I’ve had comcast’s new PVR (personal video recorder, sometimes also referred to as a DVR or digital video recorder) product for a few months now (they finally became available right around the time Isaac was born), so I thought I’d share our experiences with the product.
Intro
First, I should mention that I’m in the West End of Henrico County, a suburb of the cirty of Richmond, Virginia. If you live elsewhere the features, menus, etc. may be vastly different than what I am going to describe. I have a old-fashioned 42″ Sony tv, so no HDTV coverage in this review.
It runs $9.99 per month to have the PVR, if you trade in your old set-top box. If you decide to keep your old set-top box, the combination of the two will increase your monthly bill by over $20. I find this to be kind of deceptive - the PVR is $9.99 a month if it’s the only cable box in your home, but if you’re an existing customer adding the pvr it costs more than $9.99 a month additional.
Hardware
The box itself is a Motorola HD Set-Top DCT6208. The most interesting features in my opinion are the ones that aren’t enabled - usb, ethernet, smartcard. There is no dual-tuner in this unit, meaning you can watch what you’re recording or watch something previously recorded, but you cannot watch live TV while recording another channel. It includes an 80 gigabyte hard drive that is capable of recording about 25 hours of analog TV, 30-60 hours of standard digital cable, and 8-10 hours of HDTV.
Menus and Controls
The menus they deployed in our area are not a signifcant improvement over their old menu system. They’re a little bit faster (although not much… what’s that powerfull processor doing in there? Folding@Home?) and easier on the eyes, with a couple of color schemes to choose from. The screens are all still overpowered by adds. The new channel guide shows 3, 30 minute programming segments, but they’re chopped up so small sometimes all you get is the first few letters of a show, like “Wheel…” for “Wheel of Fortune”. One nice thing is a new feature where hitting the guide button multiple times toggles you between the by time and by channel views. The by channel view is nice, with one exception - they don’t show the day of the week or the date next to the time, so after you’ve gone a day or so into the future, unless you select information on a program, you have no way to know if it’s Tuesday or Wednesday, the only thing you know is the program title and the time of day it comes on.
Rewind, fast-forward, pause, play, live-tv all work as expected, with some caveats. Most PVRs allow multiple levels of fast-forward and rewind, and this box is no exception. It even has the ability to jump the recording back or forward a little bit when you hit play so that you’re watching when you pushed the play button, not several seconds ahead. This works fine, except it doesn’t appear to be enabled at all at speeds higher than 2x, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to adjust the sensitivity.
Recording is not what I expected or hoped for. Setting up a recording requires that you go to the info menu for a program and select record, and then hit record again. Unless you want to subscribe to the show, then you go to recording options where you can set the schedule. If you hit record while watching live tv, even if you’ve paused it for awhile, it only starts the recording at the live tv moment when you hit the button - if the show is halfway over, it will only record the last half, ignoring what’s in the buffer.
It acts like a digital vcr with a memory, you set the time and channel and it dutifully records without any further thought. If your program moves time slots, it doesn’t care. If it’s a new episode, or a 5 year old re-run… it doesn’t care.
Looking at what you have setup to record in the future is difficult, as it’s shown on a day by day basis, and you can only scroll through days. There apparently is some way to record by show title, but I haven’t found it in the menu yet, and the documentation I’ve seen indicates that if you were to subscribe to say, “Stargate SG-1″, it would record every single episoad of Stargate on every single channel it appears on. You could easily fill up your PVR in less than a week with all the re-runs the Sci-Fi channel shows!
Scheduling conflicts are confusing too. When you want to record a program that overlaps with a scheduled recording, it asks you if you want to delete the scheduled program, and the wording doesn’t give any indication if it will delete your subscription, or that single entry (which is what I believe it does).
General
The quality of analog recordings is ok (better than I’d get from VHS and an antenna anyway), but there seems to be issues with rewind and fast-forward of live and recorded analog shows, with the rewind or fast-forward action sometimes freezing the displayed frame.
The amount of recording space for the digital formats varies so widely because comcast compresses the mpeg streams at different levels for different channels (so you can get a higher quality picture for HBO, but other more niche channels get the heck compressed out of them.) In my experience comcast compresses all their channels more than DirecTV does, resulting in mpeg artifacts even on the premium channels.
The optical digital audio works, it is nice to finally have surround sound on HBO again. This is the one area I think this box has any advantage over a standalone TiVo (well, this and HDTV recording, but since I don’t have HDTV…)
Conclusion
This product has major usability problems. Combine that with the poor picture quality and high price of Comcast’s service… well, lets just say I will be glad to get rid of them someday… if they weren’ the only viable alternative for me right now, I wouldn’t have it. The only think I like about them is my cable modem.
