Early adopting is not only for computers and cell phones anymore.  New technologies can be purchased prior to their maturity in many categories.   Television and Home Theater for example.  I have been planning on upgrading the house to HD for quite some time now.  I would have been on the bleeding edge there, but I didn’t have the cash.  I had planned for months to buy new TVs for the kids this Christmas and they have always wanted to record programs in their own rooms which is really a gift for myself.  The gift of free space on the DVR.   When I saw DirecTV’s ‘Whole Home DVR‘ service I was ecstatic.  This would allow me to upgrade the DVR in the living room and allow the kids to record and watch shows from their rooms and they would also have HD.  Not that they care about or notice the difference in tons more pixels per inch, but hey, I am a geek.

Quickly I will explain the intentions of this service.  Basically the new way the satellite wires are run allows for communication between the receivers (new HD ones only).   So the HD receivers in the kids rooms can browse the recorded programs on the DVR in the living room, schedule shows to record, delete shows, play, pause, rewind, etc.   This concept is awesome and I was able to get it working to its full potential rather easily with some troubleshooting and expert help from my friends at MSAT Electronics.
The reason I am writing this article besides gushing over the new toys available to avid DVR mongers is a few show stoppers that I believe everyone should know before considering this service.
The first thing I noticed was a problem with Video On Demand or ‘CinemaPlus’.   This was another service that I was very interested in using now that I have my new HD-DVR.  This service uses your household Internet connection to download programming using your HD-DVR for almost instant viewing.  I like this because I love movies and don’t have any time to mess with recording them.  This would let me watch some movies that are not on Netflix instant that are currently being played on DirecTV without waiting for their scheduled time to come and pass so my DVR can scoop it up.  The problem is that when the receivers are talking with one another about playlists and DVRish things the HD-DVR is connected to a network and has an address so the other receivers know where to look for it.  When you connect the Internet to the HD-DVR it also needs an address so my router knows where to deliver the Internet.   These HD-DVRs can not have more than one address!  Which makes sense not being able to connect to two different networks simultaneously.   For this there is a solution (yay),  but it’s not free (boo).    There is a piece called a DECA converter which will bridge the two ‘networks’ together.   Basically connecting the anti-social receiver clique to the rest of the world.   I called DirecTV to see if I could procure this item free of charge to allow me to enjoy all of their services at once.  I even used the leverage of having access to more may per view programming when connected to CinemaPlus.  They stood firm and stated the part was $25, but could not be sold without installation which is $49.99.   $75 is way to much to pay for downloading stuff, besides if I connect the Internet to the HD-DVR and reboot it connects to the Internet and I can download a bunch of stuff and then disconnect and reboot and the kids can record again.   So $75 for less aggravation.   The part can be purchased for like $65 at other places, but that’s still crazy.
The Second problem that I would have seen sooner than 3 days after installation if I wasn’t disconnecting the kids to download Beverly Hills Ninja in HD and such is the HD-DVR only supports 1 (one) remote viewing receiver at a time.   Remote viewing is playing something that has been recorded on the HD-DVR in the living room from one of the kids rooms.  If they both want to watch something they recorded or I downloaded at the same time tough cookies.   This really got me motivated to write this article.   So the DirecTV ad is misleading unless you pick it apart like some poem from 1899 in lit class.   It says that you can watch 2 recorded shows while recording 2 other live TV programs simultaneously, which you can.   What they fail to depict clearly in their many videos and diagrams is that one of the recorded shows would have to be watched on the HD-DVR and the other could be remote.  The kids can watch live TV all the time because they do have their own receivers in their rooms, but it would have been nice to know before I bought them HD Receivers that cost THE SAME as Standard Definition DVRs which they would be equally as happy with.  I thought it would be less wasteful to eliminate duplicate recordings because of which room we would want to watch them in.  So it is all my fault for geeking out on new technology instead of filling the basic need.
Going forward I can add another HD-DVR in the bedroom and the kids will be able to watch one thing from there and one thing from the living room, but guess what will happen.  Duplicate recording will be needed in both the living room and the bedroom just in-case two remote viewers are needed, just like before when there was duplicate recording when just in-case we wanted to watch it in a different room.  To summarize, Whole Home DVR service does little or know good for a home with 4 humans who may want to watch television in their own separate rooms.   Being DVR mongers only makes it worse.  What I should have done is just get everyone their own DVR, but what I will do now is inform everyone I can so my mistakes can be learned from.

Some Links:
DECA Router Package, Last on page (This is all I need because I have all 24 series receivers)
DECA Wiring Diagram, Notice you need yet another piece if your receiver is less than 24 series

UPDATE 1/2/11:
I contacted DirecTV and let them know that even the large picture on the center of the whole home DVR service page shows four televisions watching the same show from one HD-DVR.  This is impossible unless 2 of the TVs are not even using the whole home DVR service and just watching the show live on whatever channel it is playing.   Phone support offered me a credit on one of the HD receivers if I were to return BOTH and buy TWO new ones that did what I need.   So… DirecTV misleads with advertisement and has no return policy whatsoever and acts like they are doing you a favor when you get to throw $100 in the trash when their service does not do what it appears to do in all of the advertisements.  They said that’s all they can do so I will just have to suffer with equipment that does some of what it was advertised and none of the argument prevention with the warring DVR mongers of which I payed cash.

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