It should not be a surprise that the DirecTV Help Forums at http://forums.directv.com seem to do all they can to avoid the truth getting out about the real problems with the DirecTV DVRs.
But I was a little surprised to see the degree of censorship and "discussion control" over there. What is this, China? If a thread doesn't go the way they like, they will simply remove it. They may let it sit there for a while, but then if they can't find a satisfactory way to "blame the victim", the moderators pull the thread.
The moderators claim they are real DirecTV customers and that may be, but they are clearly selected based on their irrational support for all things DirecTV, especially the DirecTV DVRs. I suspect the interview goes something like a Bush-era DOJ interview:
- Tell us why you find the HR21 and other DirecTV DVRs to be the best on the market.
- What is it about DirecTV that makes you want to serve with all your heart?
- Aside from the HR21, give us an example of another DirecTV product you admire.
A particularly touchy subject is the HD DVR area. It appears that the moderators have been told to be especially careful regarding this subject. While the rest of the net is full of reports of never ending problems with the HR-xx series of DirecTV DVRs, the DirecTV Help Forum moderators unconditionally claim they have no problems with the HR-xx series of DirecTV DVRs and anybody with a DVR issue must have other issues. The forum is totally opposed to any problems ever being due to general HR-21 issues. If a problem is with the DVR, it must be one particular DVR, a rare individual defective unit - not a general software or hardware bug. They refuse to admit there are such problems and it's pretty clear DirecTV has told them to say as much (or has made it clear to the moderators that they would lose their precious moderator status if they didn't unconditionally deny any such issues).
Why are they so touchy about their DVRs? Well I think it's pretty clear that it's because the boxes are a hellish nightmare for customers and a looming nightmare for DirecTV. As Cable TV goes digital and adds to the HD lineup, DirecTV starts to lose advantages. Blaming everything on the dish, satellite, and "installation" as is the typical "blame the victim" strategy of the DirecTV Help Forums, may backfire on DirectTV because, even if the problems are related to such dish-related "installation problems", customers are not going to tolerate them. Customers can make all dish-related problems go away, simply by getting rid of the unsightly dish all together. Guess how? - Cable TV. Thus, relegating DirecTV to the niche of serving areas where cable TV is not available.
At one time, DirecTV had several competitive advantages over Cable TV:
- much better quality, digital vs. analog signals
- more channels
- better guide and user interface, (especially later with the Tivo DVR)
- not having to deal with the cable company, who we hate about as much as the phone company
The big disadvantage? the DISH and "installation" issues
With Cable TV now digital, the above advantages start dissolving. One huge advantage cable has going for it (besides the market monopoly issue) is bandwidth. They can drive way more content into the home, which especially effects their Video-on-demand (VOD) capabilities, which far surpass those of DirecTV.
Also, with CableCARD one can use their own DVR, such as Tivo, with Cable TV, which is not possible with DirecTV. Even when DirecTV offered a Tivo-based box, it was still a DirecTV-specific model that had specific DirectTV-imposed limitations (no Music and Photo streaming, no Multi Room Viewing, no transferring shows to your PC, etc.), further swinging the balance away from DirecTV.
There's still that issue with hating the cable company, but with what DirectTV has done to me since the HR-21 and with the attitude over at the DirecTV Help Forums, it's about a wash now - only took a year and an HR-21 to convert a 10+ year DirecTV fan into a hater - and I know I'm not the only one. Good job, DirecTV.
Update: I'm told it's not the independent moderators who remove posts, but "Forum Administrators that are DirecTV employess that randomly review posts to ensure that they are in compliance with the 'Forum Terms & Conditions'"
I've been with DirecTV for 12+ years. I'm sorry, but the DirecTV apologists on here are just plain wrong. I was happy all those years, many of which using Tivo Boxes and then DirecTV forced their HR-21 DVR upon me. That's when all the trouble started. After 10+ years of nearly no calls to DirecTV for support, it's been one problem after another for the the past 13 months (since the arrival of the HR-21 box). Before that I recommended DirecTV all the time. Since then, it's been an utterly unpleasant experience. There is no variable in the equation except the HR-21 box. No amount of DirecTV fanboy logic can change that.
Suffice to say with swapping boxes, software upgrades, freezes, glitches in audio, crashes, bad recordings, missed recordings, and on and on - I am at the end of my rope and considering switching to Comcast HD, who I already know I dislike. And the Comcast switch involves $1000 in installation fees and new TiVo boxes, and I think I'm still going to do it and be done with DirecTV, once and for all.
Has anybody else done this? How has it worked out?
April 30, 2009 my HR21 downloaded a new version of the DTV DVR software, designated 0x2f6. There is a lot of talk of bugs and issues with this new version. Here's some comments I have about it, after using it a few weeks.
They have added some feedback so one can tell (usually) when something is clicked/selected with the remote. It doesn't give a Tivo "bong" sound, but the selected item/button does flash once to indicate it was clicked. Before, for many functions ("Delete" comes to mind) there was basically no feedback that the option was clicked for several seconds, which would cause one to press again, and then those clicks were "buffered" and played back later (much later) and the whole thing was annoying. With the new "flash" once" feedback at least you know the operation has started - it still might take 10 seconds or more to finish or to provide any additional feedback, but at least now you know to just wait rather than keep clicking.
They also added some additional progress bars at certain points (again, "Delete" comes to mind) to provide further feedback that the receiver is doing something. In the past, deleting a program could take a long time and there was basically no feedback that anything was happening.
For some silly reason they increased the "jump back" when using single-speed (one arrow) fast forward. This make this fast-forward mode almost useless because the time it takes to fast-foward is lost in the "jump-back".
A lot of people are complaining all over the net about audio and video break-up and sync problems. So far, for me, these have not been worse than I have always had with the HR21, or at least not it's not noticeable for me yet (very few recordings are 100% free of defects in audio or video with this blasted machine; there are always some burps and skips, and DJ-like scratching (repeats), video artifacts, pixelation etc.)
I have had some recordings that don't play for no apparent reason. They show as having normal duration but they won't play. They just get "stuck" - no combination of fast-forward, jumping around etc. cause the video to play. It would just jump from beginning to end and not play. A not quite as fatal of a situation is sometimes during playback a recording freezes and I have to fast forward to start it going again - there is a "hole" of a few seconds to a few minutes in duration in the video that will not play no matter what.
Update: You can find more about this release on DBSTalk forums here: http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=155859
Update May 2009: I am now experiencing te pixelation and audio drop-outs that everyone else reports. It seems unlikely to be signal / dish issues becuase resetting the HR-21 box causes the issues to go away for a few hours. Others have started to simply unplug the box each night. DirecTV customer services refuses to accept that there are issues and provides the standard "swap the SATIN cables" useless advice as usual. I am just sick and tired of this.
