Macopinion

Tivo vs. DVR Follow-Up

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

I know I've written a great deal about Tivo and DirecTV's HD DVR and you're probably sick of the subject, but there are a few follow-up points I'd like to make.

First, it's been a few weeks since I actually wrote the article and some of my perceptions have changed. Mainly, I've noticed a number of DTV annoyances and problems that didn't show up in my initial review. Also, I've had some feedback from readers and others I thought I'd like to explore as well.

Why DVR?
I'll begin by addressing something that is such a natural part of my thinking process I forgot to mention it, but a reader comment reminded me. Why am I writing about Tivo? Isn't this MacOpinion?

Here's the thing: I feel strongly that the Tivo-versus-Others debate is extremely similar to the Mac-versus-Others debate. Both were revolutionary products that sparked many imitators and yet failed to win the market. Both had periods of success and showed great potential, but struggled to dominate the market, in large part because of the "What's the difference?" attitude by consumers when faced with competiting products.

Of course Apple has surged in recent years and is growing rapidly, while Tivo is still struggling and seems to have lost their way a bit. Tivo has never found a successful revenue stream. Now they've complicated the product by adding in not-so-useful features that sound good on paper, are desperately partnering with companies like Amazon and Rhapsody, and faced with cable and satellite DVR boxes that rent for $5/month they are finding it difficult to justify the $13/month they desperately need (their hardware is a loss-leader). Cable and satellite providers at least have other sources of revenue and can afford to sell the boxes at cost or even at a loss.

It's because of these reasons I find the DVR market fascinating to write about. I also believe that DVR technology is significant culturally -- media and entertainment is huge socially in this country and while TV boxes are not exactly computers (technically, of course, they are), it's an important field that isn't covered enough by tech writers.

All that said, I fully admit my Tivo bias, and that was driven home recently when I met someone who was a ReplayTV fan. This was interesting, for Replay had completely departed my consciousness -- yet at once time Replay and Tivo were like VHS and Betamax, warring for dominance. Replay eventually all but disappeared (apparently the company does still exist, but now only makes DVR software for PCs instead of set-top boxes). According to this friend of mine, Replay is still superior to Tivo and any of the other DVRs.

I, having never used or even seen a Replay, cannot comment on that. But I do find it fascinating that people can become so attached to technology (this particular man swears by his Replay units and won't give them up for anything, even though they can't do high definition). This just goes to show that no one interface is perfect and everyone has preferences. In my case, I'm not trying to making Tivo out to be perfect (I believe I've been fairly critical), but I am speaking from my own experience and as a Tivo fan. What I'd like readers to gain from my comments is not just that one unit is better than another, but deeply look at the thought process behind the subtle differences between the various devices.

DVR Annoyances and Problems
I thought I'd covered the two DVRs pretty well, but I realize now that I was so focused on comparing the two I left out a whole category: annoyances and problems. So this isn't a comparison, but merely lists of issues I have with both DirecTV's DVR and with Tivo.

The number one problem I'm having with the DirecTV device is the stupid overloading of the Exit button. Like Tivo, DirecTV has a feature to allow you to clear the display banner that pops up when you switch to a new channel. This temporary screen briefly shows you the channel info and current show details -- within preferences you can adjust how long this screen is displayed. But if you want to clear it immediately, you can press Clear on Tivo or Exit on DirecTV. I use this constantly, usually without even thinking about it. With Tivo this works just fine.

Unfortunately, DirecTV has made the Exit button serve double-duty: it also exits the current show and takes you to the show listings screen. If you're watching a recorded show, the TV screen switches to live TV. Of course this only happens when the banner display is not showing -- if the display is showing Exit clears the screen.

This has proven to be extremely annoying, for about five times out of six when I'm trying to clear the display, my timing is such that right as I press Exit to clear it, it goes away naturally and DTV interprets my Exit press as a command to exit the show!

For live TV this isn't the worst -- I can still see the live TV feed in the upper window. But for recorded material, this is frustrating since it completely exits the show and takes me to live TV. Since the DirecTV has another annoyance (which I did mention in my series) of always bringing you to the top of the recorded shows list, if you're watching something you've recorded a while back, exiting the show means you then have to scroll down several screens to find that show again. Obviously this is frustrating if you didn't mean to exit the show in the first place.

