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Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR Reviewed
cblount writes "The Dish Network DVR-921 is the first home satellite receiver capable of recording and time shifting HDTV signals both from satellite and local Over-The-Air broadcasts. The first comprehensive review has been posted at DBSTalk.Com."
There was an article in the local paper this morning about the troubles tivo has been having, what with all the cable & dish companies offering PVR's... I wonder how long it'll be til my lifetime tivo service is worthless :(
While this is extremely cool, I still prefer to just wait till stuff comes out on DVD.
I'm an avid watcher of:
Stargate SG1
Alias
24
Sopranos
But I just wait for em on DVD. Plus, it's a lot tougher to swap shows with your buddies when they're on a non-removable device.
My bro-in-law and I are always loaning eachother the above shows back and forth. He buys some of em, I buy the others..
-NetMagi
and they are already suffering the /. effect?
The DVR-921 won CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Best of Innovations for 2003. Of course, it should have won it for 2004 since that is when they will actually be available.
I so so have been wanting and waiting for this unit...
(so hoping it has all the features I heard about, including support for DVI)
=)
Going to read review now...
I don't own a television set, so I had to ask one of my close personal friends to write a review of this device. Here it is.
As you all know, High Definition Television represents a clear and present danger to customers' right to time shift. The so-called "broadcast flag" prevents casual users from exercising their Fair Use rights.
Nevertheless, I watch a lot of television thanks to my TiVo. TiVo lets me skip the commercials, which makes me a "thief" but lets me enjoy the entertainment I deserve. Let's compare some features.
Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR does not have a "Season Pass" option to let you record a whole season's worth of programming.
TiVo has a Season Pass option.
Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR does not offer the ability to play multimedia content streamed from a personal computer.
TiVo's Home Media Options turns your TiVo into a multimedia access centre!
Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR does not run Linux.
TiVo is an open-source-friendly company.
Based on my good friend's comments, I rate Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR a 1 on the Seth Finklestein scale of greatness. Do not buy the Dish Network DVR-921 HD DVR.
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
IIRC, the flag also tells you how long recorded copies can exist for - will this pay attention to that field? Will I be able to time-shift a show, but only by 60 or 90 minutes?
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The review site is unreachable, but thes /receiv ers/dvr/index.shtml
Dish Network DVR product line is here:
http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/product
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Time Warner will start deploying the Scientific Atlanta HD PVR soon as well. I can't wait. Right now I have a TiVo for normal TV that I can't use when I watch an HD feed. That's really cut in to my TiVo use as I normally use it to rewind and pause sports, which are commonly in HD now.
Can you skip commericials with this model?
I have the (Linux-based!) 721 dual-stream receiver/PVR. It is pretty good, with the latest software. It has had some flaky bugs, but it's still the best PVR I've ever used.
I'm sure the 921 will have some quirks too, but if it runs the same core PVR application, it should be pretty good.
I'm not planning on getting a 921 as I already watch too much TV as it is, and there's not enough HD stuff being broadcast yet to warrant the expensive display I'd need.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
This is exactly the kind of attitude that holds back technological progress in HDTV. I mean, without an audience, how can we expect broadcasters to pony up the dough required to send HDTV signals. The advertisers won't want to pay the premiums for HDTV slots that nobody watches!
It's up to the general public to adopt technology, or important innovations (like wasting time with TV) will never happen!!!
(tongue firmly planted in cheek...) ---
That's not Seth FINKelSTEIN. Troll! YHBT! Mod it down.
The 921 is based on the 721 software...
If any of you have ever used the 721, or really any Dish PVR... you'll know how pathetic and bug ridden dish PVRs.
One of the biggest issues with the 721 and 921 is the fact that they totally and utterly lack any sort of Name based recording. Every other PVR on the market, Tivo, Replay, UltimateTV, etc... all have name based recording, but Dish saw fit to leave this critical feature off.
This makes the 721 and 921 nothing more than a glorified VCR. The whole point of a PVR is to make recording easier and to handle the mundane, day to day tasks so you don't have to. Leaving off name based recording makes you search through the guide on a daily basis, hoping to find the programs that you want to record, instead of telling your unit to "Record anything with XXXXX in the title/description"
I switched to Dishnetwork from my UltimateTV and Tivo boxes, and was never sorrier I took the plunge. I always liked Dish over DTV, due to the superior customer service, but after this fiasco with these jokes of a PVR (which I paid far more than a Tivo with lifetime for) and it's just a VCR with a hard drive, I want to cancle my Dish service just out of spite. Unfortunately, I'm under a contract, and I hate DTV more than I hate Dish, so I'm pretty much stuck with Dish for the time being. As soon as Voom comes out with an HD PVR, I will be signing up for Voom.
