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How to Play Poker on a Mac

Tivo versus DirecTV HDDVR, Part 4

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Commercial Skipping
Both devices let you fast-forward through commercials (or whatever), but DirecTV adds a 30-second skip button right on the remote control. Tivo also has this feature... sort of. On Tivo the feature is disabled by default and you must activate it by pressing a certain sequences of buttons while a show is playing (it's Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select, if you're curious; Tivo does not promote this feature). If you do it right, you'll hear three dings, which means it's active. After that, Tivo's "jump" button becomes a 30-second skip. If your Tivo reboots for any reason (software update, power outage, crash, etc.) you'll need to re-active this feature. I am so used to this being active it throws me if I'm using someone else's Tivo and they don't have this activated.

Once Tivo's 30-second skip is active, it works great. In fact, it's slightly better than DirecTV's. Well, I suppose it is a matter of preference. Here's the difference: Tivo's skip is instantaneous. You press it and suddenly it's 30 seconds later. Press it four times and it's two minutes later. This means you can skip through commercials really fast.

On the other hand, DirecTV's 30-second skip actually fast-forwards through the time. It does it pretty quickly -- perhaps two seconds -- but you get a series of frames from the commercials you're skipping. Sometimes that can be good. For instance, I love Apple's commercials and on Tivo I might never even see them, while on DirecTV I can see that I skipped one and rewind to watch it. This also works for other commercials that are either funny, cool, or unusual, so if you like commercials (I do), the DTV approach isn't bad. But it is slightly slower, especially if you're trying to advance by several minutes, but one nice touch is that it will resume playing the moment you press Play (it will stop fast-forwarding and immediately begin to play so if you pressed it too many times, you can effectively cancel out of the skipping).

In the end, I'm voting this one a tie. They both work, but Tivo's has to be activated and DirecTV's is not instantaneous, so it's a wash.

Winner: Tie

Managing Programs
Once you've got a bunch of shows recorded, you'll have to manage those shows. That means scrolling through the list to pick a show to watch, deleting shows you don't want any more, marking shows to not be automatically deleted, and so forth. Here we see some dramatic differences between the units.

Both display the shows in a list, but Tivo gives you several choices of how that list can be organized (by date, by name, with or without folders, etc.). DirecTV also has configuration options: the default is by date with shows in their own folders, but you can sort by category and reverse the order if you'd like.

But where Tivo shines is in the subtleties. A significant one is that Tivo remembers where you are in the list. For instance, if my list of shows is five screens tall and I scroll down four screens and pick a show and watch it, when I return to the list, I'm still four screens down right where I was before. This is tremendously helpful when watching several of the same show.

On DirecTV's DVR, it always jumps you to the top of the list. This is annoying if you were at the bottom and need to go back down there. DirecTV's list is also shorter than Tivo's (six shows versus eight) meaning that it takes extra button pushes to scroll to the bottom (only a problem if you have tons of recorded shows, like me).

Another annoyance is deleting shows. It's a common habit for me to wait to delete shows until I'm absolutely sure I'm done with them. Also, because I do a weekly soccer podcast, I'll save all the soccer games I watch until I'm finished recording the podcast (in case I need to review something in a match for the podcast). When I'm done with all the shows I delete them. That means I'm often deleting 10 or 12 shows at once. On Tivo, I can do that with 10 or 12 pushes of the "clear" button. Each show instantly vanishes from the list. On DirecTV, I have to answer a "Delete this show? Yes/No?" dialog -- and it's slow to show and even slower to go away (for some reason it takes several seconds to delete a show). This makes deleting shows, at least in my situation, much more of a hassle.

[Update: A few days after I wrote the above, I noticed that the DTV HDDVR has a multi-delete function. It's buried in the "Playlist Options" menu and is called "Mark programs to delete." Selecting that lets you place check-marks next to programs to mark them for deletion and then you can delete them all with one push of a button. Nice! There also is a shortcut: you can double-press the "dash" key to delete a show immediately without a warning.]

Tivo also has a handy "undelete" feature: deleted shows are placed in a "Deleted Shows" folder where they will get overwritten (oldest first) if the Tivo needs the room. Otherwise they are there for you to retrieve if you change your mind or deleted something by accident.

DirecTV's show management isn't unusable -- it's functional -- but just not as easy or convenient as Tivo's. It does have several nice touches, however. One is that the titles of shows you've already started watching are shown in gray. That can be helpful to remind you, "Oh, I was halfway through that cooking show. I'd better finish it so I can delete it."

Another nicety is that DirecTV will let you play all the items in a folder. That's great if you wanted to archive some shows to a VCR or DVD burner, or if you just wanted to watch several episodes of a show in succession.

Winner: Tivo

Next Time: Managing Schedules and Searching

macopinion@designwrite.com