I switched from Time Warner Cable to DirectTV last week. The price was good, the service is good, and tivo service is coming. The TiVo service isn’t here yet, however.

Still, I switched and my TV is now connected to a shiny new “Direct TV HD DVR +”. It works well enough for the most part, but there are things about it that just drive me nuts.

  • The remote places the fast forward/play/rewind functionality towards to top of the remote, away from where your hand naturally rests. As a result, I’m continually hitting the wrong set of buttons. When I want to fast forward, I instead start some sort of multi-play feature.
  • While the red button on the remote does delete programs (sometimes), there is no way to delete from a list without confirmation. What should be one press is instead 2.
  • The TiVo never deleted anything until it really needed to do it. “Delete” was “move to Deleted items”, so you could recover a deleted item. This is why the TiVo didn’t require confirmation.
  • the TiVo had a rich wishlist functionality. You could set up a wishlist to do full boolean logic against the guide metadata and create a recording that basically said “Record all first run shows that have ‘The Simpsons’ in the title, but do not contain the description ‘Homer and Marge raise Bart and Lisa’. This allowed me to record new episodes of the Simpsons, without dealing with the 50 episodes a week that are reruns and the FOX affiliate was too lazy to update the guide data with real information. The DirectTV DVR can match keywords, but cannot match the wishlists of a TiVo.
  • The TiVo allowed me to specify what channels I receive, so that it would never attempt to record anything from channels I don’t actually get. DirectTV automatically knows what channels I get, which is great. However, DirectTV includes PPV and subscription channels in the “channels I get”, which is not great. Also, I don’t care if I get Fox News, I don’t want my DVR to think I get it. Ever. This would be fine if I could set up the keyword based programming to only look at channels I specify in a favorites list, but they are hardcoded to “channels I get” and cannot be modified.
  • The TiVo allowed me to create a season pass for new episodes of a program in the guide without recording the episode I selected. The DirectTV DVR allows me to record a series, but will also record the selected episode used to create the series—even if that episode doesn’t match the rules of the “series recording” (consider the case where you are in rerun season and wish to set up a series recording for “House”). On the plus side, my TiVo HD did not allow me to specify a default way to set up a season pass, the DirectTV DVR does.
  • The TiVo had an embedded web server, which I could query to find the current list of recordings on the box. I even had a dashboard widget that used this functionality. The DirectTV lacks this feature (Direct2PC might work, but only on a PC, and only with nasty copy protection restrictions).
  • With a TiVo, when you pay for it, you own it.
  • The TiVo has a much more intelligent on-screen guide display, and when you change the guide settings, they stick. DirectTV’s DVR reverts back to the default every single time.
  • I thought I would like the little “picture-in-picture” of live TV when I’m using the menus of the DVR. I have grown to hate it. When you have 100% bought in to the “never watch live”, you don’t care about what the active channel is; you’ll often be tuned to something completely irrelevant. I find myself hitting Mute a lot now.