# What main things would make you happy ?



## Bobman (Jan 3, 2006)

We all know an update should be coming in the next few weeks but nothing about what it does. 

What would you like to see fixed or added in this release ?


Some of the things I would like are:


SL first run / repeat issue fixed

remove or increase the SL / TDL limits

skip to tick

faster 30 second advance

fix the black screens and freezing on recorded shows

only one press to use the guide

increased previous searches or add a way to make some permanent

speed everything up

add "please wait" type screens so you knows its doing something and not locked up

fix the channels you receive list so it shows the correct channels not all of them.

Either add movies and stuff instead of all DirecTV commercial shows
to VOD or give option to use space for our recordings.

fix colors on channel logos

ability to change the menu colors (I had this on a Sony SAT-A1 and SAT-A3 receiver 10+ years ago).


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## qwerty (Feb 19, 2006)

A biggie you missed - dual buffers.

- The ability to toggle between two recordings with the prev button (for football  )

- The ability to toggle through your (unlimited) favorites by repeatedly pressing the guide button as described in other threads.

If we're talking pipe dreams...

- The ability to edit my recordings (remove comercials)

- The ability to download to PC (OK, Mac too  ) via the USB port.


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## MercurialIN (Jul 17, 2006)

I agree with the above posts but I'd like to add: I'd like to see the Caller ID fixed. Mine is still not logging any calls nor showing on screen notices, it hasn't since July.


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## sheridan1952 (Mar 16, 2006)

How about not having a problem viewing programs that have been recorded and have a period of a loss of signal.


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

A consistent "jump back" feature. Pick a specific number of seconds and stay with it.


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## Lantian (Aug 26, 2006)

like comcast dvr, set sl but only that channel and/or that timeslot etc


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## morgantown (Nov 16, 2005)

Jump to end AND beginning (if it does jump to beginning -- I missed it). 

Dual buffers...and of course record what you want (get the first run shows 99.999%) when you want, on whatever channel the show pops up on (for the old shows).

EDIT: Speed up the active features (talking about the NFL stats on NFLST), sometimes I don't think they are working due to the delay...other times they don't work unless you change a channel and go back.


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

morgantown said:


> EDIT: Speed up the active features (talking about the NFL stats on NFLST), sometimes I don't think they are working due to the delay...other times they don't work unless you change a channel and go back.


If the active features are going to be running like they were today....no need. I don't need them that much to wait 20-30 seconds for scores or stats to come up.


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

Also SLs for the same program on different channels or all channels?


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## morgantown (Nov 16, 2005)

Wolffpack said:


> If the active features are going to be running like they were today....no need. I don't need them that much to wait 20-30 seconds for scores or stats to come up.


Today was the first day I took the R15 back out of the box after many months. The interactive is "okay" but is deserves some attention. I want to watch the game and then get some extra info...not have my game interrupted waiting for extra info. Perhaps today was just a fluke?



Wolffpack said:


> Also SLs for the same program on different channels or all channels?


Thinking along the lines of saying record "Cheers" on whichever channel it is on next... All channels would suit that example just fine. I can't think of an example of wanting a specific program on only one or two channels would do any better.


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## bearymore (Sep 1, 2006)

Limit search to channels received. Autorecord of searches is utterly useless without this.

Increase autorecord/SL limits.

Fix the horrendous problems and inconsistencies with FF and RW.


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

morgantown said:


> Today was the first day I took the R15 back out of the box after many months. The interactive is "okay" but is deserves some attention. I want to watch the game and then get some extra info...not have my game interrupted waiting for extra info. Perhaps today was just a fluke?


Last week was not that bad. I sat at one point today for 30 seconds waiting for STATs to appear. I didn't use it after that and don't plan on using it any more. Took WAY too long. 



morgantown said:


> Thinking along the lines of saying record "Cheers" on whichever channel it is on next... All channels would suit that example just fine. I can't think of an example of wanting a specific program on only one or two channels would do any better.


