Poking at DVRs, at least in principle

[dvandom]

It's looking like, barring sudden medical/dental expense, I should be able to get ahead enough financially that I can buy a new TV in the next month or so (I'm researching that separately), and that also means lifting one of the last barriers to replacing my VCR with a DVR. Since I've never had a DVR before, I figured I'd ask here (among other places) for advice.

My cable company offers a DVR as part of their digital tier, but I've talked to some people locally who tried that, and they were dissatisfied, so I'm holding that in reserve as an "at least it won't involve hassle" option if I can't find a way to do things the way I'd prefer. (ETA: Also, while Dish's DVR option looks nice, my apartment doesn't really have the means to mount a south-facing dish.)

I'm not interested in building a DVR into my computer...I use a Mac in large part because I'm not a hardware OR software geek. However, a fairly "off the rack"-usable program to let my Mac control a DVR would be okay.

One of the big things that has kept me from switching to a DVR is I don't want to add yet another monthly expense. I want to buy a machine that will do things, and be done paying for it at the time of initial purchase. I don't want to have to subscribe to a separate service just to get the thing to work. I just want to be able to tell it, "record cable channel 49 at 8PM until 10PM this Friday" and have it DO that. (I have enough trouble keeping up with my existing programming, I don't need a system that can scour the entire listings and record other things I might be interested in, so I don't mind having a "dumb" DVR that has no idea what channel 49 is.)

The only thing I really want out of a DVR that a VCR can't do is simultaneous recording. Higher recording quality and going longer before needing to "change tapes" (delete things from memory) are nice add-ons, but I have low-def eyes and a 6-8 hour tape memory is something I've lived with for 17 years, I can put up with it for longer. Having it able to listen to instructions from my computer would also be nice (i.e. in case a station changes its schedule, something like Yahoo listings could automatically change the recording time), but again it's something I can live without. I really only need to upgrade for the simple fact that VCR tapes are phasing out, and I don't want to have to troll eBay for blank tapes in a couple of years. :)

So, in a nutshell, what I'd really like is something that works like a bank of VCRs. Records the channels I tell it to, when I tell it to, without needing to look online to some parent service for guidance (not even a free one, as those can vanish and leave me in the lurch...I want full manual control). Allow me to locate particular events (i.e. list by date, time, channel) and play them back on my television (I don't like watching shows on my computer for idiosyncratic reasons). Record at least two things at once from existing cable signal. If I can provide a local parent service on my desktop without having to program it from scratch or install a bunch of libraries, that'd be a nice plus.

If I can't find something at least comes close to meeting my preferences, I'll just buy a second VCR, they're cheap. Maybe by the time VCRs stop being available it'd be easier to get a manual DVR...or it'll be impossible to get cable without a company-supplied DVR (I can certainly see them going that route). Or the whole DVR transitional tech will have been replaced by a true on-demand system. Whatever.

I like the operating paradigm of the VCR, I'd just like to cherry-pick a few of the features of the DVR. I don't like the standard operating paradigm of consumer-level DVRs.

Comments

[5eh.livejournal.com]

oh heys, would love to know what you do as far as a teevee goes. I have my eye on a 40 incher (1080p 120mhz) for around $900, but with unemployment looming, that doesn't seem plausible for a bit....but I've been annoying people with asking about what they're getting.

As far as DVR, I am retiring my laptop next year, which will be turned into a faithful servant of a teevee. I have an awesome graphics card in this thing, that will be nice for that purpose. I don't necessarily know if I'll be DVRing or just buying/streaming shows online and totally ignoring DVR.

All of this hinges on me getting a job ;-)

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I keep my TV about a meter from the computer, so I'm sticking with smaller. 26" class will have the same vertical dimensions as my current 19" set.

[buckeyebrain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the extra fee is a pain in the ass, but I absolutely LOVE my DVR.

I use the Comcast version and pay about $7.95 a month for it.

What it does is, you can be just browsing through the Guide and decide, "Hey, I want to record that upcoming show for later", hit a button and you're off to the races.

They have a search engine where you can enter the first five letters of a show's title to look up, find the next airing of that show and set up a recording that way.

You can also set a Series Recording. For example, I love Poker After Dark, but it airs at 2:05am Tuesday-Saturday morning. Not really conductive to watching. So I set a series recording to get all episodes (but I take it off when they're in reruns). You can customize this, as well. Say you want The Simpsons, but you only want the old episodes in Syndication and not the Newer ones on Fox. If they're on separate channels, there's a setting for 'This Channel Only'. You can also tweak the recording times (One minute early, two minutes late, etc.) in case the channel or network wants to monkey around with the schedule to thwart DVR'ers.

It's also great for the fact that I live on the West Coast. If a game starts at 8pm on the East Coast, that's 5pm here in the Pacific Time Zone. I work till 5, then have to commute home. So with the DVR, I can set it to start recording, get home at 5:30-ish, call up the recording and start watching the game, skipping commercials, halftime, etc. along the way and eventually even catch up to the live feed. (The Comcast remote doesn't have a standard button for this, but there's a hack out there where you can program the remote to 'Fast Forward 30 seconds' to quickly zip past commercials.)

