Thursday, November 27, 2008

Time Warner DVR sucks

After moving from an area covered by Charter to an area covered by Time Warner, I had no choice but to switch my cable provider. Right off the bat, I found many things lacking in the Motorola DVR that TW provided me. Most of it, I've learned to live with, but the most recent offense... there's just no excuse.

What's bad to begin with:
  • Search. Having to scroll through each letter instead of letting us use the arrow keys for an on-screen keypad.
  • Program Guide. Time Warner's program guide rarely has sufficient information on programs more than a couple of days ahead of time. If it's going to be three days before the program airs, chances are it doesn't have anything in the description for it. If it's more than a week, you might not even get the program's title. Some programs never get any useful information, even when it's airing. Why is this important? Well, without having any info about the program, it doesn't know if the program is new or not.
  • After setting a "series recording" (TW's version of TiVo's "season pass"), if you delete a program you've just finished watching, and the same episode is aired again a few hours later (this happens a lot on HBO/Showtime shows), it will try to record it again. Why? These re-airing are not new anymore! Ugh. I constantly have to look through my "future recordings" list to remove shows I know I've already watched.
  • Have too many upcoming shows set to not record? If you set one more to not record, something else you've previously set to not record will want to record again. WTF?
  • Just added a new series to your DVR? Better check your upcoming recordings again, because guess what? The episodes you've told it not to record all think they need to be recorded again.
The worst thing it just did? This week alone, two of the shows I've set to always record new episodes were not recorded. And there were no scheduling conflicts, either. One was on Monday, for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I've set to record along with Chuck, but there was nothing else on that it needed to record. Strangely enough, it recorded Prison Break just fine. So I was forced to download the episode from online.

Just a few hours ago, it failed to record Dirty Sexy Money, when there was nothing else on that I wanted to record. This episode had the return of Samaire Armstrong, the whole reason I started watching this show to begin with, and what does it do? It didn't record it. Instead, it recorded a rerun True Blood, which I've already watched on Sunday. What a piece of crap this DVR is.

6 comments:

Ricky Jones said...

Strange part is, Comcast is owned by Time Warner and uses the same gear and its 10 times better! (go figure!)

Anonymous said...

Time Warner Dvr sucks... When you record a show you have to watch it while it's being recorded.. There's no way you can change the channel. Well what's the point of recording a show if you are forced to watch it.. I hate their DVR...it's horrible. The att dvr is better and, when i had it, i didn't have this problem, not to mention that it allowed me to record 4 different programs at once.
Jay

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Ricky Jones said...

Well, if you're recording only one thing, you can just hit the "swap" button, switching you to the DVRs second tuner and you'll be able to change channels there. If you're recording two shows, however, you will only be able to watch one of the items being recorded.

Ricky Jones said...

...or something previously recorded.

Anonymous said...

Hey there! I am sorry to hear about your DVR issues with Time Warner. I wanted to let you know about DISH Network which is my TV provider. I have a DVR which has the largest DVR hard drive in the industry. As a DISH employee I can tell you that DISH has an award-winning dual DVR, receiving CNET's Editor's Choice Award. You should check out Dish Network.com for more info.