Junk. Find used DirectTV R10 (made by Tivo) instead
Pros:
I see none.
Cons:
It doesn't work, period.
The Bottom Line:
Low marks for everything because R15 just doesn't work, and what doesn't work doesn't exist.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Being a software engineer myself, I am truly ashamed to see this misery made by my collegues from a company called NDS. R15 is -- let's put it mildly -- a disaster.
Let's start from fast forwarding; the guys didn't figure the art of positioning in compressed stream. Trick: inject aux timing info into MPEG stream and add subindex.
If there was any problem during the show, entire recording becomes unavailable (no MPEG stream -- no time info -- cannot play back). Solution: see above.
Hmm, basics are not nailed yet. Let's see how the rest works.
Apparently, not very well. Receiver tends to lock up on the left and on the right (e.g. right now, right after full reset [via menu, it wipes it clean], it is searching for "Red Wings & Sports, Hockey" for 20 minutes). In fact, the list of bugs is so long that I spent 30 minutes on the phone with DirecTV enumerating bug after bug after bug -- all are easy to repro, all are pretty basic stuff (to the honor of DTV, they listened and recorded). Trick: NDS, please invest into test team -- you really, really need one.
Finally, menus are simply terrible. Trick: NDS, please invest into UI engineers and usability testing.
Conclusion: R15 is such a far cry from usable product that I do not even know where to start. Sufficient to say that my family watches old [non-timeshifting] DirecTV box in the kitchen most of the time; "newest and bestest" receiver from DirecTV in family room is completely unusable (hmm, it is still searching for "Red Wings". Gosh boy, the game is tomorrow at 7:30 PST!).
PS: somehow Tivo R10 managed to store much more stuff on "70 hr" disk than R15 on "100 hr".
