BrianJarrett.com

It was a sad day in our household on Monday of this week; our Tivo died. It had been acting a bit screwy as of late and then it told us it was recording a movie that it actually wasn’t. Traci couldn’t get it to go away so she rebooted it and, much to our dismay, it never booted back up again.

We called DirecTV and told them what happened and they said that they would have to replace the unit. I imagine it’s easier to just replace the box than it is to try to spend a couple hours trying to fix it. They told us that they couldn’t guarantee us a Tivo though; as most of you probably know DirecTV has been working on their own DVR for some time now. They’ve severed their ongoing relationship with Tivo and are marketing their own DVR, called the R15, to all new customers.

I didn’t want to give up my Tivo but I knew DirecTV was moving away from Tivo and the girl on the phone really talked up the R15. I hadn’t had time to research the R15 yet but I decided to go ahead and try it. Two days later the unit showed up at our house; and that’s where things went south.

Set up was easy; just as easy as the Tivo. Activation was easy too. Once I started the unit up though, I began to see the vast differences between the R15 and the Tivo. I’m not going to go into a huge review; you can read that stuff on the Internet. Basically the R15 had several major shortcomings. Although the unit has two tuners, it’s not really set up to toggle between the two easily. The second tuner functions primarily as a way to watch one show while recording another but not to easily jump back and forth between. That was a major show-stopper for Traci, the primary user of the TV. The user interface was okay but it had some pretty difficult areas to navigate, especially their version of the “Season Pass”. There were also bugs in the recording logic on the unit; no matter if you told the unit to record first runs only it would record every damn showing, no matter what show it was. There is no “Wishlist” feature and no suggestions. Wishlist is nice and suggestions I could live without but they’re nice features to have. The 30 second commercial skip was slow, the audio and video was slightly off at times, the whole thing would “hiccup” occasionally, and manual referenced menus that did not even exist. All in all, this unit is a nice first attempt by DirecTV, but it was probably released a year or two too early.

We screwed with this unit for three or four hours, trying to get it to do what our Tivo did, and we were only partially successful. We even had to call DirecTV for help (that’s how we found there was no tuner toggle). By the end of the night we were both highly frustrated. I called DirecTV back the following morning and told them I needed another Tivo; the R15 just wouldn’t cut it. I was bracing for a big fight but to DirecTV’s credit they gave me no flack at all; they overnighted a new Tivo series 2 to me and arranged to return the R15 with no shipping charges to me.

So, Traci is ecstatic that we have our Tivo back again. We actually now are better off, we had a series 1 and now we have a series 2. DirecTV is going to need to do some work before their DVR is production ready; luckily that’s not my concern for the next couple years while I thankfully use my Tivo.