Comcast DVR: A Piece of Junk
November 19th, 2006
People have long recommended that I get a TiVo because it’s awesome and has revolutionized the way they watch TV. I ended up making my own TiVo and realized that they were right…but my box ended up crashing after a few months (it was an old computer).
So I ended up buying what I thought was the same thing as a TiVo, the Comcast DVR. People were quick to tell me that they weren’t the same, and that Comcast’s DVR was a poor alternative.
At first I didn’t believe them, but now I do.
This Comcast box is a piece of junk. It barely does the one job it’s supposed to do — recording programs on time — and it doesn’t have any nice features or frills.
My overall biggest complaint is that it has a lousy user interface that is very difficult to use. It’s very cryptic and not at all user-friendly. Here are some more specific complaints:
- The box is not able to handle shows that start at unusual times. For example, many networks now start or end their shows a few minutes late (to keep viewership or something). Comcast’s DVR cannot deal with that at all, so what does it default to doing? Nothing. It just does not record the shows. It kept me away from the last episode of The Office, so it’s walking on thin ice.
- There is no easy way to transfer recorded material to another computer or media. If you record a TV show or movie, there is no convenient or built-in way to send it to your computer, copy it to a portable hard drive, or burn it to a DVD. It’s funny because there are plenty of connectors on the box (e.g. Firewire, ethernet, RCA jacks), but none of them are activated; they are all dead. Nice touch.
- Worst of all (almost) is that the Comcast box doesn’t display the time, just the channel. This is very annoying. There have been many nights when I fell asleep in front of the TV and woken up in the middle of the night, only to be confused because the “time” was 67.
I think it’s about time I got a TiVo.