DIRECTV HD/DVR RECEIVER (HR22)

After many very happy years with standard definition DirecTV using a Hughes DVR and Tivo, we went with high-def in July (2008). Love the TV set (another brand), hate the HR22 DVR and the kludgy service. The menus are not intuitive at all. The delay between the remote and the response on screen is awful. Often you will run over many selections after continuing to hit the remote in expectation of a response. Some on-screen menus are different from the manual. We experience audio drop-outs and pixelation in recorded programs. Several times everything has stopped and required us to reset the system.... with the corresponding long waits for information to download. I have heard alarming mechanical sounds coming from the box. Ever heard a hard drive before it crashes?

This is the third box DirecTV has installed - the first two failed. And it's no better.

I went looking to buy my own HD DVR, but I can't find one. Everything seems to be for cable only.

My advice? Wait until DirecTV and Tivo finish their remarriage vows and get hardware from Tivo.

So I recently switched from Dish Network to DirecTv, and this is the box I chose. It has a great feature list, full HD resolution support (1080p only w/ HD on demand movies), good storage capacity, and uh ... well that's about all I expect a box to do. While the box works fine for watching television and such, it is unbelievably slow to respond to remote commands.

When navigating the guide, making menu changes, or browsing recordings this thing is slow. Not sure if it's just a software problem or what but it is pretty frustrating.

Recent firmware update added 1080p on demand support, but failed to address the speed of the box.

Has some other cool features, e.g. able to stream music, videos, and pictures from a networked pc. Pretty cool in theory but only the music and pictures will work unless all of your video files are in the mpeg-4 format ... no .avi support. On top of that the box is even slower to respond with streamed content.

All in all the box performs really well. Recording individual episodes or whole seasons is easy and works for me 100% of the time. The DirecTv to PC software lets you watch any dvr content on your pc which is a nice bonus. The HD channel selection you get with DirecTv, if you get the full bundle, is pretty extensive. One thing ... I miss travel channel HD. Not available. /sad face.

This box is great at what it does, it just does everything incredibly slowly. Hopefully a future firmware update will address this, but in the meantime I'm going to be really frustrated.