But before any of that could happen DTV would have to fix the debacle they created with "channels I receive". You can't tell your DVR to record Cheers on any channel I receive when the brain dead unit thinks you receive everything. :nono2:

Earl, what's the latest on this "channels I receive" bit?


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## saleen351 (Mar 28, 2006)

I have one but it's not possible in the R15's current form. I would like to see the play, ff, rw etc functions on a remote that has a wheel. A click wheel where you can go forward or backwards, as slow or as fast as you would like. 

My dads tv uses wheels for the volume and such and i found it to be the bomb... So much easier to use. 

Anywho, for the current R15, it would be nice if it didn't run at speeds of windows 3.1 and it stopped recording dupes and the dumb signal notice..


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## sheridan1952 (Mar 16, 2006)

After the problems I have had today, how about updates that don't require you to have to reformat and lose everything you have recorded.


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## carl6 (Nov 16, 2005)

Absolutely the most critical / important issue is basic stability - a DVR that does not lock up, freeze, hang, black screen, etc. A DVR that never again needs a reformat in order to clear out the cobwebs.

Next in importance - Series Link first run versus repeat. Series links record what they are supposed to, when they are supposed to. Always.

Third - Significantly raise, or eliminate, the limits on SL's, etc.

Fourth - keep the buffer alive when the unit is in standby. I often do not turn mine off (put in standby) just so I have the buffer.

If they can accomplish that with the next upgrade, they will have a solid DVR that we can then look for other improvements in.

Carl


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

carl6 said:


> Absolutely the most critical / important issue is basic stability - a DVR that does not lock up, freeze, hang, black screen, etc. A DVR that never again needs a reformat in order to clear out the cobwebs.


Honestly, My R15 has done that since I received 10D3 back the beginning of August. Also when I was on 10D4 but back on 10D3 now. Mine is a very stable unit but back when I received 10D3 I did perform a reformat.

The only problems I'm seeing is recording reliability, first run/repeats, FF/RR/Jump back consistency and limits. But my R15 has been very stable since 10D3.


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## Xram (Nov 19, 2005)

Wolffpack said:


> Last week was not that bad. I sat at one point today for 30 seconds waiting for STATs to appear. I didn't use it after that and don't plan on using it any more. Took WAY too long.


I would like to see an option to completely disable the interactive feature if i choose to.


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## Bobman (Jan 3, 2006)

We have a lot of good ideas above now we just need to see what Earl says is in the upcoming update.


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## cabanaboy1977 (Nov 16, 2005)

-SL and TODO limit's increase/gone
-mark and delete in todo list
-a useful history
-change the SL defaults so you can select ALL and add a 10 to it too (for the keep at most).


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## gimme5 (Jan 28, 2006)

I'd like:
- fix the black screen problem
-Live dual buffers
- jump to beginning
- Let me setup a Series Link for the same show on two (or more) different channels.
- more consistency. I want to be able to use "--" and "(R)" to delete or record anything no matter what menu I'm in. Also, consistent jumpback. 6 seconds, not "anywhere between 1 and 6 seconds".
-no more TODO limit.
-faster 30 second slip.


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## qwerty (Feb 19, 2006)

Wolffpack said:


> Honestly, My R15 has done that since I received 10D3 back the beginning of August. Also when I was on 10D4 but back on 10D3 now. Mine is a very stable unit but back when I received 10D3 I did perform a reformat.
> 
> The only problems I'm seeing is recording reliability, first run/repeats, FF/RR/Jump back consistency and limits. But my R15 has been very stable since 10D3.


I agree, except for the new playback problems. I spent a good 1/2 hour reorganizing my SL's last night. You know in the past that would have definitely locked it up.

BTW - speed up navagation of the prioritizor. What took me 1/2 an hour shouldn't have taken me more than 5 minutes!


