[sjord7]

I have the HR-20, and mine is double pig-dog slow. Yes, the new HD guide and list are faster once you get in them, but getting to them, or out of them or any other button I press can take varying amounts of time. It might take 5 seconds, or 50 seconds. My wife and I laugh at how slow it is - she keeps telling me to do something, and I just sit there, telling her I pressed the button almost a minute ago - and nothing has happened.

I too have been with DirecTV for many many years - but this is so ridiculous. I don't know of any other box I have hooked to my TV where when I press a button it takes it almost a minute to respond!

I want to go to the HR34 - for the more tuners and larger amount of space (and hopefully faster hardware), but it appears to be full of bugs, including it won't necessarily even record your shows for you!

 

[inkahauts]

I have the HR-20, and mine is double pig-dog slow. Yes, the new HD guide and list are faster once you get in them, but getting to them, or out of them or any other button I press can take varying amounts of time. It might take 5 seconds, or 50 seconds. My wife and I laugh at how slow it is - she keeps telling me to do something, and I just sit there, telling her I pressed the button almost a minute ago - and nothing has happened.

I too have been with DirecTV for many many years - but this is so ridiculous. I don't know of any other box I have hooked to my TV where when I press a button it takes it almost a minute to respond!

I want to go to the HR34 - for the more tuners and larger amount of space (and hopefully faster hardware), but it appears to be full of bugs, including it won't necessarily even record your shows for you!

What's weird is I don't have these problems. I fact, lately, my hr20 has picked up even more speed through the menus. I just don't get the inconsistency of the speed of the units. I have a feeling they are working on that, but I wonder if anything we have in our systems can impact it as well.

 

[NoOTA]

I have the HR-20, and mine is double pig-dog slow. Yes, the new HD guide and list are faster once you get in them, but getting to them, or out of them or any other button I press can take varying amounts of time. It might take 5 seconds, or 50 seconds. My wife and I laugh at how slow it is...

I too have been with DirecTV for many many years - but this is so ridiculous. I don't know of any other box I have hooked to my TV where when I press a button it takes it almost a minute to respond!

I feel your pain. Directv WHY ARE SOME BOXES SO SLOW????????? Load up an old HR20 or HR21 with their limited RAM and CPU speed an external drive with 100+ shows and test it yourselves. See how you like pressing the LIST button and waiting 10+ seconds for anything to happen. Once the family starts complaining, it is only a matter of time until I have to do something. Since I don't have the choice to go back to a GUI that WAS acceptably fast for us (thank you very much), I have to look at other options. I've been with them since the late 90's also, but this is may cause me to look into other options.

Sorry, but here is what is so FRUSTRATING. I never ASKED but my box to be slowed down. It just happened due to changes I can't control.

The family just wants the old LIST button speed back.... Wasn't "fast", but this is terrible.

 

[eileen22]

I feel your pain. Directv WHY ARE SOME BOXES SO SLOW????????? Load up an old HR20 or HR21 with their limited RAM and CPU speed an external drive with 100+ shows and test it yourselves. See how you like pressing the LIST button and waiting 10+ seconds for anything to happen. Once the family starts complaining, it is only a matter of time until I have to do something. Since I don't have the choice to go back to a GUI that WAS acceptably fast for us (thank you very much), I have to look at other options. I've been with them since the late 90's also, but this is may cause me to look into other options.

Sorry, but here is what is so FRUSTRATING. I never ASKED but my box to be slowed down. It just happened due to changes I can't control.

The family just wants the old LIST button speed back.... Wasn't "fast", but this is terrible.

I have to agree with this. I've been a D* customer since 1999, have had DVRs since 2001, and this is definitely the slowest ours has ever been. Especially bad is the response time to an initial press of List or Guide if the box has been idle for awhile. We have a HR20-700 with an external 1TB drive, which runs at about 70% full most of the time. We are connected to the Internet, but don't have MRV, as this is currently our only HD DVR. Also don't have SWM yet. We have a bunch of SD DVRs in other locations. I'm interested to hear that not everyone with HR20s is experiencing the extreme slowness, and wonder if the setup or the amount of free disk space has anything to do with it. Should I try to delete some recordings to see if that helps? Has anyone else done this and seen improvement?

 

[CCarncross]

I fortunately am in the camp with inkahauts, my old original HR20, from 2006, has a 1.5T drive attached to it, well over 200 hours of programming on it, and it works great, very zippy. Perhaps you have a HDD going bad?