Even though I know about this problem, I'm so used to clearing the display that this still bites me frequently -- just last night I was trying to watch a movie I recorded last week and ended up accidentally exiting it at least three times! (I was trying to schedule some other recordings and things while watching the show and accidentally pressed Exit too many times.) Another reason this happens is that the Exit button is dreadfully close to the common List button (which lists your recorded shows) so it's easy to hit it by accident when trying to hit List.

But that's just an annoyance with the DirecTV HD DVR. After using it more extensively, I've discovered some serious problems. The most serious is that occasionally it won't record a show!

Yikes: for a DVR, that is the death-knell. You must be able to trust your DVR.

I went to DirecTV's tech support forums on their website and found others complaining of this problem: apparently it's rare but not isolated. It happens when you're trying to record two channels at once: sometimes one of the channels just records a gray screen. There's no indication of a problem, the show is listed as though it recorded, but when you try to watch it, nothing is there. (This bit me one night not recording Survivor as promised, but fortunately I'd set one of my Tivos to record it as a backup.)

Worst of all, apparently DirecTV knows of the problem but doesn't have a solution -- and in fact it's hard to get them to even admit something's wrong. That's exactly the wrong attitude the company should be taking. I cannot remember the last time one of my Tivos failed to record a show -- they are extremely reliable. Perhaps Tivo should push that in their marketing.

Another problem I've discovered with my DTV DVR is strange audio glitches during rewinding/fast-forwarding. It happens almost every time lately that rewinding will cause a brief period of silence, sometimes for five or more seconds, before the audio returns. The audio is there as I can rewind further back and it will play -- but it just seems that while the video plays immediately, the audio can take time to start. It's a very annoying delay. This is especially a problem if I use the Instant Replay feature to hear a piece of dialog I missed -- and the DVR plays silence. That means I have to rewind 12+ seconds to hear six seconds of audio. Grrrr.

I've also had problems with audio stuttering. At least one time this happened for the entire show and seemed to be caused by the audio-video feed itself (i.e. the source had a problem), but every other time it has gone away when I rewind, fast-forward, or exit and restart the show. That means it's just a playback glitch, but it's annoying and makes me distrust the player.

All of these problems are seemingly random in occurrence: perhaps that only happen in certain circumstances, like during HD shows or while recording two channels at once or something, but I haven't been able to determine exactly what causes them. They just happen when they happen and it's annoying. I have never, ever seen any such problem with a Tivo that wasn't due to the original source being bad.

That said, Tivo isn't free from annoyances either, though its problems tend to be more minor. For instance, Tivo will automatically prompt you to delete a show when it reaches the end of the show. That's a quick way to delete a show and easier than doing it in the show listings screen, but sometimes a show will end and it will take Tivo 3-5 seconds to display the "Delete show?" question. Tivo just seems frozen and won't respond to anything during this delay, which drives me nuts. I hate waiting even a couple seconds when I'm in a hurry, but mostly it's just such a stupid delay. I can understand a delay if I ask Tivo to show me a list of every soccer game showing for the next two weeks, but why should it take any processing time to throw up a simple "Delete now?" dialog when a show is at the end?

Along the same lines, Tivo has a "feature" that if you try to exit a show within the last five minutes, it thinks you're done with the show and prompts you to delete it. What's annoying about this is that if you don't delete the show and go back to it later, it resumes at the beginning, not at the 55 minute mark or whatever. Now you might wonder why you'd want to return to such a late point in a show, but it does happen at times (especially for short downloaded Internet clips where the whole show is less than five minutes). DirecTV doesn't have this problem as it not only supports bookmarks to let you jump back to a particular point, but you can also rewind even when the "Delete show?" dialog is showing.

Of course the DirecTV's "show end" dialog has its own minor annoyance: it doesn't play a sound the way Tivo's does. I often listen to shows while I'm doing something else and Tivo's distinctive "end of show" sound lets me know what's going on. With DirecTV, I only notice when the silence becomes noticeable.

