DirecTV HR20-700 is a poor attempt at making junk
A month ago I received my HR20-700 from DirecTV. After months and months of waiting I would finally be able to record the HD programs that I like to watch every week. I've had an RCA DTC-210 HD receiver for some time and it's worked flawlessly with both OTA and satellite delivered HD feeds, but when it comes to recording my DirecTivo has always carried the load. So imagine my excitement when I finally get the call that the HD DVR is available. Now I revert to one unit vs. two and have the best of both worlds, right? Wrong! Initially I reviewed this unit fresh out of the box and at a cursory glance it looked promising. Having used it for a month now, I've determined, the HR20-700 is almost worthy of the junk pile.
If you search online for reviews of the HR20-700 you'll quickly find it's got more than just a few issues. I guess the silver lining in this cloud is the fact it apparently has less issues now than it did a few months ago so that, at least, is encouraging. However, as a developer, if I released for general use a product that has as many issues as this unit does, I'd be fired pretty quick. Initially there were reports the unit would be offered to existing HD subscribers as a free upgrade, but that's certainly not the case. It's a solid $299 upgrade and no amount of sweet talking seems to be able to budge that number. After using the unit I can understand why, the support costs have to be astronomical.
So what's wrong with the unit? Lots of little things. There's the expected complaint that it's "not my Tivo", the entire interface is not very user friendly. My first question is, why did DirecTV find it necessary to reinvent the wheel? My DirecTivo just plain works. Never had a major issue with it. It gets every program and has never frozen. The HR20-700 is very hard to navigate, the screens aren't intuitive, I spent a good thirty minutes trying to figure out how to record a "season pass". When you do get it configured to record something, it's a crap shoot whether or not it actually records the program. The money saved in licensing the Tivo software cannot, remotely begin to compensate for the amateurish interface that's being delivered on the HR20-700. It almost seems as if DirecTV chose to deploy the software and the unit to the field in order to "work out the bugs" at the consumers expense.
Then there's a whole host of issues with the feeds themselves. I will say that since the most recent software update I've not noticed any pixelation in the HD broadcasts, but prior to that, HD was virtually an unusable feature, especially if you were trying to record it. Another problem I ran into this weekend is the audio is connected to my stereo system via optical cable, and it's unusable. All I hear are pops and the occasional tidbit of sound from the audio. This happens with both the HD feeds and recorded shows, but seems to be fine for standard definition programs.
Then there is the POS remote. What a joke this thing is. It only marginally supports the tv and I have a 2 year old Hitachi so that shouldn't be a problem. My Tivo remote was at least smart enough to manage the tv's internal menu, the HR20 remote can barely turn the thing on. At first it worked flawlessly but now, it's decided it can't operate the mute or the volume on the tv. This started all of a sudden, and all of a sudden it will start working again. So far I can't place a pattern for it, and no amount of fiddling with the units will get it to start working until it decides it wants to. There's no apparent interference that I can find, and when it goes brain dead, reprogramming does not fix the problem.
In short, the HR20-700 is a waste of a good $299. I realize that it's "new technology" and there are people out there that are willing to put up with the headaches of working out the "issues", I'm not one of them. I'm past the time I'm going to sit and spend hours upon hours trying to figure out why my system all of a sudden stopped working. The rule of thumb is: "If it was working and you changed nothing and it stops working, the problem isn't yours". My expectation is simple. I pay $299 for a unit that does such and such and I expect to get a unit that works and does what it's advertised without having to spend half my life getting it to work.
I'll give the unit 2 stars out of 5, simply because a lot of the idiot issues seem to be getting fixed via software upgrades so there is a flicker of hope. However, the unit is more of an alpha or beta product and should never have been released to the general public until it was solid. Let the tech heads that want to spend countless hours chasing these issues, do just that, but don't call me and play it off like the device is consumer ready when it's a far cry from that. If your looking for an HD DVR from DirecTV my suggestion is to wait. For now I'm still running the DirecTivo in the same room so I at least have a fall back option, which means I program everything twice. The saving grace is, I don't believe there is a better option out there as competitors seem to have issues of their own, so once again the consumer gets hosed at the expense of competition. Hopefully this will improve without a unit upgrade but as of now, if I had it to do over, I'd wait another 6 months before looking into this option.
Comment by J.P. on 1 January 2007:
We became DirecTV customers on Nov. 30 and left them on Dec. 28th, having cancelled the agreement on Dec. 1st when we discovered our salesman had outright lied to us about the availability of distant network programming. So, we sent a certified letter to the DirecTV legal department to let them know that we had only signed up for their service because of the DN channels.
