[mythtv-users] Myth with Dish Network / DirectTV ?

[Chris Ribe]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Gavin Peters <gavin at ytz.ca> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 03:37:59PM -0600, Matt White wrote:
> >
> > It would be nice not to need the receivers, but everything works very
> > well, so I won't complain.  It's a heck of a lot better than the
> > Dish/ExpressVU PVR solution...
> >
>
> Any thoughts on what's wrong with the Dish solution?  I recently switched
> from
> an ExpressVu HD dual tuner PVR to myth, and there's things I miss about
> the ExpressVu PVR, but the balance favours Myth.
>
> - Gavin
> _______________________________________________
>


An invitation to bitch about my Dish DVR?  You just made my day!

I have a DISH ViP 612 DVR (dual tuner + OTA HD, single output), and I *hate*
it.  In fainess, I have high standards, having spent 6 years with Tivo and
MythTV before moving to Dish.  I didn't move to Dish directly from another
PVR, though, having gone without a DVR entirely for the first 8 months after
I went HD ( 90% of what I watch is live sports and DVDs).

Anyhow, here are the things I hate about my DISH DVR:
     1.  If you are watching a recording in progress, and the satellite
signal drops out momentarily, playback resumes at live TV.  For example, if
you are watching a close football game in the fourth quarter, 15 minutes
behind live TV, and there is a dropout, you will find suddenly find your
self watching the postgame show.  This particular bug is really the
dealbreaker for me.  I have a very marginal view of the DISH satellite, and
I get frequent glitches whenever rain moves through the area.  I can live
with dropouts, DISH is not to blame for my neighbor's trees being in the
way, what I can't live with is the DVR's handling of these glitches.

    2. If you exit a recording in progress, you may only return to that
recording at begining or live tv.  I got in the habit of flipping back and
forth bewteen two simultaneous baseball games when I got my first dual tuner
DirecTiVO back in 2002.  Now I can't do that anymore.

    3.  If the signal drops out while watching OTA live TV, it immediately
goes to a "you can't recieve this channel" screen...*and stays there*.  It
won't rejoin the program in progress until I bring up the program guide or
exit to a menu and return to TV. My neighboor's trees also play havoc on my
OTA signal, so I this bug tortured me until I finally started my move back
to Myth.  I currently have a hybrid setup - MythTV with an HDHR for OTA and
DISH for pay tv.  I have WAF issues that will prevent me from moving fully
to MythTV - I'm impulsive and enjoy tinkering with computers.  My wife likes
to watch tv so much that she chose a career in TV.  Due to her job in TV,
she likes to watch commercials and has little use for time shifting.  Given
my inability to resist breaking anything that can plausibly be modified and
her desire for a a simple and stable TV delivery platform, DISH is probably
a good fit for us (coincidentally, we met while we both working at a TV
station- she was a director and I was an engineer).

    4. No buffer by default. Say you sit down, watch live tv for 5 minutes,
then turn away for 2 seconds and miss something you were interested in. So
you try to skip back five seconds to hear what you just missed.  Too bad!
There is no buffer until you hit pause for the first time.

    5. No buffer at all when the tuner decides to go elsewhere.  Say you are
watching Thursday Night Football on ESPN.  It's 11:29, you are 25 minutes
behind real time in the game, but there are only 3 minutes left on the
clock.  It's a 2 point game so it will in all likelyhood end well within the
25 minute buffer you have built up.     A bubble pops up on the screen that
says, "the DVR would like to record 'The Colbert Report' at 11:30 on channel
107'.  You say to yourself, "fine, whatever, that's after the end of the
game" and you push OK.  All of a sudden 90 seconds later, *BAM.*  You are
watching "The Colbert Report" and the last 3 minutes of that football game
are bits in the wind.

Those are the things that I realy hate about the current DISH DVR.  It
really is an unfortunate state of affairs. 11 years ago DISH first made the
widely adored ReplayTV available to its customers (featuring automatic
commercial skip!).  Almost 8 years ago I had a DirecTiVo the met my DVR
needs admirably.  Unfortunately, TiVo owns a lot of important DVR IP, and
Big Content decided to lock TiVo out of the HD transition.  As a result, all
of the cable/sat providers offer complete shit DVRs because they are stuck
in the middle of an uncomfortable triangle:  upstream content providers will
balk at anything that gives customers too much control over content,  in
house sales departments will balk at anything that helps cuastomers avoid
advertising, while TiVo stands outside with its patent portfolio that grants
it a virtual monopoly on customer satisfaction.

 Yeah. So that's how I feel about DISH.

-chris
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