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## qwerty (Feb 19, 2006)

cabanaboy1977 said:


> -mark and delete in todo list


I don't know how helpful that would be. I deleted repeats from the ToDo (as BobMan advocated). It just repopulated the ToDo list and recorded them anyway!


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## khajath (Feb 18, 2006)

What main things would make an R15 user happy ? : free upgrade to HR20


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## cabanaboy1977 (Nov 16, 2005)

qwerty said:


> I don't know how helpful that would be. I deleted repeats from the ToDo (as BobMan advocated). It just repopulated the ToDo list and recorded them anyway!


I've never had it add anything back into the todo list. If your talking about something where it's airing the same episode 5 times but only 2 are in the todo list and you delete those two and the other 3 show up then yes that happens to me. But if your saying that you delete an episode on Monday Sept 18 at 7:00pm and it add that episode back on Monday Sept 18 at 7:00pm again then I've never had that happen. Just checking what your saying.

I would use it mark and delete alot in the todo list as I normally go into the todo list almost every night and it takes forever to delete things off of it. It takes me the same 1/2 hour that it takes for moving around things in the prioritizor to delete things in the todo list. This is something that I use to do once a week with my R15 (mark and delete) but since the todo list is limited to 100 I have to do in ever day to clear it up.


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## mikewolf13 (Jan 31, 2006)

Bobman said:


> We have a lot of good ideas above now we just need to see what Earl says is in the upcoming update.


Seriously, do any of you believe that any of the items above will be in the next update?


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## Bobman (Jan 3, 2006)

mikewolf13 said:


> Seriously, do any of you believe that any of the items above will be in the next update?


I do. Sure not all of them as this is a list of everyones wants and wishes.

I would think, and this is only me talking, the barest barest minimum for the next release would be:

Fix all the issues the prior update broke like (black screens/pauses, 6 second back, icon colors, etc...)

Tweak the SL first run logic (it has gotten a tiny bit better with every update)

Enhance stability and reliability (mine has been greatly improved over the last two updates but some still have problems)

Tweak the Caller ID (I don't have CID anymore so I don't know whats what)

I really dont think some items like dual buffers, unlimited SL and TDL will ever happen.


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## bearymore (Sep 1, 2006)

Bobman said:


> I do. Sure not all of them as this is a list of everyones wants and wishes.
> 
> I would think, and this is only me talking, the barest barest minimum for the next release would be:
> 
> ...


So, you are saying that the new update will fix nothing and be totally useless. Until they fix FF and RW, this thing will be a piece of junk, but that doesn't seem to be on the horizon. Why won't unlimited SL and TDL's ever happen? Doesn't DTV have programmers with the skill level of Tivo employees? Can't they extend a data base? What about searches that exclude channels you do not receive, even if you'd have to indicate which ones they were manually?

Let's get basic DVR functionality before fooling around with frills like caller ID.


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## cabanaboy1977 (Nov 16, 2005)

Bobman said:


> I really dont think some items like dual buffers, unlimited SL and TDL will ever happen.


I think the Todo list limit will be lifted but I'm not sure that the SL's will.


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## Bobman (Jan 3, 2006)

bearymore said:


> Until they fix FF and RW,


What's wrong with the FF and RR ? It works fine on mine.


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## cabanaboy1977 (Nov 16, 2005)

Bobman said:


> What's wrong with the FF and RR ? It works fine on mine.


Only issues I have with FF and RW is 3X or 4X (even the bar indicating where you are in the recording doesn't know where it is) and during live TV it's a pain to use any of the trick play functions (at least pause starting working right again). As long as I stick to slip, 1X and 2X in MVOD I don't have any issues.


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## nbpc (Aug 14, 2006)

I'd like to see

Picture in Picture (Time Warner's DVR does a nice job)
Dual output (it has two tuners. how bout the option to drive two TVs for watching sports?)