We then went into a “trial process” with free programming, while awaiting the status of our distant network waiver requests, which ultimately were all denied by the local broadcasters. During this same time period, our new HR-15 DVR quit working. After several attempts to troubleshoot it, the Tech Support declared that our access card was dead for some reason. After only 23 days usage. Great quality control there.
Having been DISH customers for 10 years, we also found the GUI for DirecTV to be clumsy and poorly thought out. Especially the part that controls recording a weekly series program. Worse yet, the manual is useless. The user manual is so bad, I thought of writing one myself.
Someone in Development needs to get canned for sure - as a former software validation analyst I agree with you that the GUI is terrible, that it has bugs that are unacceptable and that the GUI, the bugs, the manual and the access cards need to be fixed right away.
We dropped DirecTV after 28 days and are back to DISH network - and are happy once again. It was like a month in hell to use their gear and lousy software. Their only selling point over DISH is the one channel with Free concerts from top bands, but with DISH you get more movie channels for the same price as DirecTV, better equipment and a better interface. Best of all, you get 30 days to try the system and can return it if you are not satisfied. DirecTV has no such satisfaction guarantee and would have a huge number of users returning their crap in the first 30 days if they really knew the full details about their system and programming. Do your homework before you sign up for DirecTV - you’ll be glad you did. We wish we had never heard of them!
Comment by Adam on 28 June 2007:
The HR20 is a hunk of garbage for sure. I’ve had two since Feburary and have waited on long promised fixes which are just barely trickling or have never came.
I have been a DirecTv subcriber for atleast 6 or 7 years now. I had the HDTivo and it work flawlessly with no problems, maybe my only compliant was slow reaction time from time to time.
But these HR20s are just unusable. The one in my living room atleast functions and I’m able to watch TV, but on HD channles espically the MPEG4 encoded channels off thier new HD service are horrible. The picture is still a pixelated mess (compared to the picture off local antenna) sometimes I even get a cartoonish looking over exageration of colors on the MPEG4 HD stuff. I also get points where the picture will free for a second and then begin to act like its fast forwarding in slow motion to catch up. At this point the sound sync goes to hell. Now the picture is out of sync with the sound and it seems like a bad Japeneese fighting movie. Its even worse while recoding MPEG4 content as the sound is always out of sync with the picture. The user interface really sucks and is not intuitive at all, it will take you forever to figure out how to record a season pass. Plus there is no way to switch back and forth between one tuner and the next like Tivo and also no option for slow motion.
And those are the problems I have with the reciever in my living room, which are just minor frustrations compared to the HR20 in my bedroom. This one is pretty much non functional. On the off ocassions that it does work the picture output from the HDMI output is pixelated mess on every channel. When changing channels it takes about 1 minute or two just to change the channels. That means if you hit channel up or channel down it goes to a black screen for a minute before a picture is displayed. Same sound sync issues with this reciever. Plus this one has a bad habit of freezing constantly. Sometimes the picture will freeze for a minute or more but will then resume working other times it will just freeze and you have to unplug it to get it to become responsive again. On avaerage this can happen serveral times a day or if I’m lucky once a day. Other times when I do have to reset the reciever the reciever wont even power on in some instances. I have to sit there moving all my stuff reach back and unplug the power cable for a few minutes, plug it back in and hope it will power on. If not I have to keep doing it until it decides to power on. From time to time I cannot even rewind a program or record with this one! This one is a heap of garbage and D* still refuses to replace it.
I am very disapointed by the response and attuitude of DirectTV support reguarding this issues. It seems that thier stance is that there are no issues with these recievers and if there are they are just a vocal minority. A simple Google search will prove otherwise. Finally thier only solution seems to be the red reset button, or unplugging the coax ins from the sat and reseating them. But you can only do that so many times. Plus every time you reset this thing it takes about 10 minutes on average to boot it up. This seems like some beta test garbage that they dumped on me after my HDTivo’s powersupply went. They won’t replace it blame me for causing the problems and they won’t even give me any discounts. So far as me being on thier A list it doesn’t really matter. I am pretty much on the verge of dumping it and getting a Series 3 Cable Card Tivo. The only reason why I kept them around in the first place was for NFL Sunday Ticket, but even now the prices for Sunday Ticket are getting ridicously expensive.
Even the Direct TV support community on DSS Fourm have an attuitude that hey, you paid $300 a piece for these boxes, but hey you just have to be paintent while they develop and try new things on your dime. For me this attutide is unaccpetable when it comes to consumer electronics. This things should just work.
Comment by Ekim on 17 October 2007:
I’ve had the HR20-700 for about a month now. It has worked flawlessly except for every once in awhile, the sound will cut out, but come right back if you change the channel.
The only other issue is that sometimes, I’ll get a channel and everything will be purple (peoples clothes, their faces, surroundings, etc). Again, change the channel and the problem goes away.