Brad_Mirak

I recently began renting a Motorola BMC9012 from my cable provider, Sunflower Broadband. While I have not explored this box thoroughly, here is my initial review on both the box and the highly acclaimed Moxi menu service.

In a Nutshell: This box houses an 80GB hard disk (which supposedly holds up to 50 hours of regular programming or 9 hours of HD), dual HD tuners (no splitter required), a healthy array of AV outputs, 4 USB inputs, and a DOSCIS cable modem. Go to motorola.com for more details. It also employs the Moxi menu service. This is my first DVR and I am generally impressed but I do have a few complaints, which I’ve inserted below.

Moxi: I start with the menu because, just like with any cable box/DVR, it’s the menu that really matters! The Moxi interface is very stylish and fairly intuitive. I won’t spend time describing the menu layout because you can view demos at digeo.com. The submenus include “Channels”, “Recorded TV”, ”Find & Record”, “On Demand”, “Pay-Per-View”, “Ticker”, “Photos”, “Settings”, “Intro to Moxi”, “Games”, and various search filters including “News”, “Kids”, “Sports”, “Movies”, “HD”, and “Favorites”.

There is fairly little lag in navigating between channels, menu options, etc. Usually, it is less than a half-second. What lag there is may be associated more with my cable provider than with the software itself, as the lag seems a bit more pronounced during heavy viewing periods.

You can adjust the settings to omit channels you do not subscribe to (or don’t want to watch) from the channel lineup (they won’t appear in the menu and you’ll automatically skip over them when thumbing through the channels outside the menu.) This is a great feature I didn’t have with my previous cable box. Goodbye QVC!

Recording, both scheduled and on the spot, is very easy, as is “pausing” live TV, and the playback quality is, of course, exactly whatever quality the box receives from the provider. The box is dual-tuner (this applies to HD as well), so you can watch something else while you’re recording, or you can record two things at once, and no splitter is required. You can choose to record once or record the series (but see complaint below), and you can chose how long to retain each recorded show.

As far as features go, the Ticker is an interesting innovation, but not something I anticipate using with any frequency. Basically, you can create your own ticker at the bottom of the screen which scrolls information from a category (sports, news, etc.) that you select. The games included are pretty simple, and again, not something that I think most people will be interested in. The photo application allows users to import photos via a USB card reader (the box has 2 USB 1.0 and 2 USB 2.0 ports) to the hard drive. You can use the hard disk for permanent storage (why?) or just temporarily to present a slide show.

Generally, I have been impressed with the menu, although I do have some specific complaints:
- First, in navigating channels, a small “side menu” pops up on each channel showing what will be on that channel later in the day. You cannot, however, “shift” the entire channel lineup ahead by a few hours and scroll through that timeslot. With my old, and extremely crappy, menu, I could at least bring up the menu at 6pm after work and casually browse the entire 7pm lineup. You cannot do that here, and it seems to me to be a fairly glaring omission for such a highly touted menu.

- Also, there does not appear to be any hard disk capacity management utility. I don’t know if other DVRs have these, but it would be nice to know just how much room I have left on the disk, and how much capacity a show I’m planning to record will consume.

- Similarly, there is no way to edit recorded material. If, for example, I wanted to record a series of sit-coms, it would be nice if I could edit out the ads to shrink the capacity each show consumes.

- Speaking of ads, there is no “ad-skip” feature, which I find a little annoying.

- Also, the “Record Series” option doesn’t work very well. For example, let’s say I want to record “Hannity & Colmes” every day. The problem is, Fox News airs H&C 3 times per day! This problem is supposed to be alleviated by selecting the “record 1st runs only” option as opposed to the “record reruns” option, but it doesn’t work. Additionally, even if you only set up the DVR to keep recorded programs for 2 days and then discard, the DVR will only schedule to record as many programs as can be fit in the present disk capacity, and then will fail to schedule any more after that! This is a limitation that needs to be remedied.

The Box: The housing for the BMC9012 is very attractive. It is silver, sleek, sizeable (about 3.5” tall) and uncluttered. It certainly has presence, and should be a proud addition to any home theater.

The Remote: I’ve collected a lot of remotes over the years, and this is probably the best “non-command” remote I have ever received out of the box. It is laid-out very well and is uncluttered, with larger more colorful buttons corresponding to the more important features. My only complaint is the inevitable consequence of its uncluttered design – it lacks the buttons necessary to be used effectively as a universal control for the rest of my stuff.

The Cable Modem: This was one feature that really excited me when I first heard about this unit. Digeo promoted the box as being networkable with your home PC. Unfortunately, the modem does not appear to be functional at the present time. Thus, it is currently not possible, as I thought it would be, to stream audio, pictures, and video from my PC to my TV via the box. Further, there is some question whether it ever will be – beyond promoting the box as networkable with your PC, Digeo/Motorola have not been forthcoming in when this will be functional or what it will allow. A disappointment.

Conclusion: Motorola certainly gave this box the muscle to be a great DVR, but there are several disappointments on the software side that Digeo needs to address. With a few fairly simple tweaks to the Moxi interface, and the addition of network capability, this box could really shine!