Top positive review
3 people found this helpful
Working fine so far, except for...
By M. Kenny on Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2012
I read the reviews and decided to purchase one of these simply for "time shifting", recording shows I am not available to watch. I do not have cable or satellite and watch mostly PBS. I hooked it up and connected it to my OLD outdoor antenna that I used for years with my analog CRT TV. I have a new DTV now, and the recorder scanned all the same channels as the TV (too many, I had to go through the list and eliminate about 2/3s of them). The picture and sound are excellent, as good as on the TV, and the remote works fine but it needs to be pointed DIRECTLY at the recorder. I do not mind the military time as it eliminated the possibility of setting the recorder for 3PM instead of 3AM which you wanted. Most of the time I use the program guide as it is so simple, highlight and click and the icon appears next to the show and I am done. The one problem is, I used the set up menu and set the recorder for captioning and when I watch a show "live" through the recorder the captioning is there but when I play back a recorded show it is not. If I click "CC" on my TV remote a box on the screen says "not available". The captioning works fine on the TV by itself (without the recorder). As someone commented the manual is not helpful. If anybody has a comment please let me know. Updated 10/3: The comment that DVRs are not required to have CC as yet was informative. I had another problem with the audio, it would drop out for one second about every 10 seconds, on live and recorded material. The fix for this was to unplug the DVR overnight and the next day all was back to normal and has been fine for the last 2 weeks.
Top critical review
Sometimes it works
By B. Meredith on Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2013
Yes it's better than a VCR and even has some good features, but it's a clumsy device that will probably confuse and frustrate you. For example the HDMI audio occasionally stops working, as other reviewers have noted. The solution is to unplug the device which also means you have to reset the clock. The automatic time set should make this a snap, however it tends to miss the first 30 seconds of our shows so we have to manually tweak the clock ahead by 30 seconds. The program guide is extremely unreliable, sometimes showing a couple days worth of shows, sometimes nothing. However it's so slow that you can't tell if it's going to eventually show you more, or just have a staring contest with you. The lack of programming means that most of your shows will be recorded manually (like a VCR) and it doesn't auto-detect the program name so your recording will simply display the channel, date and time. This makes it very difficult to browse through your shows, especially as your list grows long. Sometimes it records the wrong channel. Yep, it often thinks channel 3 is channel 13. And channel 13 is often missing from my recording options for reasons I cannot fathom. So we tune into our favorite show only to find that it has recorded the news or Access Hollywood instead. This is inexcusable. My wife is ready to throw this in the trash, and I'm frustrated enough that I might actually subscribe to cable again, or pay the ridiculous amount TiVo wants for one of their recorders. Unfortuantely there don't seem to be many good options for people who don't value TV enough to spend a fortune on it.
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