Changing from DirecTivo to the DirecTV HR24 DVR

For a long time I put off the switch to HD television because doing so would mean giving up our cherished, 8-year-old Series 2 DirecTivo unit. The HD digital video recorder from DirecTV does not use Tivo's patented and deservedly popular user interface.

Finally the wait got too exasperating and we made the switch-over: a new, beautiful Samsung 46C8000 TV, a new A/V receiver, and the DirecTV HR24 DVR. (I ordered the HR24 from Amazon to be sure of getting that model, and not the slower HR23.) This is a summary of the main differences between these DVRs, as seen by a long-time Tivo user. The bottom line is: it's fine, no big problems.

This is a comparison of the standard Tivo user experience, to the DirecTV HR24 experience, as seen by a long-time user of the Series 2 DirecTivo.

The Box

As a physical box the HR24 is much less conspicuous than the DirecTivo. It is smaller in all dimensions, and lighter. Its case is midnight black with a subtle blue-glowing icon. Its primary output is HDMI, a big forward jump compared to the DirecTivo which lacked HDMI.

The Remote

The remote is not as comfortable or intuitive as the Tivo "Peanut." On the other hand, it isn't possible to pick it up and try to use it upside down, as my wife sometimes did with the peanut.

A significant feature that is new to Tivo users: the HR24 has an "off" mode. The DirecTivo was never turned off; it was always producing audio and video output unless you went through several menu levels to put it in Standby mode.

The HR24 remote has ON and OFF buttons. When you turn it off, the HR24 clears out of any menus, cancels any paused recording, shuts off its video and audio outputs and dims its front panel. Obviously it remains "on" internally because it makes timed recordings. The ON/OFF buttons can be programmed to turn your TV on/off as well, so that the TV and DVR come on together. You can also program the remote to operate a separate A/V receiver, but not with a single button-press.

Something else different: when the HR24 has been paused for more than a minute, it goes to a screen-saver mode in which a DirecTV icon wanders around a black screen. The Tivo did not do this; it would sit on a paused image indefinitely.

You can get deep into nested menus with the HR24 interface. However the remote has a dedicated BACK button for backing out of all menus in reverse sequence.

An Interface for the 80s

The first thing the Tivo user notices on meeting the HR24 on-screen user interface, is the cosmetic differences. The Tivo interface used calm, deep colors and had a polished look created by rounded corners, drop-shadows, aliased fonts, and subtle color gradients.

The look of the HR24 interface is anything but subtle and far from polished. It uses garish light-blue, black, yellow and orange colors. Every menu and window is flat and hard-edged: there's not a gradient or drop-shadow anywhere. The only concession to appearance is crudely pixillated rounded corners on some rectangular elements. Fonts, too, are unaliased and chunky. It's a surprise that an HD DVR, which will always be used with a 1920x1080, 24-bit screen, still uses interface elements that would look natural on a 16-color, 640x480 DOS screen of 1982! Twenty-five years of interface design progress ignored.

Cosmetics aside however, the functions that you command through this retro UI are in almost all cases the equal or better than Tivo's.

Playing Recorded Shows

With the Tivo, I most often went to the What's Playing List. Tivo provided a List button to get there, and so does the HR24. When scrolling through this or any other list, you can use Channel up/down to scroll by pages, just as with Tivo. Select a recorded program and press the Play button to start playing it, or hit the Red button to delete it.

A nice feature of the HR24 is a display of disk capacity used. Tivo lacked this feature.

Watching a live or recorded show, the controls are basically the same as Tivo. Play, pause, fast forward, rewind and jump back a few seconds are all similar. The FF button has four speeds, not three. Compared to Tivo the third speed is too slow and the fourth is uncomfortably fast. When you stop fast-forwarding, the HR24 jumps back a bit to compensate for reaction time, but it jumps further than Tivo did, and less predictably.

Tivo made single-frame advance and slo-mo quite easy. It is possible to engage slo-mo with the HR24; I have not found how to do frame-advance. On the other hand, the HR24 lets you set "bookmark" points in a recorded show so you can easily skip back to replay a favorite scene.

One Tivo play feature not easily replaced is Tivo's go-to-end button. On the HR24, the jump-ahead button doesn't go to the end. When playing at normal speed, it skips 30 seconds. If you are at any FF speed it skips 15 minutes. You can force a recording to its end (or to the real-time point if it is still recording) as follows: start FF at any speed, then press the skip-ahead button enough times to bring the recording to the end.

On Tivo, you could bail out of a program with the two-button sequence go-to-end, List. This was a quick way to bring up the Delete yes/no dialog. On the HR24, the same result is obtained with FF then skip (skip, skip...) to the end, and wait a few seconds until the delete dialog appears.

On DirecTivo, deleting a program moved it to a special folder from which you could recover it, sometimes days later. There is no such "trash can" folder on the HR24. A deleted program is gone immediately and forever.

Upcoming from Info

The HR24 has a dedicated INFO button that you can use to get info about a program at any time: while in a list of recorded programs, or while playing a recorded or a live program, or while browsing the on-screen guide. The displayed info includes a "first aired" date, useful for knowing when a program is a rerun.

Something that I always wanted in the Tivo interface was the ability to move easily from info about a recorded show, to a list of upcoming episodes of that show or to the Season pass manager. The HR24 provides this. The info panel brought up by the INFO button has a short menu of things to do, including finding upcoming episodes of the same show, finding other shows with the same performers, setting up to record the series, or going to the series options if the series is already being recorded. Again, you can do this while playing a program, or from the guide, or from search results, or the list of recorded programs. It's very handy.

Search

The search function of the HR24 is more accessible, more elaborate, and more useful than Tivo's Wishlists. You enter text in a similar way, by navigating a matrix of characters. But as soon as you begin entering text, search results begin to appear -- as with a Google search. The suggested results are quite good. For many searches, as few as two characters will produce the thing you want in the list of tentative results.

The most common search is for the name of a show, but you can also search a channel name (e.g. ESPN) to get a list of shows on that channel; or search a person's name and see all shows in which that person appears; or search a category (e.g. REALITY) and see all shows in that category. Of you can do a keyword search, finding every program whose listing contains that keyword. Once you have a list of shows by any means, you can browse in it, and hit Record or INFO on any one. You can also set "Auto-record" to record all shows that match a particular search, similar to Tivo's auto-recorded wishlists.

The last 15 searches you've done are available in a list so you can easily repeat them. The search also supports Boolean AND, OR and NOT functions and other special keywords. These are not documented in the user manual; you learn about them in online forums.

Performance

On internet forums there were many complaints about sluggish response of the previous DirecTV DVR, the HR23. The HR24 is apparently much faster. It is as responsive as the Series 2 Tivo in almost everything. The only place I have noticed any sluggishness is in the response to the RECORD button. Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to respond to this button. That's awkward because, if you press the button twice, you have requested recording the entire series of that program. So you learn to press once, firmly, then wait for the ® icon to appear.

Missing Suggestions

The only major Tivo function that the HR24 lacks is Suggestions. I miss my old weekly exercise of sitting down to go through 80 to 100 programs in the Suggestions folder, deleting the majority but intrigued by some. Suggestions should be easy to implement; the algorithm would be just like Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought X" feature. DirecTV could easily tell my DVR, "Customers who record the programs you do, also record these other programs, grab a few if you have space." I don't see why they don't do this.

No Regrets

I put off converting to HD and the DirecTV DVR for a long time out of reluctance to give up the Tivo user interface. Now that I've done it, the new environment is quite comfortable and usable. If a high-def DirecTivo ever does appear, I won't be in any rush to change back to it.