In some analysis of how to save some money, we’re looking at the possibility of moving from DirecTV to TimeWarner cable. We can get a good bundled deal of internet (which we already have from them) and cable TV from TW.
Looking at the lineups, it looks like the channel selection is pretty comparable. But my biggest concern is the DVRs. We’re very pleased with the DirectTV HD DVRs, and everyone in the house (me, wife, daughters) can use it without problem.
How different is the DVR for TW? Capabilities, ease of use, etc?
I don’t know what the capabilities of the directtv DVR are, but the Time Warner DVR is horrible. The thing regresses constantly. They keep chipping away features and coming out with new revs of software that add some pointless new feature at the cost of things that used to work well now being flaky. I lack the words to articulate the rage I feel against Time Warner for their sorry excuse of a DVR but trust me, it’s abysmal.
Thanks. Thats enough to make me stay with DirecTV. The only reason we would switch is to save a few bucks - we’ve been DTV subscribers since 1995 and happy with it for the most part. And we watch at least 70% of our TV viewing via the DVR, so a poor DVR is unacceptable to us.
What Kraaze said. I don’t know what the DirectTV DVR is like (is it a Tivo?), but the SA unit that Time Warner uses sucks. Big time. It lacks many basic features that one might expect on a DVR (like searching), and it is extremely flaky. I still can’t get it to season pass Good Eats, no matter what I do. It always seems like it’s done it, but as soon as a new episode comes on, it forgets to record it, and then (apparently out of embarrassment) erases the season pass. It sometimes randomly misses the first few minutes of a recording, and you can’t tell it to start recording early or to stop late (which sucks for shows like Heroes, which usually runs long). It also doesn’t know to avoid recording multiple copies of the same episode of a show, so if you record anything that runs in multiple time slots, it will generally record all of them. Erasing stuff from the recorded list is a chore (three button presses, scroll down a list, then two more button presses, just to erase one show… rinse and repeat for each additional thing you want to erase).
If you like the DVR that you have, then stick with it. You won’t like this one.
I’ve never used DirecTV, but I’ve had a TWC for a year now. The box as a whole was pretty terrible when we first got it and we’d end up resetting it multiple times a week. As a contrasting opinion, I think the DVR software has gotten better, and we haven’t had to reset it in quite a while.
A lot of people were pretty upset when they moved from the older software (I forget the name) to Passport, which we’ve had the whole time so we can’t really compare. I think Passport has gotten better in recent months though.
It lacks many basic features that one might expect on a DVR (like searching)
What do you mean by this? I’m able to search for programs by title. I’ve also never had issues setting up a series to be recorded. We have had issues in the past with audio dropouts during recorded programs, but 99% of the time it was fixable by restarting the show. There was a period where CBS would frequently have audio dropouts whether record or live, but we haven’t seen it since they switched to SDV in our area.
I don’t want to come across like I’m completely happy with TWC’s service though. We’ve considered switching to DirecTV a number of times since we signed up with TWC.
Yeah Time Warner’s DVRs seem to vary greatly depending upon where you live and what version of the software you have. I currently have AT&T U-Verse but back when I was on TWC we had 8300HD DVRs with Passport that had fairly basic non-sexy UIs but I never had problems like Ben’s other than the issue with it re-recording the same program over and over… it couldn’t detect duplicates at all, your only options were record new only, or record all and record all would tend to store a lot of dupes on shows that repeat a lot like Colbert Report, Daily Show, South Park, etc.
My TWC DVR absolutely let me adjust the recording time for shows to be under/over both in the beginning and the end, it did have search though it was implemented very klunkily, and it never spontaneously decided to delete my series recording settings or recorded shows.
I had Tivo’s until DirecTV decided to go with their own systems. I prefer the Tivo, but once you get over the differences, the capabilities are pretty much the same. Search capability is fine (e.g., if I want to search for movies that are dramas with Jimmy Cagney, no problem,) season passes work fine, lost of flexibility in recording options, and everything is easy enough my technophobe wife can use it with no problem.
The Motorolla DVR I had with Time Warner was seriously one of the worst pieces of electronics I’ve ever owned. After having several shows just inexplicably cancel their scheduled recordings on us, we called customer service and demanded they send us a new box. Well, they did, but it was just another Motorolla and sucked in pretty much exactly the same way.
