Hopeless Geek

I’ve been without DirecTV and TiVo for about a month now and I figured now’s a good time to look back on it and see if this was a good decision. The best way I’ve found of determining that is the venerable pro/con list. So without further blathering, I’ll just drop into that.

Pros

1. Recording four shows at once without degradation in video quality. A DirecTiVo can do this for two shows at once but I, alas, have one of the old 40GB Series 2 TiVos that was controlling the DirecTV box via IR cable. So not only was I getting compressed video off DTV, but then TiVo was compressing it again. Best Quality never was. With U-Verse, however, what I see in a recorded show is always the raw MPEG-4 stream that it received, so that’s spectacular. Then on top of the better video quality, I get four at once.
2. Better conflict handling. Rather than TiVo’s priority-based approach, the U-Verse box walks me through conflict resolution when it happens and lets me sacrifice a recording right there in the “please record this” screen. TiVo makes me add the show as all-or-nothing and then tweak it in the Season Pass screen (for which processing takes forever when you change something).