New User Question

[Justin]

I apologize if I should be able to find this in the FAQ's. I have looked through them and the answer does not seem obvious.

My situation:
I have two rooms. 1 has a HD TV and the other an SD TV. Today I have Dish Networks and serve both rooms using a DVR-942, which works great; however I miss the ease-of-use of TiVo.

I wish to continue having HD service in room #1 and SD service in room #2. Getting cabling to either of these locations is not a problem. I would like both Televisions to be able to have DVR functionality...preferrably be able to share recordings if at all possible. Any suggestions? Keep in mind that my goal is to have TiVo.

My thought was that I would use some sort of splitter on the satellite feeds coming in and put a HR10-250 in the HD room and place another, non-HD, DirecTivo DVR in the second room. Could these share programming/recording? Would this setup actually work?

Alternately what are my options for using a standalone TiVo with my current DVR-942? Worth exploring?


Thanks,

Justin

[JLucPicard]

Justin,

If you're looking at staying strictly Tivo, you may need to buy your HR10-250 and your SD DirecTivo off of eBay (or something like that). I do not believe that DirecTv lets you obtain Tivo units from them anymore, and I KNOW that when you order from them they do not guarantee that you will get a particular model.

As for your second room, you could get a stand alone Tivo and connect it to a DirecTv receiver, but then you would also be paying Tivo for service as well as DirecTv (and would be limited to a single tuner versus dual tuners).

If you do get an HR10-250, the minimum dish they would install for that would be a Phase III dish, which has four outputs and a built-in multi-switch. As such, you would run two leads to your HR10-250 and the other two to your standard DirecTivo. No splitters would be required (and "splitters" as such only help you in very limited situations with DirecTv - you would need a "multi-switch" if you needed more than four input feeds).

At any rate, any DirecTivo models, and even their new DirecTv brand DVRs, cannot share programming between DVRs.

I can't help you with your DVR0942 question.

[Justin]

Thanks for the information - it was very helpful!


Justin