As far as the 921 goes, I suspect it's going to suffer from many of the same bugs as the 721 does. Such as random reboots, crashing to the X desktop (requiring reboot), misfiring timers, timers recording until the HD fills up for no explicable reason, unit not responding to the remote, etc... I could go on and on with the problems on the 721 (and by extension, probably the 921) that are never addressed by the Dish developers... problems I never had with Tivo or UTV. They are very easy to fix some of these problems, but they just won't do it, because it would cut into their profit.
I never realized how much I relied on my UTV box to "do the right thing" until I got my 721, which was suppose to be superior. Now I come home at night and wonder if my programs will still be on my PVR after some wierd crash... I watch shows when I really don't want to, because I'm afraid that if I don't, I'll lose them. These are things that I never even thought of with my Tivo or UTV box.
Dish is also charging an outrageous and ridiculous price for the unit... $1000? Come on, you are gouging people because it's the only HD PVR on the market, plain and simple. I guess you gotta charge it while you can.
The bottom line is, if you've ever used another PVR, you'll hate the 921 (and the 721) because of all the bugs and total lack of features and brain dead UI. If all you've ever had is a VCR, then you'll like the 7 and 921's, because they ARE better than a VCR... but when compared to the PVR competition, the Dish PVRs are an utter and lasting joke... a travesty to the PVR buying public.
Realisitcally, if Dish would just add NBR, I would be less critical of the other flaws, but since that one glaring deficiency is being refused by dish to impliment, I have no sympathy for the company. NBR is the defining feature of a PVR, and Dish DOES NOT HAVE IT. All they have are glorified VCRs with a misleading lable.
Dish still has the best pricing plans for satellite service though, so it's a big plus in their favor.
I have an older Dish Network DVR Receiver (model unknown, it doesn't say on the front and I'm, not going to disrupt my video distribution system to find out) that has the worst firmware I have ever encountered in a consumer device. After replacing it three times, I concluded that it was firmware rather than hardware.
I can crash it, requiring a power up, just by hitting things too fast on the remote control. Whenever it decides to reload the program guide, it loses the ability to schedule a recording by hitting the "record" button! It has various other malfunctions where unrelated functions break other ones.
As one who does embedded software, I am ashamed for the profession about this lousy software.
The only good weather is bad weather.
DirecTV will be showing their HD-based TiVo DVR at January's CES. Pictures have already been leaked over the net, but I don't have the exact link. So that rather dampens the newsworthiness of Dish Network's wanna-be TiVo.
With Rupert Murdoch taking control of DirecTV shortly, expect a price war against both Dish Network AND the cable companies. I believe there was a speculative article linked to Drudge the other day about that.
I myself am tired of Comcast. Here in Sacramento, they are raising our rates again, with the pathetic excuse for them to recupe their investment in expanding pay-per-view. I don't use PPV and I believe it would've been a wiser investment to offer set-top boxes with TiVo built in. Now if DirecTV would offer a decent broadband service using leased space over the cable lines, that would be the winning choice...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
You're violating the DMCA. I'm not exactly sure how you are, but I'm sure you are. If you're sharing DVDs with the bro-in-law, then the MPAA isn't getting every last penny it's entitled to. And the DMCA was written to wring that last drop of blood from your lifeless grey corpse. The MPAA stormtroopers are probably subpeonaing Slashdot right this very moment to discover your identity.
I'm getting the Motorola DCT-6208 HDPVR in about 2 weeks for $3.95/month. It's not even close to a Tivo and only has 1 tuner, but the cost is next to nothing. I'd probably have to pay $500+ for a DirecTV HD Tivo. I am an ex-D* customer and would still be one if my current house wasn't in such a poor spot to receive local OTA HD channels. What is really needed is for Tivo to make a deal with Motorola to supply PVR software on their boxes, or for cable companies to bypass the horrible Moto boxes in favor of an all-Tivo cable box.
This looks great. I'm not ready to go to HDTV yet, so I was wondering about a cheaper model. Since i'm not in a major local area, so no locals over the dish.
Are there any Dish DVR which can also record over the air broadcasts other than this one? (Non-HDTV)
Normal DVD resolution is pretty crummy compared to HDTV ... The standard for HD-DVD was just recently agree'd upon, I believe, so normal DVDs will be obsolete for the most part if you have an HDTV .. Yeah, they'll work and look OKAY, but compared to them in High Definition, you'll be like "Oh man, i gotta rebuy EVERYTHING again??" .. It's that good!
