My HR10-250, the HDDirecTiVo, has died. It constantly shuts down with an overheat message, despite the fact that it's clearly not overheating. So now I have a quandary as to what to do.

I can lease a PVR from DirecTV, but it's not a TiVo, and I have to start another 2-year contract. I could find a replacement HR10-250, conceivably. I could drop DirecTV and get cable, where I could either pay for their non-TiVo, or pay a little bit extra for CableCARD access and get an (expensive) Series 3 TiVo. This would have the added benefit of getting me a better HD signal, as I currently have to watch HD OTA, and the transmitters are on the other side of the county.

Right now I'm leaning towards getting a new HR10-250, mostly because it's the easiest choice. Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

Well, I would say that I could hook you up with a used HR10-250, but DirecTV might have sent out the kill signal to these boxes. Ours "stopped working" on Friday. On Friday an installer came out and made some upgrades to our DirecTV system, which included the new dish and an HR20 in the family room. This unfortunately meant no Tivo in the main viewing area, but since our antenna stopped getting OTA HD signals, we didn't have a choice.

But the HR10-250 was reused in another room that had an HDTV. When we hooked it up, we kept getting error messages about the card, and after many hours on the phone with DirecTV, they pretty much told us tough luck and now the Tivo is essentially useless. We can still watch recorded programs, but we only get the preview channels. Even this would be okay, except for some unknown reason, when a DirecTivo is disconnected from its service, it is not possible to view your season passes! Granted, we should have written them down before the switch, but I think it was safe to assume that we'd have access to them afterward. So we had to guess when adding shows to the HR20.

Sorry, onto your issue:

I will say that Rob R is right, the HR20 is a nice unit. It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and there are a few things about the visual look of the UI that I like more than Tivo. For instance, everything seems crisper, but that's probably because Tivo stupidly used SD menus and icons for the HR10-250.

Personally, I'm looking forward to getting FIOS when I move into my new place in July. I know it's expensive, but I'm going with an S3 (it's down to $599 now, and should be lower by then). I was very excited to see that just today, Engadget had an article about a simple button hack for getting eSATA drives to work! (the HR20 can use eSATA drives already)

I'm with you, though. I just can't drop the Tivo service. I've had it for almost six years now, and there's not a smoother, easier, more pleasant UI out there.

What kind of error messages about the card? Was it something to the effect of "please reinsert your access card"?

I'll check again. I don't think that was it, though. Also, for some reason I'm no longer able to get video output from the component or HDMI outputs. I don't know if this is an issue with the TV (which is pretty new, so probably not) or the Tivo, but all I can output on is regular composite video.

Ah, but TiVo allows you to do that if you want. I can (could, I guess) record all the shows I want to watch and then watch them at my leisure rather than having to be at home when the shows are on. It becomes more like reading a book that I can pick up whenever I want.

Who do you use for internet? Can you save by bundling?

time to investigate MythTV ?

Know what you mean

We just had a "Heroes" weekend (cool show, now I know what the thread was about) great to watch 7 or 8 episodes in the space of a couple of days.

Stop for a bit to do some DIY (british custom on a bank holiday weekend), go back and watch some more with lunch... mmm, easy...

The benefit of Myth BTW is that the sky is the limit for storage - it's like having our own broadcast channel! - and we can have frontends in the bedroom and lounge - start watching in the lounge in the evening and finish the show in bed.

Kinda nice to set it to wake us up with a gentle music playlist in the morning too - no adverts, nothing too heavy, volume rising slowly...

I love my tech...

Actually, I'm really enjoying my mythbox too. I used KnoppMyth and it was really easy to get setup.

The only gotcha I experienced was that I didn't know I had to get a free account with Zap2It Labs to get my guide data.

Also, I setup an rss feed that allows me to download any programs I record in XviD format. Try that with TiVo.

Not if I go with CableCARD, but it's a good question.

Mine was perfectly legit and totally unhacked, too, FWIW.

Sorry, Tony, I was just joking. Still, it pisses me off that DirecTV couldn't do jack for us to get it working again. The box was moved from one room to another, and now they can't see it anymore? That doesn't make any sense.

