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July 14th, 2012

Yet Another Reason the Comcast DVR Stinks

We live in a world where iPhones, iPads, and Android phones exist. These devices are designed and engineered to be high-performance miniature computers. But the Comcast DVR exists and is terrible.

Here’s another reason.

There’s a guide of channels, of course, and the DVR allows one to set up “Favorites” lists. Notably the guide doesn’t filter at all to show the channels that one actually gets – it’s all channels, including all 940 sports-related pay networks. Worse, searching for a title will return results on channels that one doesn’t get. Worse still, the DVR will let you record these shows – so you’ll get a recording of a black screen. How… nice?

But I digress slightly. A couple of weeks ago I decided to put together a Favorites list of the channels we receive. It was a huge pain in the ass: I had to manually change channels, check if there was a signal, and then add it to the list. I also had to watch for SD v. HD; some SD channels included a “watch in HD” button on their channel info popup, and some didn’t, even if there was a corresponding HD channel.

After about 40 minutes of routine button-pressing, the list was complete. There were tons of channels we didn’t know we received, and it was glorious!

Then we had a small power outage last week, and all of our personal settings – including the Favorites list – were gone.

The Comcast DVR is a piece of crap. It’s only in my house because their internet service is the fastest, best option we have.

Posted in Consumer Commentary, Technology

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