Dish Player-DVR 942
In an event that doesn’t come close to Senator Stevens' iPod, last month we canceled DirecTV in favor of Dish Network. Mind you, we never had any issues at in the many years that we enjoyed the service. But read the bottom line on how they work with Tivo’s home media features:
At this time Home Media features are not compatible with DIRECTV® DVRs with TiVo®
We now have a Dish Player 942 and a PocketDish AV700E. We had a bit of trouble getting it (and some more with installation, but that’s another story), but now everything is in place and we are pleased.
Particularly with the speed and ease of use.
Review
For starters, it is one unit with 250G hard drive, two tuners, two remote controls, and it sends output to two TVs in different rooms in our house. (One of the remote controls is UHF).
The remote controls are universal, meaning that they can turn on and off your television, and control the volume (either via the TV or an auxiliary amplifier). Pretty much everything else is via the 942.
Press a button and you get a TV guide. It scrolls quickly and smoothly through all of the channels (local, “cable”, and premium) and across just over a week of programming. Skipping ahead or back a day is a touch of a button. With the DirectTV/Tivo box we had, there were often delays and jumps as it downloaded other portions of the schedule.
Select a show that is playing now to change the channel. Or select a show in the future to record it. You can record just one episode, all episodes, or all new episodes. Even with all episodes, the unit is smart enough not to rerecord a program that is broadcast twice.
With 250G and two tuners and two televisions you can pretty much watch what you want, where you want, and when you want, all with a click of a button. Pause live TV, jump ahead 30 seconds, or jump back 10 — all perfect for watching the good parts of a Saturday Night Live show on Sunday morning in about a half an hour (or less).
But the pièce de résistance is the PocketDish. Connect the USB 2.0 cable and use the remote to select which recordings you want, and tell it to go. My wife traveled to New York last week and before she went she selected 27 half hour episodes to download. It completed in about an hour (did I mention that this unit was fast?), and used up only about half of the 40G of space on the PocketDish.
This isn’t downloading selected shows from certain networks shortly after they are aired for a small fee, this is recording them effortlessly as they air and transferring them in minutes for free.
Compromises
There are a number of compromises that don’t affect our usage, but it is worth knowing what they are.
This will capture, record, and playback HDTV, but only to one TV. It looks gorgeous on a DLP, but the real issue is that channel selection is quite limited at this time. From what I am reading, this will take a number of years to address, and will likely require an upgrade of the hardware as they will be converting over to MPEG4 compression as opposed to MPEG2. For now, we have decided to drop HDTV after the free period expires on this feature.
The data transfered to the PocketDish is encrypted. You can transfer it to a hard drive or back to the 942, but it will only play on the 942 or the PocketDish. This is an acceptable compromise to me as I view video as having a short shelf life and unlike audio, generally only viewed once and then discarded. YMMV. I’m told that you can purchase a DVD recorder and record in real time, but it seems to me that that would have the ease of use characteristics of recording on a mid 1980’s vintage VCR.
While the ease of use is outstanding, there are a few niggles. While the remote control will control the TV volume even when in “satellite” mode, no such luck for selecting the TV/Video input — you have to press TV, Input, Satellite. Just a niggle, but annoying.
When you connect the PocketDish to the 942 via USB, a menu pops up asking you if you want to control your media device (Duh!), with the default being no. When you do say yes, it asks you which device, then it asks you what you want to do. As I would think that the most common operation would be transferring video to the device that was just plugged in, this process could be streamlined.
And whatever service provider you pick, you inevitably end up on the short end of the stick when disputes like these crop up.
Conclusions
This combination sets a new standard for speed and ease of use. Being able to store several days worth of programming, and to be able to quickly and easily select and then transfer dozens of shows is what makes the difference between the PocketDish being demoware and being something that actually will get used.
For DirectTV to win us back (and these days it is feasible to switch ever few years given that free installation offers abound), they will have to meet this benchmark.