Macopinion

Tivo versus DirecTV HDDVR, Part 6

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Playing Video
Years ago when I first tried a non-Tivo DVR I was horrified at the clunky interface. Not only were the menus awkward, confusing, and cluttered, but even the most basic functionality of the device -- playing video -- sucked. The engineers at Tivo really thought a lot about video playback and it's still the best, though the DirecTV DVR isn't bad.

Both systems feature play and pause, rewind and fast forward at multiple speeds, slow motion, and frame advance/reverse. But the implementation and how it feels is totally different.

Tivo's is smooth and natural. High-speed fast forward or reverse is not jerky, like a series of still images thrust at you. I actually watch shows on fast forward. For instance, there might be a soccer match I don't care about and don't want to devote two hours of time to, but I'm curious to see the results and don't mind watching it on high-speed for five minutes and seeing if anything exciting happened.

With DirecTV, the fast forward is so jerky and awkward it literally makes me queasy, even at the slowest setting. It's not unbearable, but borderline. It's possible I'll get used to it, but my initial reaction is it's not anything close to Tivo.

Another disadvantage is that closed captions don't appear on the DirecTV DVR during fast forward. With Tivo, these show when you're on the slowest speed, which can be nice if you're in a hurry and want to speed through a show but still keep up with the plot a bit and read the dialogue.

The DirecTV DVR's maximum forward and reverse speeds seem much slower than Tivo's. Tivo's max is 60x -- so an hour show takes just sixty seconds to scroll through. Another key advantage of Tivo is that it lets you instantly jump to mid-points in the show (in 15-minute increments for shows less than four hours, half-hour increments for longer shows). When I do my review of soccer matches for my podcast, on the DTV DVR it's infuriating to not be able to jump to near the 78th minute where the goal happened -- I have to painfully and slowly fast forward through most of the game to get there.

[Update: I did figure out later that DTV does have a way to jump to mid-point ticks during a show, but the implementation is weak. You must hold down the Fast Forward button for five seconds and it will jump to the next tick mark on the progress bar. However, it will only do this once. To go to the next tick mark, you must release the Fast Forward button and press and hold it again. This means you cannot jump two hours into a show with five or six key presses like on a Tivo. Because of the long delay before the jump forward, this jumping feels just as slow as the glacier fast forwarding.]

Speaking of fast forwarding, one of Tivo's most intelligent features is its "jumpback" implementation. Basically, if you are fast forwarding (or reversing), there's a delay from when you see a flash on the screen and realize that the commercials are over and the show is back and when your finger can press the Play button. But during that short delay -- only a half second or so -- the Tivo has fast forwarded well past where you wanted to be. So Tivo intelligently "jumps back," guessing you wanted playback to resume earlier than it did.

This isn't perfect, but it's pretty good. Most of the time I don't have to correct the positioning or I only have to watch a few seconds of a commercial or I miss a few seconds of the show (often just the "establishing shot" of a drama, like those cool Miami views on CSI: Miami that try to convince you the show's really filmed there.

Fortunately DirecTV does implement a jumpback feature, but as you might expect, it's not quite as good as Tivo's. I have yet to put my figure on it exactly where the flaw lies -- it could be I'm just so used to Tivo's timing that I'm expecting DTV to work the same way and it's slightly different. It is possible that first-time DVR users wouldn't notice a problem at all. But it's not that big of a deal in any case, since both DVRs have "instant replay."

Instant replay is a button on the remote that jumps you back a few seconds so you can re-watch something. It's obviously great for sports, but handy for other things, too: my mom's hard of hearing and uses hers all the time when she misses a line of dialogue. I've used it when sudden truck noise or the neighbor's lawn mower happens to drown out what I'm listening to. It's also good, when used with the 30-second skip, to adjusting your position in the video stream so you don't miss any part of a show.

I've never had a complaint with Tivo's instant replay: it jumps me back eight seconds which seems like a lot but turns out to be just about perfect 90% of the time. Four pushes is just over 30 seconds, which is handy if you pressed the 30-second skip once too many.

DirecTV, however, for reasons unknown, have made their instant replay jump back only six seconds. Perhaps I'm just too used to Tivo's, but I find it frustrating. Six just isn't enough. By the time you factor in my reaction time ("Oh, I missed that, better press instant replay.") six seconds really is only jumping back three or four, and with the DTV, I find about 80% of the time I have to press it twice to go back far enough. But then that's annoying because twelve seconds is too far back -- now I have to wait for the DVR to catch up to where I was.

The six seconds is also a problem for undoing that extra 30-second skip press: it requires six presses. Why not five since six times five is thirty? You're forgetting your reaction time: by the time realize you skipped 30 seconds too many, a few seconds have passed. Reversing exactly 30 seconds means you'll get a few seconds clipped. Not a huge deal, but can be annoying (in a sitcom, you'll hear laughter and have missed the earlier joke). I give Tivo the edge in instant replay.

In terms of frame-by-frame advance and reverse, both are nearly identical and even have the same bug. It's always annoyed me that Tivo's reverse frame jumps by multiple frames -- it doesn't go frame-by-frame the way advance does. That makes getting to a particular frame in the video more difficult than it should be. I hoped the DirecTV DVR would be better, but unfortunately they seem to have copied this feature exactly from the Tivo since it does the same thing. I suspect it might be something in the way MPEG video is encoded that it doesn't allow precise reverse stepping (though I can do this on my Mac in QuickTime Player, so it is possible to do it).

The DTV DVR can do slow motion like the Tivo, but instead of a dedicated button, you hold the Play button down until slow motion starts. This sounds like a fine interface on paper but is horrible in practice: the feature takes so long to operate that by the time slow motion kicks in, what you wanted to see in slow motion has already passed! This means you've got to rewind, then press and hold Play and hope that slow mo will kick in on time. If it kicks in too early, you've got to wait forever while those few extra seconds of video go glacially by, and if it kicks in too late, you've got to start the process over again. Getting the timing right is so difficult it's aggravating and basically I'd argue that this DVR doesn't even have slow motion: it's that useless.

Winner: Tivo

Next Time: Extras and Digital Downloads

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