Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)So I recently switched from Dish Network to DirecTv, and this is the box I chose. It has a great feature list, full HD resolution support (1080p only w/ HD on demand movies), good storage capacity, and uh ... well that's about all I expect a box to do. While the box works fine for watching television and such, it is unbelievably slow to respond to remote commands.
When navigating the guide, making menu changes, or browsing recordings this thing is slow. Not sure if it's just a software problem or what but it is pretty frustrating.
Recent firmware update added 1080p on demand support, but failed to address the speed of the box.
Has some other cool features, e.g. able to stream music, videos, and pictures from a networked pc. Pretty cool in theory but only the music and pictures will work unless all of your video files are in the mpeg-4 format ... no .avi support. On top of that the box is even slower to respond with streamed content.
All in all the box performs really well. Recording individual episodes or whole seasons is easy and works for me 100% of the time. The DirecTv to PC software lets you watch any dvr content on your pc which is a nice bonus. The HD channel selection you get with DirecTv, if you get the full bundle, is pretty extensive. One thing ... I miss travel channel HD. Not available. /sad face.
This box is great at what it does, it just does everything incredibly slowly. Hopefully a future firmware update will address this, but in the meantime I'm going to be really frustrated.
*****EDIT*********
Just wanted to update this review a bit. As others have mentioned I do get the occasional a/v skip with recorded material; it's nothing major and doesn't really bother me, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get one or two skips in any recording. I have to wonder if this is in any way related to the way disk space is managed by the box.
Some other thoughts
I connected an external drive, Seagate 1.5tb, to see if I was able to replicate the a/v skipping in recordings. After two months daily use the a/v skips started to appear, so it's not a faulty harddrive. This drive had worked perfectly on a win7 system, never stuttering even under heavy simultaneous read/write loads.
Another minor annoyance is that using an external drive doesn't actually add storage, not in the literal sense; the external drive behaves as a replacement drive, meaning all newly recorded content goes directly to the external drive while your internal drive remains empty. Seems pretty stupid to me.
Aside from the a/v skips the box is still functioning normally. It's still slow as all get out, but it works. Also glad to have the Travel Channel HD added to the lineup, not reflective at all of this hardware but it bears mentioning.
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