(a little off topic)
There is a chance they could try to take away our fare use...
The argument of timeshifting would have been answered... even if we couldn't extract the video for archiving...
It has Firewire & USB connections on it, & it runs a variation of Linux. I think that the broadcast standard is MPEG-2, & that a later variation of this will burn DVDs.
I want one... It's important to archive The Daily Show for posterity.
The satellite and cable providers don't have the bandwidth to send much more HD content down.
They can up-sample any content to HD res, but without the bandwidth to make it look nice it will look horrible.
What we will have when HD is mandated in 2006 or whenever is a whole bunch of pixellated high resolution channels.
The whole thing is a complete waste of time before the carriers are ready.
Been a DishNetwork sub for 8 years now, and a Dish PVR user for a little over a year. I also have a TiVo (2 yrs old). There simply is no comparison. Going from the TiVO to Dish's PVR is like going from XP/OSX back to Windows 1.0. The interface is so horrible in comparison. It just plain sucks. AND the damn thing's buggy (I have to cold reboot it once every coupla weeks). AND it does weird things (stops buffering the current show if you play a recorded event, eg). And you can't easily add HD space.
I was all set to switch to DTV when their HD TiVo combo comes out... Problem is DirectTV may be owned by Rupert soon. Yech! Hate the idea of feeding money to that monster. Support The Evil Empire, or buy (vastly) inferior tech. Arg.
If only Dish would use TiVo instead of torturing their customers with their horribly inadequate PVR skillz.
When is someone going to invent a Digital Internet Recorder?
Life would be so much easier if I could just get new slashdot posts saved for later, so I could see them at a convenient time, rather than having to sit and click refresh all the time.
And, of course, being able to pause would make it much easier to be first post!
build it and they will come!
if they will not do that, then they can go out of businness.
Still no 1080p... which if i'm gonna blow $5k+++ for a TV and new VCR (try $9,999 for a 720p unit at best buy, yea right), it better support 1080p without any DRM.
Oh, and it better be under $500 if they expect Joe Public to buy it.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I can record HDTV from the satellite. I use a DVB satellite card point my dish to DISHNETWORK or EXPRESSVU(canadaprovider), and I can record to my hardrive. Or I can stream it to my DVHS and record it in a tape. And is free. Is better to stream the file to your DVHS that way you don't have to use your CPU for the MPEG2 decoding. It takes alot of CPU.
There is this nice program called mytheater
While the technical achievement itself is impressive, what has been ignored in this review is the total amount of disk storage that is required to store JUST ONE HOUR of high-def 1080i video uncompressed DTV signal (you got it, uncompressed, they cant mpeg encode on the fly with these things yet, its too processor intensive and the specialized hardware is expensive) is 35 GIGABYTES.
So in other words, you need basically an ENTIRE STANDARD TIVO's worth of storage allocated for just one hour. So if you want to store any decent amount of programs, youre gonna need 700 gig just to do 20 hours of 1080i programming. Thats 4 200 gig ATA drives if you want 800 gig. Thats a helluva lot of heat to be generated in such a small chassis not to mention a huge expense.
Whats needed for mass adoption of this technology is terabyte sized hard disks, because having to create a contiguous file system using a RAID of 200 gig drives is rediuclously impractical and expensive to do. Not to mention prone to failure.
Still looking for one for Digital Cable. Any ideas on THAT?
[insert witty comment here]
It's been over a year since I left. When people used to complain to me about some of their policies I'd almost always say "Well, sir I have cable."
It's the attitude of corporate management that leads to things like this, I'm sure the engineers wanted to add all of the nifty features that we have come to expect, but when management wants a product released by a certain date, features get ignored.
The 721 was nearly a year behind schedule. It does not surprise me that the 921 is full of shortcomings as well.
If you really want to complain, do this. Call 1-800-333-DISH and when you get a CSR, please be polite and ask to speak to a supervisor, the CSR will ask why. Say that you have a complaint, that only corporate management is empowered to address. The first person that you get will get his supervisor, in DishNetork parlance his "coach". That person will not be able to help either, tell the supervisor that you want to talk to someone from corporate or Soraya's Team. These are the people in the corporate HQ who report directly to Soraya Hesabi-Cartwright, one of the company's VPs. Take your complaints to them. They can get things done.