Do you have the SA 8300HD? Mine has no such capability. In the Guide, I have three options–browse by channel, browse by title, and browse by theme. There is no true search function, and even the browsing functionality is a pale shadow of what you get with Tivo (particularly since the SA DVR doesn’t cache program schedules as far in advance as Tivo does).
I have that same DVR, and there is a title search screen. Go to the guide, browse by title, and the red remote button will then give you a lame ass keyword search. It’s really just a string match against the titles to allow you to browse to the right title in a long list, not a true search. For example, if I search for NFL it will find “NFL football”. If I just search for “football” it won’t find it.
Just checked, and mine does not have that. If you hit the red button while browsing the title list, it just returns you to the “select by letter category” list. If you are already there, pressing the red button does nothing at all.
I think I have the 8300HDC. On mine, I think when you pull up the guide, you can press the blue (I think B?) button, and then the blue button again and it will let you type in a title.
The HDC is just a CableCard version of the HD. The version of the UI software you’re running is what makes the TWC cable boxes act differently (in some cases, remarkably so), not really the hardware model. As I mentioned before, the version of Passport they used here in San Diego was perfectly usable and stable but YMMV greatly depending upon where you are and what version of the software they give you.
That blue button thing doesn’t work for me, and the instructions that you linked to are not for the Time Warner DVR, in any event (they are for the regular, non-DVR digital cable box). On my DVR, the blue button opens a list that lets you change the date that you are browsing, in all three of the browse modes. Pressing it again does nothing.
That does highlight another absurdity of the browse-by-title functionality (and its related search feature, for those that have it)–the DVR only lets you browse titles for a single day at a time. So by default, that title list only includes programs that are airing today, and you can set it to instead view titles that are airing tomorrow, or next Tuesday or whatever, but you can never list more than one day’s worth of titles at a time. Which makes the whole feature utterly useless, because I don’t really need a search function–or even an advanced browse function, above and beyond the basic channel browser–to find programs that are going to air today. And I likewise do not need one that lets me search for stuff in the future, but only if I already know specifically what day the show will be airing. Tivo never requires that you know when a show is going to be on to schedule a recording. Hell, it doesn’t even need the show to be listed. I can tell it to record, say, all episodes Max Headroom, even though the show hasn’t been on television in over twenty years, and if it ever does come back, the Tivo will record it.
Or I could, if I had one. Anyway, comparing the Tivo to the TW DVR is like comparing a sophisticated fly-by-wire modern jetfighter to a rock.
The DirecTV DVR has really grown on me. I was a big fan of the DirecTV/Tivo combo machine but have gotten used to their own box and they have really stabilized it with all their bug fixes.
I used to have the Comcast DVR (made by Motorola) and it was a horror show like everybody else is saying.
You should consider bundling phone and internet to at least get some savings… either from TW or your local AT&T spinoff…
Right. I actually had to double-check that I hadn’t made a comment to that effect because I meant to…
As I mentioned before, the version of Passport they used here in San Diego was perfectly usable and stable but YMMV greatly depending upon where you are and what version of the software they give you.
Also correct, and I actually made a mistake in my original post. The old software that people seemed to really like was Passport, but I had Navigator out of the box, and I thought from what I’d read over at AVS that TWC has been moving everyone to (the same version of) Navigator to make support easier for them.
the instructions that you linked to are not for the Time Warner DVR, in any event (they are for the regular, non-DVR digital cable box)
Sorry it didn’t work for you, but the link was for Navigator, which is supposed to be on both the DVR and non-DVR boxes.
I’m completely baffled by what you’re describing in the rest of your post, as I’ve never experienced anything like it on my box. The search function I’ve described lets me look at everything that’s currently available in the guide, which is a week’s content I think?
I pulled up an old PDF for the 8300 and it sounds oddly like what you’re experiencing. So maybe you’re just on a much older version of the software for some reason.
I have personally had both. In fact, I just made this very switch last summer because in my new home I cannot get a view of the southern sky. I would LOVE to go back to DTV. It is FAR superior to Time Warner. Unless the money is critical for you, I’d stick. That said, the DVR is not THAT bad. It’s doable. You have to adjust a bit to the different features, but it’s not awful. DTV was better though. Time Warner does have on demand, and it’s adding HD channels, but still doesn’t have as many as DTv.
They are actually doing pretty good with HD channels in my area. There are only two channels that we watch that aren’t in HD at this point–Sci-Fi and Comedy Central–and apparently they are going to be adding those sometime this year. After that, we’ll be all HD, all the time.
