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We installed a DirecTivo in 2001. When in 2008 Tivo announced they would produce a new, HD DirecTivo we were delighted, and opted to hold our HD upgrade until it came out. Time passed, and passed and passed and the new Tivo went off to live with Duke Nukem in vaporware land. Finally pulled the string on the purchase of a new AV receiver, a new 46in LED TV, and this DVR. Now it is installed and working, how does it compare to our old Tivo?
First, a warning: the HR24 DVR is designed to work with a SWM dish. That's single-wire multiswitch, a single black coax cable from the dish. If you have what our installer called "a legacy installation," aka Multiswitch, characterized by TWO cables from the dish, then in addition to the DVR you need a pair of "B-Band converters." These are small boxes that go inline with the coax cables to convert something to some other thing. There are no B-Band converters in this box. They are available from Amazon, just search on "DirecTV B Band Converter" and you'll find them. If you have two cables to your old DVR, order a pair of them at the same time as the HR24. I was lucky, my installer had a spare pair in his truck.
I got no kickback from DirecTV when I said I had ordered my own HR24; except that they refused to schedule the installer until I had the box in hand and could read them the device serial number. They admitted that the Amazon price ($199) was the same they would have charged. The installer said that customers who order the MRV (multi-room viewing) option will get an HR24, but those who don't (I hadn't) would get "whatever we have." Which might well be the slower HR23. So I was right to get the HR24 from Amazon, but if you are going for MRV, you may as well get DirecTV to send it with the installer.
OK, now we've used it a few days, how does it compare to Tivo? Well, darn it, it's just fine! The only Tivo feature it lacks is that it doesn't record "suggestions" of shows it thinks we might like. I kind of miss being able to go through the Suggestions folder every few days to see what Tivo found for me.
The user interface is not as polished to look at; the menus and dialogs are square-edged and rather crude looking. The button layout on the remote is kind of bizarre and arbitrary compared to Tivo's "peanut" -but the response time to button-presses is fine. There are four levels of fast-forward instead of three, and #3 is too slow and #4 is too fast. There is a 30-second forward skip that Tivo had as an easter-egg feature. The "skip backward" function goes back 6 seconds instead of 8. There's a Back button that takes you back through successive levels of menu, and that's very convenient (Note: the Harmony One universal, if you opt for that, does NOT have this Back button; you have to program a soft-button for it.)
Although the search function is designed differently from Tivo's, it has pretty much the same abilities to find programs. There is a nice feature TIvo lacked: when viewing the detailed info on a recorded program, you can select "cast and crew" to get a quick search on the names of cast members, to find other programs they are listed in. There's also a "you might like" search that is sort of a replacement for Tivo suggestions.
All in all, DirecTivo die-hards do not need to fear the HR24. If you are tired of waiting for a new DirecTivo to emerge from the vapor, go ahead and make the jump. It's fine.
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