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Current Crop Of HDTV Recorders Compared
rbrander links to this "nice review of all the HDTV Recorders from the Washington Post: DirecTV's based on the TiVo wins for best interface, but Dish Network's gets a few nods. There's also a nice swipe ('...spectacularly stupid decision') at JVC's for allowing only (copy-protected) Firewire input to the one HDTV tape recorder on the market."
HDTV capture cards have a slight advantage over typical TV capture cards because they don't have to digitize anything from analog, they just have to remember the bitstream they were fed from the channel.
Their disadvantage is that HDTV can be quite the high-bandwidth application, and that means the limitations of the PCI bus, and even the AGP connection can sometimes cause quality loss. PCI Express seems to be the solution to that in the pipeline, and that's most likely what the mainstream vendors are waiting for. An HD card on the market today has to be labeled as an "early adopter" model.
On the other hand, maybe this is a technology that you want to be an early adopter of to avoid cards that end up getting crippled by "broadcast flag" laws.
A codebase split seems to have happened when the DirecTiVo units officially took on the name of "DirecTV DVR with TiVo service" and the monthly subscription price got halved from $9.95 to $4.95. Near that time, the fees for standalone TiVos moved upwards from $9.95 to $12.95...
And at that point the DirecTV code froze, while development for the standalone TiVos continued. Apparently, DirecTV now must pay for any new features they want added to the DirecTV DVRs, meanwhile TiVo continued to push its latest stuff out for free to their direct subscribers. All of the things that a standard Series 2 TiVo can do that a Series 2 DirecTV DVR cannot were added after that point in time.
I know some (read most) people will think I am crazy but I recently purchased the DirecTV HD Tivo. I have had the unit for just over a week now and absolutely love it.
:) I know I know I know.. justify myself all the way to hell.
The price: 999.00 (ouch, don't tell my wife)
I have had DirecTV HDTV for about 6 months and really hated not being able to record the shows I like to watch. I found myself using my hacked/upgraded tivo (series 1 non-hd) to watch shows that also are aired in HD simply because I like skipping commercials.
The quality of recorded shows are simply amazing. Especially Disovery HD and movies on HBO-HD. Very nice sound as it keeps the DD 5.1 soundtrack.
Was it worth the 1000.00 I paid for it? Well, I priced out building a similar HTPC (Home theater PC) with 2 HD tuners and 2 OTA tuners and it was more expensive to roll my own. Also, mythTV does not worth well with direct (from what I have read). So I do believe it was worth the 1000.00 considering it does come with a 250gb hard drive (150.00).