2008-08-13

Box of Whine

Petty annoyances:

When the DVR has been running longer than an hour, the disk drive bearings start to sing. It's a high-pitched sound, up in the range where it's difficult to locate the source. If the service stays, we need a quieter DVR. To be sure, C-- the installation guy had warned of disk noise.



Turning on the television with the TV's remote starts the U-verse box and automatically flips the TV's input to HDMI, which then takes a second to synch up with the U-verse DVR. This "feature" is desirable if you watch only U-verse programming, but it's annoying when I want to see the 2008 Olympics on NBC.HD, as freely provided by TWC. There's probably a setting on the TV to keep it from autoseeking a new source.

TiVo's skip-ahead / jump back function is really, really nice. When fast-forwarding the U-verse box, it's nearly impossible to hit the end of a break accurately. U-verse has a jump forward 30 seconds button, but it's not the same. Note to AT&T: just pay TiVo the royalty.

Once in View Recorded TV mode, jumping back to Live TV takes two steps. Select the Guide which puts you into the channel guide mode (recorded TV appears on channel 9999). Enter the channel number or scroll up through the 400-odd channels to find the live program. Hit OK. Now it's possible to jump back and forth between the recorded channel and the live channel.

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