More on Motorola’s garbage DVR boxes
Let’s revisit a popular item: The awful DVR boxes that Comcast and other cable providers dump on their customers.
Blindsquirrel has an excellent summary of the Motorola boxes:
The Motorola 6412 DVR that Comcast gives to its customers is the worst piece of technology I have ever used. It is slow, it hangs, it’s slow, it crashes, it’s slow, it records things and then you can’t watch them. It is a complete mess and I can’t believe Comcast still offers it to its customers.
I second every word. One could say that the 6412 DVR is the… Iridium of DVR boxes. In fact, it’s worse than Iridium. At least Iridium works.
A couple of months ago Omar Shahine quoted an article by Wall Street Journal’s tech columnist Walt Mossberg who reached the quite frankly inescapable conclusion that Motorola’s DVR box “is just awful.”
Jason Weill sent a letter to Comcast over a year ago in which he detailed the shortcomings of the DVR box.
Cory at The Underserved has put together a nice little grid that compares Motorola’s garbage DVR to the one used by DishNetwork.
And then there’s John Battelle’s rant on the subject. It’s a good one.
It could be that things will get better, as D-Mac on Phildadelphia Will Do points out. And it could happen as soon as next year. Maybe. (Next year? Wow, that’s only scores of hours of television programming shredded by the Motorla box from today!). One can dream, can one not?
February 14th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
First, thanks for taking the time to read what I wrote about the Motorola 6412. Every day it is more and more frustrating to use. My wife and I were completely spoiled with the Microsoft UltimateTV and DirecTV, but I really wanted the HD locals. So I decided to start researching the Tivo Series 3 that does HD and was blown away by the costs. Just more than I’m willing to spend right now to record TV, so I am still looking for the next best thing, whatever that may be. I was almost willing to drop the money on the S3 when i started reading about a change the cable companies are looking to make in how they deliver channels that *may* give the Tivo a hard time. Plus I have read that the cablecard experience varies between cable companies and the people you get on the phone to help you.
I didn’t even cover some of the bugs with the 6412 like the fact that you have to leave the thing on or you might not have a picture when you turn it on later. The only way to get your picture back is to go to your recordings, start playing something, stop, and then go back to regular TV. How could they not find that in the QA process?
Supposedly Comcast will make available a Tivo software download and new remote if you want the Tivo software on your 6412 (maybe others as well?) in the upcoming months. If it performs better on the same hardware I’m all for it. Charge me extra for the new interface, whatever, as long as it actually works.
Thanks again for reading my blog.
March 17th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Hi there,
Sorry to respond so far after your post, but I saw your blog linking in to mine when I did some maintenance on my site today. I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only one with DVR problems. Since I wrote that post, I moved to Seattle and signed up for Comcast here. The DVR box, a Motorola DCT3412 (despite the lower model number, a newer model), was just as bad as mine in Pittsburgh. I ended up ditching cable TV entirely. It’s completely useless to spend $70 a month on largely non-compelling, poorly-compressed HDTV content when I could get a HD-DVD drive for $200 and a Netflix account for $10-$20 a month.
I miss live, HD sports, but that’s about it. Even downloading things legitimately (with the associated loss in quality and DRM restrictions) costs less and works better than Comcast’s DVR ever did.