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Pastimes : Home Theater Systems - Designs, Products, Tips and Info -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greg s who wrote (180)	7/4/2019 2:51:00 PM
From: Zen Dollar Round	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 418

My parents have DirecTV satellite service, and once upon a time, I would have chosen it over local cable in every instance. Since they came out with the Genie boxes with the satellite (please excuse the pun) for other rooms of the house, it has gone downhill in speed and usability. Or at least that's what I've been told. My parents kept their older DVRs for every room and have the Genie just in the family room. But the older DVRs have continued to get software "upgrades" that have slowed down their performance, I can only assume because the operating system they use is more bloated with every iteration. I find them frustrating to use because they are so slow. The Genie DVR is still fast enough, but it only gets used at night when they eat dinner and watch a movie. I talked to one of the techs the last time he was there to fix something, and he said all new installs only have the Genie as an option, all other boxes are the non-DVR kind that work with the Genie. By contrast, my ancient TiVo box is still fast and even with the upgrades it remains that way. About a year ago or so they added a commercial skip feature. For recorded network shows, like, say, The Tonight Show, once you hit a commercial break, the TiVo will emit a little "ding" sound and you can just press a single button to skip all the commercials. It works surprisingly well and it's very accurate. For shows that don't have it, just fast forward as usual. As a side note, the DirecTV Now streaming service is also pretty glitchy, far worse than PS Vue for me. It also only has a 20-hour cloud DVR that keeps recordings for 30 days, with no option to buy more storage time. PS Vue has unlimited storage and keeps recordings for 28 days.