This is a rant for my TV-loving friends.
Oh, how I miss my DISH. As soon as possible, I'm going back. Here's a quick run-down of features the Time Warner recorder is lacking, and things I just hate about it:
1) No jump-forward or back (sometimes known as Commercial Skip).
2) No date or episode number on show summaries or recorded events.
3) Inability to display info while watching a recorded event.
4) Clunky remote. The DISH remote was very intuitive and comfortable to use.
5) Can't change sort order on recorded events.
6) Our 2nd DVR doesn't even have dedicated buttons for bringing up the DVR features, just the usual stop, forward, rewind, etc. You have to scroll through about 5 menus to get to your shows.
7) Speaking of those buttons, they aren't very responsive. I often miss my target when pausing, rewinding, etc.
8) When you exit the recording menu, you're stuck on a splash screen until you change the channel. That's the only way out. It doesn't even drop you back to the channel you were on.
I'll think of more, but I think you get the picture.
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7 comments:
Sounds like Time Warner did DVRs as an afterthought and rushed 'em out there without actually thinking through the usability issues.
Dish has had a long time to perfect DVRs. Maybe the cable companies are just playing catch-up? Still, you'd think they'd look at what works...
Another thing - the channels have a way of freezing, either on a black screen, or with the picture paused. It usually clears up by changing the channel.
There was actually one feature that I liked, but in the time it took me to get logged in, I forgot what it was.
I'm a bit late to comment, but I couldn't agree with this more. I had DISH, then moved and went with Time Warner becuase of a better package deal. I would say quality of programming is not noticably different between the two, but DISH did a much much much better job with the DVR design. It's so much better that I will soon be changing back to DISH Network.
Really, most of my complaints come down to simple little things, that all add up to a frustrating experience. All of those already listed above are so true, but there's more for me. See, with DISH, everything made sense - it was intuitive. And it provided useful info. With Scientific Atlanta (Time Warner's DVR manufacturer) it's extremely cumbersome.
Some examples.
When surfing channels, the up arrow naturally increases the channel, so if your watching channel 6, press it and you get number 7, then 8, and so on. Makes sense. But when you go to the guide, the channels are listed opposite, with the lower number above the higher numbers. So if you are watching 6, press the up arrow and you get 5, then 4. Yeah, you get used to it after a while, but what kind of stupidity went into that idea??
With DISH, you would customize the guide so that it only shows channels that you want to browse - this is a great way to remove those PPV or locked channels that you didn't purchase. But with Time Warner, you don't get a choice, they just list every channel possible, whether you recieve the signal or not. So now if you want to browse the guide, you can't tell what channels you get and what you don't. Such a pain.
When you schedule recordings, the system is stubborn to start and end according to the time slot. I generally like to start recording 2 minutes before and end 5 minutes after the scheduled time slot. So if a program is scheduled to play from 8:00 to 8:30, I would set the record time from 7:58 to 8:35, just to make sure i get all of it, because sometimes the DVR clock and the network are a bit off. And Time Warner allows you to adjust these settings, but THEY DON'T STICK! The DVR makes up it's own mind and records strictly from 8:00 to 8:30, and of course it's not in sync with the network's programming, so I lose the last 30 seconds or so of the program every time.
Next - this just happened tonight (which led me to search of DISH info online, bringing me here). Let's say your watching a movie, and someone calls you, so you pause it. You happen to be on the phone much longer than expected and after an hour the DVR automatically plays becuase it can only store one hour of live video (keep in mind, DISH holds two hours). So you can't pause again, and you're only choice is to record what's left or lose it. So you press Record, and hit OK. Unfortunately, there was only 30 mintues of the movie left when the phone rang, and so when you press Record, you're 30 minutes into the NEXT program on that channel, and when you started recording, what happens? It only records 30 minutes of the current programming, not what you were watching. Yeah, that's intuitive. DISH's DVR did exactly what I wanted. Time Warner is leading me to an early grave.
Glad you got the opportunity to vent. :-)
I feel your pain, but I'm back to having Dish again, so I'm happy about that!
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Hello,
Thanks for the comparison and the useful information,according to me the comparison is depends on what you want from your satellite or cable provider.
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