Direct Tv Dvr By Scoobie79 on Apr 08, 2008 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The offer of a free DVR made me go back to DirecTV. I loved my orginal TiVo but after I disconnected my home phone line, it was pretty much useless. I got my firt reciever and by the second day it was giving me problems. It could no longer display my local channels. After calling DirecTv's customer sevice, I had a replacement in just a few days. The new unit looked a little different, but all the functions were the same.

I setup the DVR and played with some of the very cool features. The 100 hours of recording is a very nice feature, I still have programs from six months ago saved on the hard drive. Watching one program while recording another was also a feature I enjoyed as my old TiVo box wasnt capable of doing so. However, for some reason the DVR would only record from one source not allowing your to watch a different channel. This last for about three weeks, reseting or unplugging the box made no difference and one day it just started to work again. Odd, but atleast it works.

My biggest compliant about the unit is the fast forward and rewind feature. At the speed of 1 or 2, the picture hardly advances, but at level 3 it fast forwards at such a rate you cannot press play in time when you want to watch again. I thought after more use I would get the hang of it, but still find it very frustrating trying to fast forward thru commercials.

Overall though, for free (with two years of service) and combined with DirecTv's excellent service, the DVR R15 is a great value.