[JoeSchueller]

Around about the time of the 6.3 upgrade, I actually wrote some posts around here complaining about the HR10 and calling it out of date. I even went so far as to suggest that the HR20 may represent an improvement over the archaic HR10. I was pretty hard on the TiVo.

While I can't attest to the quality of the HR20, my latest experience has driven me to admit just how wrong I was to bash the HR10. The HR20 may be great (I'll never know), but I should have never bashed the HR10 because I've come to miss it so much.

I recently moved. I have no line-of-sight option for D*, so I'm stuck with TWC here in SW Ohio. They dropped the SA 8300HD in my home yesterday around noon, and by 5 PM, I was frantically searching for an in-stock TiVo HD at my local BB and CC's. WOW is that thing awful. I thought the HR10 was slow and unresponsive, but it was downright zippy in comparison and doesn't try to sell me PPV or VOD every 2 seconds. This SA POS doesn't allow for flipping between tuners, rarely remembers where you paused, and has no tick marks or time indication of where you are in a program. The remote is an abomination of buttons and just every last thing about it screams crappiness. The only upside is that it has a multi-stream cable card in it, so TWC can't go telling me they don't have them.

I apologize to the TiVo Gods and the TiVo zealots for saying the HR10 was out of date. I only hope they can forgive me in time to help me find an TiVo HD in stock very soon.

 

[Bob Coxner]

TW is moving all of their franchises to their in-house Navigator software plus (SDV) switched digital video, although the timing will obviously vary by franchise. Tivo won't work with SDV, so be forewarned.

 

[RS4]

Maybe your timing is good with Tivo's new HD box that is just out. I see it supports the mulit-stream card. I hope you get things worked out.

 

[JoeSchueller]

Yeah... I'm really worried about SDV. I'd really hate to have a $600 ($300+$300 in service) brick in my entertainment center.

 

[harley3k]

Yeah... I'm really worried about SDV. I'd really hate to have a $600 ($300+$300 in service) brick in my entertainment center.

Buy it now. Use it. Enjoy it. When SDV kills it, sell it on ebay and consider the depreciation cheap rent for the time that you enjoyed it.

Surely by then a different alternative will presnet itself.

 

[TyroneShoes]

Don't be too hard on yourself, Joel. We all try to make order out of chaos, and the limitations of our personal experience can sometimes nudge us into prejudgment.

I, too, was once a Tivo hater. I had DISH, and original 14 hr Tivos didn't work all that elegantly with that system. Folks went to hurculean lengths back then to build aluminum-foil "forts" to get the blasters to work. It was hit or miss. Also, early Tivo design was ahead of its time, and wasn't really all that great when trying to manage a single small HDD, especially with no way to even guess how much space was left. Replay seemed to do it a lot better back then.

Beyond that, I thought the "Mr. Tivo" interface was way too cute, I abhorred all of the boops and beeps, Ididn't like that a lot of button-pushing yielded less real action than on Replay and other PVRs of the time, and thought the menus sliding around like they do was just annoyingly ridiculous, as was the obnoxiousness of the time bar which popped up when it didn't need to, and stayed way too long at the party. I bashed Tivo pretty good myself, back in the day.

But between 1999 and 2004 Tivo got a whole lot better, addressing pretty-much all of my concerns, while nothing else did get better at all, Replay died on the vine, and DISH boxes actually got worse. By three years ago, moving to DTV and DTivos was a no-brainer.

Then the HR10 arrived, and it seemed like the most incredible piece of gear since the Macintosh. Dual sat tuners, dual OTA tuners, integrated EPG, flawless HD reproduction with full Tivo trick play, affordable expandability, rock-solid (comparitively) reliability--I was bowled over. And I haven't seen anything in its league since.