Jump xx minutes forward (my replaytv did that)
Jump xx minutes back

N


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## gomezma1 (Mar 28, 2006)

Instead of finding out what the updates are doing from second hand infromation Directv should send us a message and explain what the update will do instead of playing with the remote for hours trying to decipher what they upgraded.


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## Bobman (Jan 3, 2006)

nbpc said:


> I'd like to see
> 
> Picture in Picture (Time Warner's DVR does a nice job)
> Dual output (it has two tuners. how bout the option to drive two TVs for watching sports?


The R-15 was not built with the hardware to do those things.


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## ApK (Mar 6, 2006)

Don't glitch during play back.

Don't show me black when you should be showing picture.

Make 6 second always equal 6 seconds.

Don't pop up messages unless they are needed.

Pop up message when they are needed (like when a show will only be partially recorded because of a conflict.)

Display complete and correct information in the MyVOD list and the guide.

Do not require me to periodically reset you or put you in standby for you to do you basic job correctly.

Do those things for me, R-15, and you no longer be counted among my enemies.
.
After that, there's a longer list of thing you could do if you want to be my friend, starting with: don't require "The" or "A" or punctuation marks to search a show title.


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## ApK (Mar 6, 2006)

Bobman said:


> The R-15 was not built with the hardware to do those things.


For PIP? Of course it was.

It has two tuners so PIP can easily be done in software.

Even the dual output COULD theoretically be done via an adapter in the USB ports, but why? Get another box.


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## qwerty (Feb 19, 2006)

cabanaboy1977 said:


> I've never had it add anything back into the todo list. If your talking about something where it's airing the same episode 5 times but only 2 are in the todo list and you delete those two and the other 3 show up then yes that happens to me. But if your saying that you delete an episode on Monday Sept 18 at 7:00pm and it add that episode back on Monday Sept 18 at 7:00pm again then I've never had that happen. Just checking what your saying.


In all fairness, it was Mythbusters on a Saturday. I guess it's possible that it was another repeat that aired on that Saturday that wasn't in the ToDo list when I deleted the other one. My ToDo list isn't maxed out, though. I would expect to see all scheduled episodes in the ToDo list that morning, but it is an R15, so who knows! :shrug:


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## Wolffpack (Jul 29, 2003)

qwerty said:


> In all fairness, it was Mythbusters on a Saturday. I guess it's possible that it was another repeat that aired on that Saturday that wasn't in the ToDo list when I deleted the other one. My ToDo list isn't maxed out, though. I would expect to see all scheduled episodes in the ToDo list that morning, but it is an R15, so who knows! :shrug:


That's the real kicker. When I was comparing the R15 and a Tivo I noticed that the TDL wasn't always populated with a particular recording until just before that show aired, regardless of how full the TDL was. Real strange and thus unpredictable.


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## bearymore (Sep 1, 2006)

Bobman said:


> What's wrong with the FF and RR ? It works fine on mine.


See the thread "Fast Forward and Rewind Weirdness". What I wrote there was:

I'm having a lot of trouble fast forwarding and rewinding. After fast forwarding if I press the play button or jump back 6 second button, the fast forward seems to stop at random places. This happens especially in fast forward 3 and 4. Sometimes it will stop far, far after the point I hit play or jump back (much farther than warranted by the FF speed), sometimes it stops at a point in the show that is well before the place I hit the play or jump back button. Sometimes it takes two or more 30 second skips to get back to where I hit play. All this makes FF 4 totally worthless and FF 3 a crapshoot.

The worst part is that if I overshoot and hit rewind, sometimes the rewind will jump back to where I started the initial fast forward, other times, even in rewind 2, it will overshoot the rewind in the same way fast forward overshoots, often by minutes. My wife says it's a DTV conspiracy to make us watch commercials. At least that's how it seems.

As someone said in that thread in response, "That's been expressed many times."


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## BattleScott (Aug 29, 2006)

No feature adds or enhancements will overcome the unreliable core of the beast. 

'Dual buffers' will just be twice as much locking up and resetting.
'Better SL searches' will be more oppotunities for lost recordings.

