Directv HD DVR DWO2-10020 Satellite TV Receiver
Worth waiting for
I have been waiting for a high-definition integrated DirecTV TiVo box for a long, long time. I held back on buying a separate TiVo box, held back on buying a third-party product. Well, I can definitely say this was worth the wait and lived up to my expectations so far.<br /><br />The menus are very intuitive, as they are with all TiVo products. Mine was up and running within minutes after unpacking and activating it. I immediately began surfing through the current TV listings, giving movies and shows thumbs-up, double-thumbs-down, triple-thumbs-up, etceteras, ordering season passes, and setting recording schedules for a few movies.<br /><br />Since then, I have never had one problem whatsoever with the system. It has recorded probably 300 shows, some of them high-def, some standard, and all that I have watched have been flawless in terms of picture quality and simplicity of operation. I have only felt the need to watch live TV a few times since then, mostly for current news.<br /><br />I have it hooked up to an OTA antenna for local high-definition programming. It has recorded fine from there at 1080i, and integrated the local channels into my listings seamlessly.<br /><br />If I had to identify some flaws, what would I say? One thing is that when you are selecting a program for recording, or a season pass, the system will tell you if there is a scheduling conflict, which is good, and you can at that point select \\"Find other Showings.\\" However, you cannot see which of the other showings does NOT have a scheduling conflict without selecting one, and waiting for the system to compute this. It would really be helpful to have a feature where, once it knows the show you want to record, it would automatically find showings that have no schedule conflicts, or if it cannot find any, shows you what conflicts exist for each showing so you can pick the most convenient one without the trial and error. It's a small complaint overall.<br /><br />The system is slow at first, while it builds your database of suggestions and of showtimes. However, once everything is loaded, response time was perfectly acceptable. This can take a couple of weeks.<br /><br />Also, this system has a dual tuner, so you need two connections coming in from your satellite, plus one from your antenna if you have one. This is a lot of wiring. Luckily not an issue for me, but this bears noting for those looking to buy one. All TiVos are the same from this standpoint, otherwise you would not be able to watch live TV while recording another channel. HOWEVER, you CAN watch ANY already-recorded programming on your TiVo while it records another show on another channel, even if you only have one cable running to the TiVo. This means, once your system has a bunch of stuff recorded, you may find you don't need to watch live TV very often, and thus the inconvenience of using just the one tuner would not be the worst thing in the world.<br /><br />I don't see how you could go wrong with this machine. I guess a terabyte of storage would be better than just the 250 gigabytes, but I have not run out of storage yet, and you can always send it away for more capacity through one of the third party companies that soup these things up. One other criticism I have with the system is that they could if they wanted make it possible to hook your TiVo to an external hard drive. I did not see any instructions on doing that, but that would be such an easy fix to the storage problem.<br /><br />A final complaint: You can record in standard definition from the unit onto a VHS or a recordable DVD. But there is no capability to output in high definition yet. Hopefully we will find a way to get around this at some point, but we are waiting for Blu-Ray or HD DVD to become available and hopefully to standardize before the recording part is enabled, and then for Hughes to allow outputting to such a recorder. Also, the recording is done realtime, there is no way to record (dub) at double or quadruple speed, or even faster. Bummer.<br /><br />A final compliment: I love the TiVo suggestions section. I have found more movies and shows that I like by scanning through the TiVo suggestions and getting it to record at least some of them. Of course, there are also those suggestions that you wonder \\"what was it thinking?\\" but at least for me that's part of the fun of owning a TiVo generally. If you have not taken the TiVo plunge, this is the machine to do it with if you are a DirecTV customer. If you are not, I suggest you become one.Vo suggestions section. I have found more movies and shows that I like by scanning through the TiVo suggestions and getting it to record at least some of them. Of course, there are also those suggestions that you wonder \\"what was it thinking?\\" but at least for me that's part of the fun of owning a TiVo generally. If you have not taken the TiVo plunge, this is the machine to do it with if you are a DirecTV customer. If you are not, I suggest you become one.