Suggestions wanted on 721 Screens

[Scott Greczkowski]

Here is an idea I just thought of.

Since we know Dish Network is watching and making the 721 the best it can be based on your suggestions and comments here at DBSTalk.COM how about we make some suggestions to improve the user / help / warning screens shown on the 721.

Is there any screen that has ever popped up that made you say "huh?" we know that some of the screens that pop up are not too "end user friendly"

So what are some screens that have popped up where you wish you had a secrect decoder ring? What would you change them to say to make them more friendly?

This could be interesting, I look forward to everyones suggestions.

(Just be aware that if you make a good suggestion Dish Network might just grab your idea) :D

[Jerry Abbanat]

I think one of the best things they could do is to allow users to create folders for saved programs. I think you have mentioned that earlier as a good enhancement. It would allow a much cleaner looking screen.

[Nightmare]

I would like to see some way to show which tuner is in use. And please rename them to something that does not change (since the MAIN changes to whatever tuner you are watching). The when there is a confilct it could say something like
TUNER 1 timer set to record "a"
TUNER 2 timer is recording "b"

[LarryH]

The caller-id popup appears to be broken on playback. It works fine on live shows, but I've yet to see it when I'm playing a show off of the disk.

[dbronstein]

The biggest annoyance for me is when you go to the main PVR screen and want to update or edit a time. First you have to scroll down past the recorded shows to get to the timers. Then they don't actually show the complete information for each - just the time and channel not the day. And they don't seem to be in any kind of order. So you have to scroll over each one to figure out which show is which.

Then you get to the one you want and hit Select, and all it does it list the timers all over again with the little check boxes next to them. Then you have to find the one you want and select it again, and then go to edit and hit select again to finally be able to edit it.

Selecting the timer the first time should take you right into the edit screen for it.

Dennis

[jcrash]

I'd like to be able to search for other shows like a certain show frmo the GUIDE. For example, open the guide and highlight a show that is on at 10pm on HBO and hit search and have it search for other occurences of that show.

[lonnman]

I agree with Nightmare, label the tuners 1 & 2 or A & B. Its very confusing when the screen pops up to use Main...

I would also like to point out that in some screens, hitting cancel on the remote versus selecting the cancel button on the screen will result in different behavior, most notibly in the search screen and under certain conditions in the timers screen.

Put some kind of record indicator in the guide for weekly timers that aren't on that week. For instance Alias was not on last week, but I had a weekly timer for it and there was no indicator in the guide for it. Also since the guide goes 8+ days, if I skip to next week, I should see the red dot as well, which I don't.

Jeff

[Scott Greczkowski]

Originally posted by jcrash
I'd like to be able to search for other shows like a certain show frmo the GUIDE. For example, open the guide and highlight a show that is on at 10pm on HBO and hit search and have it search for other occurences of that show.

This feature will be in L1.05 :)

[Chaos]

It would be good to have cancel step back out of the menus one level at a time rather than having to go all the way through the menus to get back to something. Just like the 50x does now.

[Tony Trent]

Scott, having the already recorded items in the same menu window as the timers is annoying. These two should be separated and given their own menus or windows. And Thanks for the Great job you are doing with this Site!

[TomCat]

There is a separate timers screen, as well as the timers included on the PVR screen. Under L103-104, press "menu - 7" and it should take you directly to the timers screen.

[krlauver]

1) Being able to tag or mark certain points of a program. For example I recorded an episode of "Eye Drops" off of Tech TV and would like to show my brother the last five minutes of the show. If the starting point could be tagged or indexed for immediate viewing then we could go right to it for viewing rather than having to fast forward through the whole program for the last five minutes. (I know I can simply watch the program to the interesting part and then hit stop so that at a later date I can hit resume to save time. Believe me that is very cool, but it would also be nice to have indexes.)

2) This probably ties in with number one but I should mention it anyway. Being able to immediately jump to whatever time in a recording. With my old JVC vcr I could perform "goto + 1:15 play" and it would advance the tape 1 hour and 15 minutes and then play the tape.

3) Being able to use the guide to select programs for recording something like using a spreadsheet like excel. You could select the start time by anchoring it and then move the right over several programs and then hit record to select all the programs between those two points of time for recording. I have only set up future recordings off the guide but right now if you set up manual recordings over several programs as once event it will not break the recording up by program will it?

4) Being able to select portions of a program for saving. Back to my example of "Eye Drops", the portion of the show that is worth watching is five minutes at the end. What would be neat is to somehow show the video and then be able to hit record so that you are creating a new recording from the program being shown. Then if you could combine parts so that you were editing video would be really cool.

5) This is probably a dumb one but once or twice I have wished I could see the guide list programs in the past.

krlauver

[Jacob S]

The advantage of being able to see the guide listing in the past is because it is usually not that far in the past, maybe like a day or so, and that would show you what usually comes on at that time during the week, saving you from having to go another week in advance to see when something is going to come on next week.

Even my vcr had a thing to where you could go so far ahead or so far back or be able to go to a certain time on the tape. Our vcr's have features that the pvr does not have in which I would not think it would be impossible or that hard to implement.

A good idea would be to make a program guide downloadable through the open tv application or Dish Home, or have a showing of what usually comes on regularly during prime time each day on each channel. If they would use a dial up connection to a server to access a program guide then this could free up space on the receiver's memory to do other things, but one would have to wait a while on the program guide, so it would probably be a bad idea to have the whole guide on the Dish Home application, it would be good for more than 2 days out.

They should have had the receivers memory upgradable like computer's memory is so that more information could be stored on it and more software could be downloaded into it allowing more features. This would allow for upgrades without having to replace the whole receiver. One could get a new graphics card when it would come out and put into the receiver for better graphics or faster functionality or for more features or to be able to look at the program guide further out, or to store videos even when they can make chips to be able to store that much information on it. They could sell these and make money off of this. It would be something that would not be required, just an extra option. It would be kind of like putting in a cd for a computer.