I also called them about my problems with having no video output on component or HDMI. They spent 45 minutes essentially finding twenty different ways to tell me to check if the TV was on the right input. AHHHHH!!!

Ah, rereading your post, I understand what you meant, now. Phew.

For what it's worth, used HR10-250's on eBay are going for around $200. New Series3 boxes, from Amazon, are $606. If you want to maintain the status quo, a used HR10-250 may be the right answer, and it's relatively cheap.

For me, when I get back home in December, I'll be pondering all these options. OTA reception is excellent anywhere that I might want to live. As such, the only question is where I want to get my SD cable channels (e.g., Comedy Central) and the occasional HD cable channel (mostly HBO). Keeping my HR10-250 seems like an obvious strategy, but DirecTV doesn't support it any more and it's just a matter of time until it dies.

That leads toward the Series 3 + local digital cable. I'm not entirely jazzed about the outrageous prices of local cable, but it's at least easily available, and they'd be happy to also offer me Internet and phone service...

My experience with eBay is not the best (not the worst, either), so I'm inclined against that, although that's about the only place I'm going to be able to find another HR10-250.

I need to sit down and calculate a monthly bill comparison between the two options. FWIW, DirecTV is definitely not now head-and-shoulders cheaper than cable like it used to be.

I'm still at a crossroads, and will be until I'm in the situation that Bitt is going through, or they just shut off mpeg2. I love my HR10-250 and dunno what I'd do without it...

Rupert sucks.

- Jon

Can anyone explain how DirecTV got away with some features that Tivo was scrutinized for? For instance, there's a dedicated button on the HR20 remote for 30 second skip. Does the Series 3 even have that enabled by default? A more recent example would be that the eSATA port is enabled right out of the box on the HR20, while the Series 3's is "dead" (aside from the trick I mentioned earlier).

So how was it that Replay pulled off the entire skip thing anyway? What did they que on?

All-black frames, IIRC. Which is actually what networks cue on to automate starting commercial breaks. I remember Chris Carter complaining once that he couldn't fade to black during a segment in X-Files episodes because FOX would start commercials if he did it, so he always had to fade to dark grey.

Specifically, the ReplayTV looks for several sequences of all black frames at 30 second intervals. So, there's actually a delay of several minutes between when a commercial break ends and when it's identified it as a commercial break. Also, commercials that are longer or shorter can throw off the detection. Still, it works about 80-90% of the time, and when it doesn't, it's very simple to skip an arbitrary # of minutes ahead to compensate.

MythTV uses a similar method to do commercial detection. I don't use it, but I hear it's getting better than the 80-90% you quoted for replay. They also detect when the station's watermark comes and goes and include that into the decision as to whether they're at a commercial or not. More info here.

That's for local commercials. You have to remember that some commercials that are shown on network TV are national ads, whereas there are other blocks for local ads. The signals you're referring to are to signal the local station to start their local ads. The blank frames I'm referring to are for the main network broadcast.

So Bitt, what did you end up doing?

I'm curious, and I also wanted to let people know that you can get a Series 3 for $406 after rebate. It ends Saturday.

I'm curious, too. I dropped cable (fack you, Comcast) and went to wireless for my internet connection. I had the Comcast HD DVR which sucked, and now I'm looking around for other options. I would love a Series3 Tivo, but I don't want to go with cable again and I can't get FiOS. DirectTV is looking OK, but I would have to go with their DVR instead of the Hughes HR10-250 because they are switching their HD signal to MPEG4 which the HR10-250 won't read. I hear the HR10-250 will be useless in a year or so, and no new HD channels will work with it.

I haven't decided yet. My, uh, friends (yeah, that's the ticket) are still letting me watch recordings they made. I had decided to go with a used HR10-250, but if the move to MPEG-4 is that soon, and I can get a Series 3 for that "little", I may do that instead. I'll decide in the next few days.

A friend of mine got the DirecTV HD DVR. It doesn't totally suck, but it's not good. My "favorite" feature? The circular set of about twenty bright blue LEDs on the middle of the front panel that spin when you fast forward or rewind.

Did you guys see this article? It's speculation, but if it pans out it would keep many TiVo users subscribed to DirecTV.