Dish Network Update
OK, I've had Dish for a few weeks now, so here's my current thoughts on the VIP 622 DVR compared to the DirecTiVo I had before:
Things that I like better than TiVo:
- Dual tuner mode is very nice, from one DVR, I can play 2 different shows on 2 different TV's, this feature really does set Dish apart from the other DVR's out there.
- The menus are much more responsive.
- The history for 'Live TV' recording lasts much longer. A couple of hours is not uncommon, unlike the 30 minutes on my old TiVo.
- The DishHD Package is by far the largest selection of HD channels, even over my local cable station. Even the local ABC, CBS, and NBC channels are available in HD over the satelite (i.e. no off the air antenna is necessary).
Things I don't like about the ViP 622:
- The volume is not at all consistent across channels. There was a bit of this on DirecTV, but nothing like the variance that exists with Dish. One channel may be barely audible and the next will blast.
- The 'dual display' mode has this annoying 'feature' in which it locks any given recording to a particular tuner. This basically means that if you program all of your recordings from one TV (like I do), you never actaully get 2 shows to record at once since each show is 'locked' onto the tuner that you told it to record from. There also doesn't seem to be an easy way to move a show from one tuner to the other.
- There is no way to 'swap' tuner 1 and tuner 2 in Dual Display mode. In single display mode, however, the tuner swap is actually a bit more intuitive than it is with the TiVo.
- Turning the channel on live TV or accessing certain menu items will stop an active show that is recording. The TiVo, on the other hand, could 'swap' the recording to the 'background' channel and bring the channel you are asking for to the 'front' channel.
- You can only program in 35 programs (or search items) to record. I never hit any 'hard' limits on my TiVo, but had ~55 programs lined up.
I'm sure that many of these problems are fixable through software updates, and it seems that Dish is fairly responsive on updating their system, as I've already gotten at least 2 firmware updates (which appear to shut the DVR off without any real notice, so I guess that's one more annoyance). My DirecTiVo, on the other hand, hadn't had a firmware update in years, so many of its annoyances were things you just had to learn to live with (like the super slow menus, taking forever to recalculate your schedule when a priority changed, etc).