The foundation (OS core) is unreliable, anything they try and build on top of it will never approach what we were used to in the Linux based TiVo boxes. Ever hear the hard drive clackin' away in the R-15? Thats the sound a drive makes when it has to scan large surface areas to find the next block of data that it needs. In 4 years I never once heard the disk in my DR39 (40 hr Phillips TiVo) make that noise. 

I think 2 main factors drove the push for the R-15, and they don't bode well for DirectTV in my mind. 

1) The contract expiration with TiVo as the DVR service provider was going to leave DTV with no offering, so they needed a replacement, FAST.
2) The digital cable companies such as Time Warner had closed the gap and in many areas surpassed DTV in 'pay-per-view' and 'on-demand' types of program delivery. (NFL Sunday Ticket excluded)

After doing a little research on the company NDS, which developed the R-15 , it is pretty clear what the direction of DTV is. By moving to the XTV base (which is what the R-15 uses), they will be able to expand and offer more features such as 'DTV to Go' and other bells and whistles which I am sure they believe will be very lucrative. Unfortunately, I think they are losing sight of the core subscriber who was tired of paying more and more for less and less from the Cable companies. If they continue on their current path DTV is going to wind up like the cable companies, only with rain fade.


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## cabanaboy1977 (Nov 16, 2005)

qwerty said:


> In all fairness, it was Mythbusters on a Saturday. I guess it's possible that it was another repeat that aired on that Saturday that wasn't in the ToDo list when I deleted the other one. My ToDo list isn't maxed out, though. I would expect to see all scheduled episodes in the ToDo list that morning, but it is an R15, so who knows! :shrug:


Ok, that makes sense then. Like Wolfpack said I've have seen a couple of times where the R15 didn't have something in the todo list untill a couple hours before. Heck right now I don't even have Smallville in my todo list (it's only at 70 something) and it's going to air tomorrow. I also delete all the SG1, SGA, and BSG marthons about 2 to 3 times (not all episodes showed up at the same time and would have been alot easier if we had a mark and delete).

On a side note I thought of a really good way to make people aware of the ! in the MYVOD. Just mark the % free bar with yellow (kind of like they do with the dark blue to show how much is set to "keep untill I delete") that way you know that you need to free up space or take some stuff out of the todo list. To me the triangle with the ! is great if I only had 5 records and could see them. I don't always scroll down to the bottom of my list.


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## Cheryl_M (Aug 30, 2006)

As for me, I'd like the USB port activated and a way to offload some of the saved recordings basically as files without playing them thru the VCR. 
Then, I'd like the caller ID to work, but I haven't ruled out a fried modem on that front.
Cheryl


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## gomezma1 (Mar 28, 2006)

Direct should buy out Tivo so the can get it together!


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## qwerty (Feb 19, 2006)

How about a way of setting up an SL that would record any game a selected sports tem played?


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## bowk54 (Feb 6, 2006)

One feature that Tivo has that I haven't seen mentioned so far is the capability to do remote scheduling of a recording. Currently on my Tivo box I can log in to the TIVO.COM site and request a recording to happen on my TIVO box.

This is part of TIVO's Home Media Option. Why can't DTV do this?

Joe


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## Clint Lamor (Nov 15, 2005)

bowk54 said:


> One feature that Tivo has that I haven't seen mentioned so far is the capability to do remote scheduling of a recording. Currently on my Tivo box I can log in to the TIVO.COM site and request a recording to happen on my TIVO box.
> 
> This is part of TIVO's Home Media Option. Why can't DTV do this?
> 
> Joe


The networking features for the R15 and the HR20 aren't activated yet so we don't really know what they have in store for the DVRs. As for Tivo only the SA Tivos have this feature unless they are hacked and even with the hack it's still not through the Tivo.com website. Somewhat of a nice feature though, I have used it a few times since they day they put it up. Mostly for some last minute sporting events.


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