD signals at once, plus the cost of the software and PC

ReplayTV software - No HDTV support at all yet, and only support Hophog TV cards and from what I can tell they don't have any HDTV options either

MythTV - Computer costs and not very non-techie user friendly, looks pretty difficult to get up and running.

What other options are there?
Click to expand...

If you just want to record OTA HDTV, or unencrypted QAM content, try BeyondTV. I haven't used the HDTV functionality, but they've had support for a while (including multiple tuners, I think).

For recording encrypted HD cable/satellite... options aren't really gonna improve until you can get Cablecard tuners for the PC, and that won't happen until the MCE version of Vista is up and running. At the earliest. Yay DRM?
 
Originally posted by: MrChad
My SA8300HD box from Time Warner is a little buggy, but it's easy to use and works great. My wife and I have never had an issue with HD space either. The monthly service fee is far lower than what we'd pay for an HTPC, and if there's a problem, we just exchange the box.
Click to expand...



I agree the SA8300 HD PVR box works pretty dang good. It does what I want it to without many bugs.
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
Originally posted by: Ramma2
Cable company box - small hard drive, poor software and general suckness, plus monthly fees

Tivo 3 Series - 800$ out of the gate plus a monthly service fee. Ouch!

Media Center - No support for recording 2 HD signals at once, plus the cost of the software and PC

ReplayTV software - No HDTV support at all yet, and only support Hophog TV cards and from what I can tell they don't have any HDTV options either

MythTV - Computer costs and not very non-techie user friendly, looks pretty difficult to get up and running.

What other options are there?
Click to expand...

If you just want to record OTA HDTV, or unencrypted QAM content, try BeyondTV. I haven't used the HDTV functionality, but they've had support for a while (including multiple tuners, I think).

For recording encrypted HD cable/satellite... options aren't really gonna improve until you can get Cablecard tuners for the PC, and that won't happen until the MCE version of Vista is up and running. At the earliest. Yay DRM?
Click to expand...

BeyondTV looks like it might be the light at the end of the tunnel for me! Cheap software, no montly fees, support for HDTV and dual tuners. Very nice, thanks for the info!
 
Doesn't the SA8300 have working eSATA ports? I know people have added external SATA drives to them. I would LOVE if Comcast would get off their asses and enable the ports.
 
Dish might be your best option. I've got the HD DVR (Vip-622) that you can get for about $200 plus a subscription to Dish programming for 18 months. I'm fairly happy with mine right now but there are still bugs for many. DirectTV's HD DVR is even more bug ridden. And it's newer than Dish's. BTW, yes there is a monthly service fee. Sorry there is no way around those.
 
Originally posted by: Ramma2
BeyondTV looks like it might be the light at the end of the tunnel for me! Cheap software, no montly fees, support for HDTV and dual tuners. Very nice, thanks for the info!
Click to expand...

try SageTv too.

 
Originally posted by: MustISO
Doesn't the SA8300 have working eSATA ports? I know people have added external SATA drives to them. I would LOVE if Comcast would get off their asses and enable the ports.
Click to expand...

I still need to look into buying an esata drive and putting all those shows and whatnot on there. In the avs forums many people have said they were able to get stuff onto their esata drives
 
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