Comcast DVR being installed thursday (1 Viewer)

[BrianAe]

Any warnings or advice?

thanks!

 

[marc]

Depending on your location, the Comcast DVR is a single tuner, thus you cannot watch one thing and record another. If this is the situation, I would suggest splitting the cable before the cable box and run a seperate coax to you antenna input. Use the HD connection to hook up to the tube or if no hd, they use the rca hookup. This way, you can watch another program while recording another. You will only be able to watch basic cable, no HD or Premium this way though. Easiest work around. Here in Chicago area, they only have the single tuner and the dual tuner is on the way. Just my 2 cents.

Marc

 

[BrianAe]

Thanks for the move, I was going to ask for one but you beat me to the punch.

 

[BrianAe]

Wow, this thing is a peace of junk. It is so loud its not funny. The picture on many channels sucks, even when not recording, compared to my old digital cable box. It takes a couple seconds now everytime you want to change channels and the software/dvr cabilities is certainly not on par with TIVO (to be fair I knew that).

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna call Comcast and tell them to get this POS out of my face.

 

[Stephen Tu]

Although Tivo is better (other than the cable HD recording ability, IMO the main reason to get Comcast box), I have to defend some things:

Extra time for channel changing due to the buffering is also unavoidable. With a DVR it's preferrable to look for shows using the guide rather than by flipping around. The good thing is that once you just start recording everything ahead of time, you always have a bunch of good shows sitting on the drive waiting for you, so you don't have to flip around for "what's on now". Channel flipping becomes unnecessary.

 

[Anthony Moore]

I have the Comcast DVR..had it for 2 years

No real problems.

It does have 2 tuners. If it didnt, I'd throw it away.

Never really had any problems with it at all.

Guess we all have dfferent experiences.

 

[Tim K]

Comcast doesn't offer the dual tuner model yet in my area...and that alone is keeping me from getting it. I can't see any use for having a single tuner DVR. In fact, I don't even understand why Motorola even developed this product in the first place. To me, it is totally worthless.

That said, I am also concerned with the noise factor and PQ. From everything I've read, it is pretty noisey b/c the hard drive is always running to record the last 15 seconds of whatever you are watching. This "buffering" is also responsible for the degraded picture quality. I think it would be wise of Motorola in include the option to "turn off" the buffering. Other than live sports, I can't see a purpose for it anyway. And if you are watching sports you can enable it in case you want to use the replay function. With the buffer disabled, you should have silent operation and better PQ.

 

[Chuck Mullen]

Only partly true. Digital feeds, SD or HD, are buffered/recorded in MPG2 form, so that there is no degradation in quality. The analog conversion only occurs once, just as if there were no buffer at all. On analog channels the signal is converted to digital and back to analog again to set up the buffer. This occurs with any stand-alone Tivo or RTV.
If you are a Comcast subscriber with HD already this is a no brainer IMO. If you don't have an HD set I would recommend a Tivo or ReplayTV.
I am not lucky enough to have a two tuner 6412 model, but with the improved interface guide that was promised it should be a good unit.