I strongly suggest avoiding all keyword autorecords. The way they're currently implemented on the HR20/HR21 is fundamentally broken, primarily because they don't show up on your To Do List and can cancel regular recordings that you have set. Here's the sequence of horrors that happened on my HR20 this weekend:
Last Thursday, I set up a bunch of recordings for olympics segments that i wanted to watch. These were on the directv local nbc, UHD, USAHD. I dutifully made sure there was plenty of space (36% on a 1 TB disk), and I ran through the To Do List to make sure that nothing I didn't want would be recorded (i even started using the MPEG4 version of UHD). I went away for the weekend, expecting to come back to a bunch of great HD Olympics coverage.
When I came back, here's what was on my HR20 (running the NR):
1. Almost all of my Olympic recordings were filed on the playlist under "VOLLEYBALL", which i had a keyword autorecord set up for. This began to worry me...
2. I had zero space free. Uh oh. I scrolled down to the bottom and found that a bunch of movies I had saved to watch alter had been deleted. Damn. Why'd this happen? (If i were on the original disk, everything previously on the disk would have been deleted!)
3. Opening up the "VOLLEYBALL" keyword, i found that:
- The HR20 had replaced a bunch of my NBC(local) recordings with NBCE, which I don't receive! Why in the world would this make any logical sense?
- A bunch of recordings i didn't want (such as 10 hours of OTA telemundo recordings) also got recorded. Why didn't these show up in my To Do list before?
4. To rub salt in the wound, when I cancelled the "VOLLEYBALL" keyword autorecording, I think it cancelled some of the future olympics recordings i had; now i have to go and redo them.
The HR20 model is now nearing two years old. These problems are quite frustrating, and I can't help compare it to my experience with Tivo. I bought a Tivo in 2000, when it had been out for less than a year. With eight-year-older technology and with little prior art, the Tivo interface was much faster, was almost never buggy (contrast that to the large number of times i've had to RBR the HR20...), and most importantly, ALWAYS recorded what i expected it to record.
Tivo is an 800 million dollar company, Directv is a 32000 million dollar company.
If people don't like tivo, they can use a host of other dvr solutions.
If people don't like the Directv DVR, Directv loses not only the DVR revenue, but also loses subscriber revenue.
I for one am considering switching to Comcast (the HD service here is more expensive than directv, and #channels is awful, but improving) simply so I can use a better DVR.
But for now, i've turned off all keyword autorecords, and i would strongly suggest that you do the same.