Speaking of delays, both DVRs suffer from occasional slow-downs that drive me a bit batty. Some things, like I mentioned earlier, make sense that they take time for the unit to display. But other times the reason for the slowdown is inexplicable. Tivo will occasionally take 4-5 seconds to display the recorded show list, for instance -- it will list a few shows and then nothing while it just sits there, frozen. (I think this is a memory issue as I have a lot of shows on my Tivo.)

DirecTV is even stranger: going back to a screen I was just at, which you'd think would be cached and still in memory, will take 4-5 seconds to regenerate. This happens when I do something like tell a show to show me all the upcoming episodes. It cranks away for a few seconds then shows me a list. I select one of the shows and press the "More Info" button to get the episode's details, but when I exit that to return to the list I'm greeted with another stopwatch and a wait while it regenerates the list of upcoming episodes! This is stupid and frustrating when you're looking for a particular episode and basically have to do "More Info" on a number of episodes. Instead of the process taking just a few seconds, you have delays between each action and it makes the whole process unpleasant and annoying.

Tivo has their own problem, something they changed recently because it didn't use to work this way. When you're looking at the "To Do" list, if you cancel a show, Tivo has the annoying habit of asking you to confirm every time (why, I don't know, since it's not that big a deal to reschedule a show you've canceled). But worse is that when you delete a future show this way Tivo jumps you back to the start of the To Do list! This is insanely stupid. Say you're going to be gone next weekend so you're clearing shows and making sure only the really important shows will record while you're gone so you don't run out of space. So you scroll forward several screens to Saturday and cancel an unimportant show. Now you're back at Monday and have to scroll all the way to Saturday again, delete the next unimportant show, and you're back to Monday again. Why? There's no reason for that -- it should keep you right where you were. It used to do that the right way but something changed in a recent update and it infuriates me.

In my full series I complained about Tivo's new policy of inserting advertisements in annoying places, but I just discovered that DirecTV does something similar -- ads show up as a line in the Guide! This is more than just visually distracting -- it makes the Guide less efficient as you lose an entire line of the display. The Guide's already limited and awkward enough without cluttering it up with promos for other shows.

Another really stupid limitation of the DTV DVR I ran into this week when I went to schedule a season pass: DTV wouldn't allow me to schedule it because it said the "Prioritizer" was full. I checked the Prioritizer and it had 50 shows in it, so apparently DTV is limiting me -- for no good reason I can fathom -- to a maximum of 50 shows! How dumb is that?!

This weekend I just discovered another serious problem with DirecTV. The Major League Soccer season began on Saturday and so on Friday I was checking to see that all the games were scheduled to record. To my shock and dismay, I cannot set a season pass for MLS games!

On Tivo, these games are titled "MLS Soccer" with specific team information listed in the show notes. On DTV, they are listing the team names in the title -- i.e. "Dynamo vs. Revolution" -- meaning there is no way to set up a season pass for all MLS games! The games are not even indicated as soccer games, so my "soccer" season pass doesn't detect them.

I could set up season passes based on team name, but remember what I just said about being limited to a max of 50 season passes? I'd have to have at least fourteen season passes (one for each team in the league) to make sure it records all the games -- and I'm already maxed out on season passes anyway!

I have not yet figured out a solution to this one. I am presently having to manually find and schedule the shows myself. Not the end of the world as I usually double-check those anyway, but annoying and frustrating to say the least. And stupid, since this is caused by a problem with DTV's scheduling information and could easily be fixed. I shall be contacting DTV's customer service and complaining -- perhaps they'll fix it, but I'm not going to hold my breath or expect anything.

Of course, all these complaints aside, I just watched Major League Soccer this weekend in HD -- and it was awesome. Even at the widest camera angle you could still identify players by their facial features and see every strand of confetti on the field. I must confess, such a terrific picture -- at least while it's the rarity and not the norm -- really makes my complaints seem less significant. But if I could have my picture quality and a good interface, I'd be in heaven.

macopinion@designwrite.com