Tuesday, February 17, 2009

DVR

First of all, I want to say that I very strongly dislike my DVR. Before we moved in here, we had DISH and i loved their DVR and remote and everything about it... When we moved in here, we switched to Comcast because basic cable was included with our HOA fees. After about a year, we decided we really missed our DVR and decided to upgrade through comcast for an extra $15ish/mo...

Well... I really really don't like it. The quality of HD programming is lower than SD programming was on the basic cable. It's yucky. It freezes up often... it's not intutive and unpredictable.

That said, It's better than no DVR and cheaper than DISH or DirecTV or anything else since we will be paying the HOA regardless. I have really liked being able to keep a couple of kids shows on hand for Squirt (Little Einsteins is one of her favorites) and play them at any time.

So I'm wondering... What are your top DVR/Tivo'd shows? For me, it's probably Friends, Scrubs, and Jon & Kate plus 8. These are shows I wouldn't watch otherwise because they're either on at stupid times or I don't want to wait through commercials or both. There are also, of course, the shows that I would watch even without the DVR: House, Lost, Life on Mars, The Office... Almost a new show for every day of the week! So exciting :D

10 comments:

  1. I love using my DVR for American Idol, How It's Made and other reality shows.

    I am sorry to hear about the picture quality and tiling (freezing up) problem with your DVR. I work for Comcast and I can reach out to my contacts to look into this for you. If you are interested in my assistance, please send me the phone number on the account so that I can assist.

    Thanks in advance and I am looking forward to assisting you.

    Mark Casem
    Comcast Corp.
    National Customer Operations
    We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com

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  2. ooh, I can get help? This is exciting...

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  3. So, does comcast hire people to go search the web for whoever's dissing them? Maybe some of that money could be dedicated to developing a better product, or improving traditional customer service. Just a thought.

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  4. American Idol (so I can skip commercials and bad singing), All My Children (so I can keep up), and The Office (so I can replay the parts that make me laugh a LOT.)

    Love you!

    Mom

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  5. I know when we had comcast (for the same reasons you did) we went through 3-4 DVR's trying to find one that didn't glitch out on our saved items. In the end, we just got our media center PC and it DVR's shows for us. We've never really had a problem. :)

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  6. If Comcast wants to improve their public image, stalking random blog users is not the way to go about it; as a point of note, Mark, your drive-by blurbing, while a good effort to take care of customers is misguided. I know, you're probably just Joe Shmoe in a cubicle assigned to troll the random hits some RSS feed-eating bot spews.

    Hopefully Comcast is still monitoring this.

    Take this as high as you can take it; as one of the country's premier ISPs, Comcast is core to one of the few things still driving this country's economy: the internet. Trying to tax websites like Youtube or ESPN by intentionally damaging network neutrality will destroy this country's internet user base. Futzing with QoS-ing your customers traffic? You're turning off gramma and grampa internet user. They're just going to shut it off, quit, and not use it anymore.

    What am I saying?

    YOU'RE GOING TO DESTROY THE US ECONOMY.

    It's in a bad spot and you're going to finish it off. Meatheads. Try thinking of your customers as people and not just numbers.

    Your DVRs don't work well. Try doing something more pro-active than trolling RSS. FIX THEM. If that doesn't seem profitable-- ADVERTISE THE SUPERIORITY OF YOUR DVRs. I am well aware of why you're shilling poor DVRs, you bought them and you need a return on investment. A firmware upgrade to your DVRs could go a long way toward improving their performance, in addition to providing better features AND it requires no new investment in hardware, only development time.

    The sheer bass-ackwardness of this Comcast program galls me.

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  7. Oh, yeah I would probably do a media center pc over the dvr. We did have one for a while but never really got it set up. I also have been thinking about using our mac mini as a media center pc, but I don't know if there is a good operating system or program or whatever to use for that kind of thing on mac... I'm not really sure how the whole media center pc thing works. I would definitely be leaving that up to frik.

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  8. Comcast isn't the only company out there who pays their employees to actively find the clients that they have wronged, and try to make things right. Personally, if a company is willing to reach out on an individual level, I applaud them. Plus, a DVR is probably one of the best things ever invented ... watch your favorite shows WITHOUT commercials? BRILLIANT!!

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  9. The only thing I miss about Comcast is... the fact that I got additional channels, But hey, you know what remedies that? Downloading them online (commercial free) and watching them on my media center PC. Most of the time I didn't even watch the additional channels as much as I had them on while I fell asleep. Yep.

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  10. Psych and Monk... they come on really late on Friday nights so we wouldn't watch them without DVR, but they are such awesome shows. If you're into murder mysteries and comedy. Which, who isn't?

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