Life After GBPVR - A Cautionary Tale of Moving to a Cable Company DVR

[bdgbill]

I came to GBPVR in 2005. At that time there was no Tivo in Canada and Cable company DVR's were a pipe dream. My choices for recording TV were VHS or DIY with a computer. I found GBPVR after first looking into a group of people who were hacking Tivo's to work in Canada and deciding it was beyond me and then taking a long look at Myth TV and finally deciding that was beyond me as well. I got GBPVR working on a junk 600 Mhz IBM with one PVR-150, 100 gb hard drive and a dedicated cable box in a single afternoon. Over the next 7 years I moved the system to 3 different, progressively more powerful computers with bigger and bigger drives but always with the same lone PVR 150 and a single SD cable box. The last machine I built with great care and high quality compnents with the intention of finally upgrading to multiple tuners and HD. I got the machine put together and working and tossed the pvr-150 in 'temporarily" just to make sure everything was working. All that was left was figure out what I was going to use for capture sources and to buy a couple HD cable boxes. Unfortunately, that never happened.

While I was procrastinating over finishing my GBPVR machine, I got a call from my cable company. They offered me their latest and greatest DVR system for eight bucks a month with no contract, no minimum rental period no strings, return it any time. The box is made by Cisco, can record 2 channels while watching a third and of course can record HD onto it's 500 gb hard drive.

I am absolutely blown away by how poorly this "state of the art" DVR compares to GBPVR.

Disapointments include:

• A maddening 1.5 second delay for every button press on the remote. This alone is frustrating enough to return the unit.
  
• 3 seconds of black screen for every channel change.
  
• Search just doesn't work most of the time.
  
• Random "Your show was not recorded because of a technical problem" errors
  
• Random broadcast flag errors where "recording is not authorized"
  
• Less random mysterious failures where a show that is scheduled to be recorded does not get recorded without explanation. This has happened with "Saturday Night Live" many times for some reason.
  
• Impossible to expand storage. The hardware actually has an E-Sata port for attaching external drives but this funtionality has been killed by my cable company for some reason.
  
• If two shows overlap by one minute and the machine is out of tuners, it will refuse to record one of the shows. GBPVR was always smart enough to figure this out.
  
• Horrible, horrible GUI. Nothing can be changed. No "recurring recordings" menu. No "conflicts" menu. No "recent recordings menu". Recordings are organized alphabetically and that is the only choice.
  
• No functionality to prevent multiple recordings of the same episode.
  
• Most surprising of all is that the guide data is no better than and possibly worse than Schedules Direct. This was the one thing I was sure would be better. I'm still getting lots of generic descriptions of episodes rather an actual description of which episode was airing. This drove me nuts with GBPVR and I always blamed it on Schedules Direct.
  
• No multi-room capability. I never used this with GBPVR but always planned to put an extender in the bedroom eventually.
  

YMMV but I am very glad I didn't pay $600 for this thing or commit to rent it for 3 years.

So, Im researching capture sources again and planning a return to GBPVR (I guess NPVR now). Anyone have a setup controlling multiple cable boxes from within NPVR?

[pcostanza]

I finally got a DVR because my wife hated all the 'gadgets and boxes' needed. Puff! Anyway, I've had one for 2 years and it's worked flawlessly. Never missed a recording, holds lots of recordings and it's quiet.
For me, until I tire of paying the cable company for premium cable, nothing beats a cable card tuner. Now Ceton has a 6 tuner device so that if you have their extender (Echo) or an Xbox, every TV in the house can share 6 tuners with 1 cable card. Ahhh, it's great living in this age.

[mvallevand]

I use one STB with an HDPVR with NextPVR and OTA ATSC and it is nearly flawless and the combination provides me with everything I need. I have the timeshifting package ($3 monthly) which gives me the east and west coast feeds so it is almost another tuner so I don't need an STB With the HDPVR/Colossus family those remote key and tunig speed and issues will translate into a 5-10 second change. You should really give OTA ATSC a look I suspect it can be pretty good in Montreal especially if you are bilangue or you can use an antenna to get the Burlington channels.

Paul, unfortunately I live in Canada like bdgbill, and there is no CableCard option here, and for the most part no clear QAM, so our choices even with WMC are extremely limited.

Martin