 

[sjord7]

I'm not sure my box has gotten slower since the upgrade. I haven't timed anything - but I do know I was getting those very slow responses before the firmware upgrade. I do not have an external drive on my HR 20. The responses seem all over the place, 5 seconds one time, and it's somewhat common to go up to maybe 50 seconds (without actually timing it). What's worse, that isn't the worst time - occasionally it goes up to several minutes before it responds (without ever pressing another button on the remote).

I guess it's possible it could be hard drive problems, one reason I'd suspect this, is several years ago, my original HR 20 died after the hard drive gave out. They sent me this box, and it made some bad hard drive noises for a couple years - I figured it was going to die any day. What's weird - I never hear those hard drive noises any more - at some point it quit doing that.

I really want to move to the HR34, but given the issues I see in that thread - I better wait a long time before getting one! That it doesn't even record the shows you setup is terrible!

 

[gator5000e]

I would like to join the others that say their HR20-700s have slowed down considerably. I have had the upgrade for weeks now. I have performed numerous reboots. Pulling up anything like the guide or the info bar or the menu takes forever.

Last night I tried to change channels, hit Guide, waited 20 seconds, hit Guide again and then again and finally it came up. I hit the down scroll button and it took a good 10 seconds before it moved. Once it moved it ran ok for a few button presses. I then landed on a channel I wanted to watch and hit Enter. I waited 20 seconds and nothing. Hit Enter again, and again and again and nothing. Finally I hit Exit and waited another 5 seconds before everything went away. Then I had to enter the channel number manually.

It really is frustrating. Maybe it's time for a HR24. I just hate to pay for one given I spend so much with D* as it is now. Is the box broken? Probably not in their eyes. But does it work like it should? Absolutely not.

 

[Mike Greer]

I suppose a hard drive or two could fail here and there but if the hard drives are the problem I have 3 bad ones!

I don't know what the trouble is but it all started with the HDGUI that was supposed to speed things up - things are not as slow as when I first got the update but still much slower than the old GUI that worked....

 

[PlanetBill]

HR20-700, s t i l l v e r y s s s l l l o o o w w w

 

[PlanetBill]

I would like to join the others that say their
It really is frustrating. Maybe it's time for a HR24. I just hate to pay for one given I spend so much with D* as it is now. Is the box broken? Probably not in their eyes. But does it work like it should? Absolutely not.

We should not have to pay for equipment that was not broken. They should offer us replacements (free) if future software continues this way.

 

[Pluvious]

This problem is not going to go away but I will. I've been a DirectV customer for over 12 years and if this doesn't get addressed soon I'm jumping ship to Dish. This is an outrage that they think this will fly with us. Having to wait 15+ seconds for a button to actually work in this day and age is unacceptable. I would consider this BROKEN and if this was a "new" product at CES they would be laughed off the showroom floor.

I read that the new DISH DVR is the state of the art now... hmmm.

 

[NoOTA]

.. Having to wait 15+ seconds for a button to actually work in this day and age is unacceptable. I would consider this BROKEN and if this was a "new" product at CES they would be laughed off the showroom floor. .

Agree. What is it doing? (I have a feeling it is sorting the PLAYLIST before showing it and that takes TIME with lots of recordings and a slow CPU. Notice when you delete, there is that same 8-10 second delay, because it is resorting the whole list! I feel the old GUI sorted a page at a time, which is why getting into the LIST was faster, but scrolling was slower. Overall, this new way is BAD!)

A couple comments -

-Once in the LIST, it is actually pretty fast to page up/down presses. Just don't delete anything, as that is SLOW.

-sjord7, That is not right and there is something wrong with your box. Mine is pretty consistent at the amount of time the LIST takes to appear at around 8-10 seconds.

-CCarncross - Mine is not a not a HDD problem. I was able to go back and forth between the old SD GUI and new HD GUI back in the fall, and the problem stayed with the HD GUI ONLY!. It is the GUI. I was not looking forward to the day I got stuck with this new GUI, but here we are.

-It IS related to the # of recordings for me. When I was at 60% free, the LIST took close to 15 seconds to appear. Deleted all we could (80% free) and got it down to 6-7 seconds. Now it is filling up again, and slowing down.

Is anyone listening to this? The 500meg competitors DVR are FAST.