One disadvantage is that it doesn't time delay. This actually happened a few months ago: I wanted a new episode of the World Series of Poker on ESPN. Unfortunately, earlier in the day, Brett Favre decided he wanted to come out of retirement again, and held his press conference to announce his signing with the Vikings. So they aired it live and and delayed everything that was scheduled, so I got the last 20 minutes of the previously-scheduled show, and then missed the last 20 minutes of the WSOP.

Another peeve of mine: My local station that airs Jeopardy! They air the regular first-run episode at 6:30, but they also air several-years-old reruns at 3:30. I don't want that and there's no way to tell Comcast's DVR box (made by Motorola) "I only want the 6:30 episodes, dammit!"

But, on the whole, the DVR is a godsend.

[loki-liesmith.livejournal.com]

Huh. My comcast DVR has a "On this channel in this time slot only" feature. So I can record just the 6:30 Jeopardys and not the others.

[buckeyebrain.livejournal.com]

Huh. Is it a Motorola? Are the menus like really big ovals? I would kill for that feature sometimes.

[diosoth.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't need an extra-fancy TV. You're not running any modern game consoles and unless you plan to get a Blu-Ray player then you can likely get by with a medium-quality HDTV. Good enough for watching TV and DVDs on. I can safely say to avoid any TV with a Sylvania brand. I have a standard TV of their brand, and the picture is a bit dark with no brightness setting and the top of the picture is always cut off with no vertical hold. This is incredibly annoying for any video game with the health bar at the top.

DVRs... well, that can be a mess. Copyright holders and such are afraid of bootlegging. Advertisers don't want people skipping out on commercials. The best non-subscription option would be a video card for your computer with TV inputs for digital recording, but it's not going to have any features, and at worst you're looking at 350 MB for a 1-hour(really 40 minute) TV show. It's not viable to keep a lot of those files on hand.

You might get stuck with a subscription box no matter what. Unless copyright laws change, but don't count on that.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

The 26" class TVs I've been looking at are around $300 (there's even a 1080p for that much, but I'm suspicious of anything that cheap). Mainly, my existing TV has been on its last legs for about a year (I've been running external speakers for that long since the internal ones are dead), and NOT getting flatscreen is becoming harder and harder.

[diosoth.livejournal.com]

This may not be in any way relevant to your current TV buying plans but I'll mention it anyway should you need such info in the future-

Any flat srceen model TV, and especially the new HDTVs are incompatible with the old light guns for game systems. The NES Zapper, Sega Menacer, Super Scope, all useless. They were designed to work with old rounded screen TVs so their aim is horribly off. I recently tried a Sega Saturn light gun and had to stand about 2 feet from the TV to get even semi-proper aimm and all I have is a flat screen CRT.

And while those guns are mostly obsolete, I did spot a recent Sega Menacer TV-game light gun at Tuesday Morning for $10. Wholly useless to me, though.

If you ever plan to play games such as that, you'll want to get a round screen TV for cheap and stick it away somewhere. Not really a bad idea for old games anyway. Some HDTVs have problems with older game systems, and the digital switch might see the RF input removed eventually. Especially shoudl you ever wish to plug in an old Atari system or something.

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

I *heart* my Comcast dual-tuner HD DVR! Yes, I think it's about $15 more per month than I'd been paying when we just had the regular box and On Demand, but for me, it's SO worth it.

I can tell it to only record *new* episodes of something on a particular channel, but it sometimes has issues. For example, I will get ALL episodes of Countdown on MSNBC, and I will get ALL episodes of Top Gear on BBC America, even though it's only supposed to record the "new" episodes.

Time delay is indeed a problem, but it's the same problem you have with VCRs. We run into that ALL the time with The Amazing Race-- football runs long on CBS, so they start 60 Minutes late and then start TAR after 60M airs. We set the DVR to end the recording 1 hour late. That solved that problem.

Being able to pause live TV? PRICELESS. Well worth the extra monthly cost when you have a little person at home. Pause to get ice cream and rewind to re-review the evidence on Ghost Hunters. Pause to do a diaper change and toothy-brushy. Much love!

The Comcast DVR we have can keep about 15 mins of HD live TV and 45 mins of standard live TV. I can switch between tuners with a "swap" button. That way, for example, I can flip between two channels and be able to rewind either one of them 15 or 45 minutes back unless I actually punch in another number or change one of those tuners to a different channel.

As someone else said, I can see that there's something coming up in the listings and just flip through and press the Record button, and it's set. I can then adjust it to make it a series recording.

You can set priority, too. That way, for example, I can put Countdown last and it'll record Heroes and House as the top priority and leave Top Gear and Countdown for the later airings (since it thinks they're new anyway).

For stuff you've kept, you can set it to automatically delete earlier episodes and only keep (N=1-7) episodes, or you can set it to only delete episodes if there's no room left on the DVR, or you can set it so that it'll keep the old ones unless you manually delete them.

I think the only times we've had a major issue is when the power or the cable goes out. Getting the HD lineup and DVR and OnDemand stuff back takes a lot of time, and the setup evening was pretty horrendus. When the power burps, sometimes the DVR just records the same episode and keeps going, so you have 547 minutes of Dirty Jobs and it's still recording and your DVR is at 83% full, OOPS. But when you wake up and see the little red light on at 6:02 in the morning, you know something weird is up and you just poke it.