At 7:30pm, I decided that I wanted to record the new Ken Burns documentary, The War, so I could watch it later. It airs at 8:00pm. My Comcast DVR was mostly full, so I spent 15 minutes tediously clicking through the abominable user interface menus, deleting one recording at a time. As any experienced Comcast DVR owner knows, the more you diddle with the menus, the slower the box gets, and sure enough, my DVR started to slow to a crawl.
I managed to delete everything I wanted, and opened the Guide to plan the recording. I found The War on KQED's HD channel, clicked on the info button, and tried to click the "other times" button to see when all of the series episodes are airing. Nothing. The button simply wouldn't work no matter how many times I clicked it.
I decided to take my chances and set a "series recording", hoping that the DVR will pick up the other 5 parts of the series. I clicked the "record series" button, examined the useless options, and clicked "record".
Pop! Click! Whizzzz!
The DVR spontaneously reset itself, and after 4 minutes of rebooting and authorizing itself, the entire channel guide was "TBA". Which, of course, meant that I couldn't schedule any recordings. Such as The War, about to air in 10 minutes.
At 7:58pm, the channel guide reappeared showing all of the program info. I clicked at fast as possible, and managed to get the series recording scheduled just before the clock rolled over to 8:00pm.
For reference, the most basic functions that allow a DVR to function are:
Easily recorded, all 15 gigs of it to my Linux box using HDHomerun.
http://www.silicondust.com/
Of course you need something to play it back through your HD set. I use an AVeL Linkplayer2 but there are other network video players available for under $200.
I'd like to feel some sort of sympathy, but given the number of times I've said "Dude, buy a damn TiVo!"...
Seriously, no excuses anymore. Comcast's rollout is at least a year away and is still going to be on their flaky hardware.
(BTW - Who says JarJar wouldn't beat Scissors?)
