No more TiVo in the Drucker Household...

Well that is bit of an overstatement since I still have 2 TiVos of the low definition variety, but I did upgrade (or side grade) my HD units to the new DirecTV proprietary HD DVR. So here is my review (basic review but review nonetheless).

The unit is a pretty solid unit. There are some very quality features and differences between the units. Here are the pros and cons.

Pro:
- faster, MUCH faster programming. You can program a season pass with 2 clicks of the record button while it sometimes took my old TiVo minutes to resolve everything.
- the menuing is great. Different from TiVo but pretty intuitive. There is a quick menu that comes up over the image and allows access to the list of recorded programs, and other menus.
- when you go to full menu mode you still are able to watch the video feed via a small PiP type box in the upper right corner.
- much better extended guide data than the old unit.
- most importantly local channels in HD off of the satellite
- built in ethernet port which will hopefully allow some great network functionality
- USB ports as well
- potential for the recording of 3 things at once using the 2 Sat tuners and 1 OTA tuner

Cons:
- buggy software. From what I have seen and read things are improving but the software is still a little quirky/buggy. Sometimes the remote buttons don't do what you think they will and other times they do. One of my units locked up and we had to reset it (losing no programming). Not that surprising.
- no 30 second skip functionality. This is a function that I rarely used (yet many others swear by it) so I am not really all that put out by it not existing.
- no jump-back after fast forwarding. TiVo has a great feature that when you are doing the fast forward through commercials or other things and when you jumped out of the fast forward to standard play it would jump-back a few seconds (the amount of the jump would depend on the speed of FF you were using). The lack of this frustrates me to no end right now. There is jerry-rigged work around but I am hopeful that a software update will improve this.
- no dual live TV buffers. There is 1 90 minute buffer but no ability to switch between tuners. Again not a huge loss to me but frustrating that there aren't 2 45 buffers instead of 1 90.

So there you have it... Really a good unit that all should have if they don't already have an HD TiVo and would rather not put an antenna on their roof.