Those in the Know - TiVo! High-Def On Demand Programming with the Hughes HR10-250
Written: Dec 01 '04 (Updated Dec 09 '04)
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Pros: TiVo functionality for HDTV can't be beat, great interface, the usual TiVo greatness.
Cons: Hardware failure on our first unit required its replacement within the first six months.
The Bottom Line: Pause, play, fast-forward, rewind all the high-def programming you can handle. This is a winner of a product with good customer support.
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| mrs-j's Full Review: Hughes HR10-250 (250 GB) 200-Hours Video Recorder |
My TiVo addiction began when a very good friend who happened to be my roommate practically forced me into buying an open box TiVo, and then helped me hack it into a 101 hour TiVo. I reviewed that box here.
I fell in love with my TiVo and when I acquired DirecTV and they started promoting $99 TiVos with their service, I bought more. My addiction to this little DVR service grew. And then we got HDTV in our household. I felt like my TV viewing hit a brick wall. I have to actually stop what I'm doing at 8:00PM to watch a show? I have to sit through commercials? Oh the humanity!
Then there's my husband. I got him addicted, and then his father, and then his sister, and then her husband, it's like crack I tell you. He dutifully went to the home theater to watch his sports programs without a TiVo. He hated it.
So we, like many others, got on the waiting list for the upcoming release of the Hughes HR10-250 Digital TV Recorder. We had ours two days after it was shipped to retailers.
About TiVo
I've heard that there are still some who don't know what TiVo's about, although now that my mother knows how it works, I have to imagine people who don't know TiVo are few and far between.
TiVo allows you do to many, many wondrous things. I'll list the best features briefly:
Season Passes: You can set up your favorite show and it will record it, even if its timeslot changes.
Suggestions: Using a thumbs up/thumbs down button you can tell TiVo what shows you like and don't like, and it will record suggestions for you based on that.
Keywords: Want to see everything that is or could possibly be about "Oprah"? Just make it a keyword search and you'll get all the Oprah you can handle.
Pause Live TV: Yes, you can pause live television. My husband calls this the "marriage saver". TiVo records a continuous thirty minute buffer so you can save up to 30 minutes of TV live, as it's playing.
Fast Forward/Rewind: You can fast forward and rewind through your shows. You might have heard about this feature after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Superbowl. Apparently TiVo found via their user data that record numbers of TiVo viewers replayed that moment. Several times. In slo-mo even.
All of these are standard TiVo features and the Hughes Hi-Def TiVo has them. It also has the standard TiVo "peanut" style remote that I've come to know and love.
DirecTV has formed a partnership with TiVo and now resells their technology inside their branded DirecTV DVRs. Because of this partnership, people who have DirecTV can get not only a high-def DVR for their HDTV, but they can also get great pricing on a standard satellite tuner/TiVo DVR combo from DirecTV. Additionally, through this partnership, DirecTV "owns" the entire relationship with the customer, which we found to be very important with this recorder - more on that below.
About the Hughes HR10-250 DVR
To accommodate high definition TiVo had to build a "super" DVR with an enormous hard drive. They also spruced up the outputs so that the picture quality coming from the TiVo equals the quality you would get from a regular High-Def signal.
Features specific to this TiVo include:
- Dual tuners: record two shows on separate channels at once, whether they're HD programming from DirecTV or off the air
- The 250 Gigabyte hard drive records up to 30 hours of High Definition programming (or 200 hours of standard definition, but why would you do that?)
- Updated interface includes HDMI output as well as Dolby Digital 5.1 optical output
- Integrates off the air digital programming with your DirecTV programming via its ATSC tuner
- Supports HDTV resolution standards 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i
- All the standard bells & whistles that we're used to with TiVo, as listed above
Here's the full list of output types:
Video Outputs - 1 of each: HDMI, Component, S-Video, Composite (RCA)
Audio Outputs - 1 of each: Digital Optical, Stereo L/R RCA
In addition to these interfaces, there's also a phone line that you will need to hook up so TiVo can make its daily call to update your guide data, and there's a USB interface which currently does nothing, but TiVo included it for possible "future use". (Here's to hoping they put network capability in it, and soon.)
How it Works
Using TiVo is deceptively simple. You simply plug it in, hook it up to the phone line, and configure it just as you would a standard TiVo. You configure a dial-in number, perform the dialing test, download your first guide data and go.
The interface, remote, well... everything, is faithful to the way TiVo works on standard televisions. The only difference is that the screen is 16:9 and much, much bigger. The integration of the off-air ATSC signal into the programming guide and recording setup is seamless, and this is vital since local HD programming is only available via off the air broadcasts.
We watch more HDTV programming, more efficiently, than we ever did before. Navigating TiVo's menu system is easy, whether you're new to TiVo or have been using one for years. Choosing programming using TiVo's programming guide is also a simple task. Sometimes, however, my husband switches it over to the DirecTV style guide which features a "HD" logo for all HDTV programs so we can tell whether the program we're interested in is high definition or standard definition.
The quality of the picture and audio that we get from the TiVo is unmatched. The images are crisp and clear, and surround sound works perfectly.
Reliability, Warranty & Customer Service
This is new, proprietary technology and as such, there have been reported issues with it. TiVo offers a one year limited warranty against manufacturer's defects for this box, and it's a good thing too, because six months after we got ours the hard drive froze. The TiVo began resetting itself and audio just disappeared from many programs we had recorded. The awful "blocky picture" that lets you know something has gone terribly, terribly awry inside the box, occurred frequently.
Dreading the difficulty we'd have replacing it, and upset that a $1,000 item was giving us trouble, I had my husband call DirecTV. He's much more gracious about broken things than I am. I have to say, support from DirecTV for the TiVo was great. In ten minutes they had put another one out be shipped to us and when we got it, we just had to pack up the broken TiVo and return it with the label they had included. It was the easiest return I've ever experienced. The only downside is that we had to manually reload all of our season passes and go through the guided setup a second time.
DirecTV offers the customer care and direct support for their high definition DirecTV TiVo. This is actually quite helpful because no matter what the problem is, there's only one number to call. All too often technical support involves two companies pointing fingers at each other when something goes wrong on an item that they both have a hand in creating. There's none of that with the HD TiVo because DirecTV takes ownership of it all.
DirecTV Customer Support Phone: 1-800-494-4388
DirecTV Support E-mail Form: http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/glb/Form_Feedback.dsp
Overall Impression
I still love our TiVo, especially now that I know DirecTV stands behind the warranty. HDTV viewing in our home theater skyrocketed after this purchase. We regularly use our HD TiVo to record everything from "Desperate Housewives" to "Sunrise Earth" for viewing later, when we want to view it. I really can't ask for anything more when it comes to watching TV.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 999
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mrs-j
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"Man was made for something better than disturbing dirt." - Oscar Wilde
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