 

[msh]

I have an HR22 connected to a LaCie 2 TB hard drive via eSATA. It worked perfectly until DirectTV came out with its new menu software. At first it was just very slow. Then some movies brought up a screen saying they had not been completely recorded (even though I already had watched them.) I have tried rebooting the DVR and reconnecting the hard drive. It just seems to get slower and slower. Suggestions?
Michael

 

[sdk009]

I too find my HR20-100 to be painfully slow. It is virtually impossible to change channels using either the up-down key or inputting a channel number. Most of the time, the only way to change the channel is by bring up the guide and scrolling to the channel I want to watch. I'm pretty sure this isn't the way its supposed to be.

 

[Podkayne]

Many posts on this thread reflect my current level of frustration with DirecTV, which has known only one higher peak (the dreaded club 771 issue). No need to repeat my setup and issues, they are still the same, and the same as many others complaining on this thread. I've been drinking DTV's Kool Aid since Sept. 21, 1994, so I'm entitled to satisfaction, here.

I now demand redress of this grievance. In much the same way that D* issued several iterations of access cards when they were trying to secure their signal, it's time for them to issue equipment to those of us whose leased equipment is so old as to be unable to keep up with their increasing demands on limited hardware.

I want another HD-DVR, I want it to cost me exactly $0, and I want it to perform satisfactorily. Failing that, I want my HDUI to be rolled back to the one that worked perfectly satisfactorily before they biddle-botched it with this new software!!

And I'm tired of waiting. I'm getting absolutely nowhere with over the phone CSR's who seem to want me to pay something to fix THEIR problem.

 

[bossfan50]

Many posts on this thread reflect my current level of frustration with DirecTV, which has known only one higher peak (the dreaded club 771 issue). No need to repeat my setup and issues, they are still the same, and the same as many others complaining on this thread. I've been drinking DTV's Kool Aid since Sept. 21, 1994, so I'm entitled to satisfaction, here.

I now demand redress of this grievance. In much the same way that D* issued several iterations of access cards when they were trying to secure their signal, it's time for them to issue equipment to those of us whose leased equipment is so old as to be unable to keep up with their increasing demands on limited hardware.

I want another HD-DVR, I want it to cost me exactly $0, and I want it to perform satisfactorily. Failing that, I want my HDUI to be rolled back to the one that worked perfectly satisfactorily before they biddle-botched it with this new software!!

And I'm tired of waiting. I'm getting absolutely nowhere with over the phone CSR's who seem to want me to pay something to fix THEIR problem.

Ditto. My Hr20-100 is becoming unusable. 15 to 30 second button response times. The response time per button push is so slow that when I enter a 3 digit channel number it is frustratingly laughable when the channel changes before the third number is even processed by the receiver. Then sometimes the channel changes and then I am presented with a black screen for a minute or two until the picture appears.

Has anyone called retention to discuss this problem because as much as I hate to do it I may have to give FIOS a serious look.

 

[inkahauts]

Ditto. My Hr20-100 is becoming unusable. 15 to 30 second button response times. The response time per button push is so slow that when I enter a 3 digit channel number it is frustratingly laughable when the channel changes before the third number is even processed by the receiver. Then sometimes the channel changes and then I am presented with a black screen for a minute or two until the picture appears.

Has anyone called retention to discuss this problem because as much as I hate to do it I may have to give FIOS a serious look.

Do a menu reset of you unit, and the as soon as its back up again, do another menu reset. This will completely clear out all the guide data. It may fix some of your issues. It's worth a try.

 

[bossfan50]

Do a menu reset of you unit, and the as soon as its back up again, do another menu reset. This will completely clear out all the guide data. It may fix some of your issues. It's worth a try.

I have seen this solution in other posts so I will give it a try. Is this a one time fix or would I need to do periodic reboots to flush things out?

 

[Rtm]

They should take all of our pre HR24 dvrs and scratch the HD logo off of them and refurb or whatever they do and start using them only as SD only DVRs. They're more than capable for that but for HD they suck ass.

 

[jimmie57]

If you have not done these things before.

Try this:
Go into Setup,
Settings,
HDTV and uncheck all but the 1080i resolution,
also
HDTV, Video and set Native to OFF

Also,
Setup,
Settings,
Display and set Scrolling to OFF.

Now press the red button to reset the receiver.

You might want to try this also.
Go to channel 1.
Once the page is operating including audio,
use the remote and press Red, Red, Blue, Blue, Yellow, Green in exactly that
order.
This must be done quickly. Otherwise the yellow press will bring up a quick
options menu. That will display a message about the NVRAM being cleared in
the lower left.