UPDATE: Over-the-air DVRs....again

[hamerhead]

I thought I'd done this before but couldn't find the thread, so here we go (again?):

DirecTV has finally priced us out, cable isn't available here, and our Frontier internet (the only thing available at this address) is shit. My wife watches a lot of network crap and is accustomed to DirecTV's recording/menu/blahblahblah interface (it IS really good).

I am looking for something so simple a caveman could do it, that can record at least 2 things while watching another, and can work with 2 separate units on 2 separate TVs. We have Amazon Prime, but their Fire stuff only allows one recorder per account. We currently record 90%-95% of everything we watch.

Any ideas?

[gtrdaddy]

Tim, if your internet download speed hits 15mbs per second, you should be able to stream Sling TV. We’ve had it for five years now. It used to be glitchy, but has drastically improved over the years. Every now and then we’ll run into a small nuisance glitch that is easily overcome by going in and out of the show we’re watching or restarting Sling. It’s a great deal. We subscribe to their “Blue” package, $25/$30 month. Has all of the major cable channels, no locals. Cloud based DVR for free up to 10 hours of recording and $5/month for the full DVR package, does multiple programs at once. Need antenna for locals, obviously no DVR SVC there.

Hulu has a stream package that is comparable and I think it does have locals. Not sure about their DVR.
 

Use the ROKU Ultra units, one for each TV, , fast processing and no wait for screen loads like Netflix if you have a tone of stuff in your “List.” Those are $100/unit

[gtrdaddy]

Also I meant to tell you that sling has free on-demand for most of the premium and basic cable channel programming.

[hamerhead]

Thanks,  Jamie, but our internet speed is - get this - 3, yes 3mbps. Near dial-up. Like I said, shit. There is one other local provider (via dish) that we're going to check out, but their speed isn't much better. Frontier sucks hind tit since they bought this area from Verizon.

I bit the bullet and ordered a TiVo. It was a couple hunnert bucks (+ $15-per-month unless we go all-in with the lifetime deal), which is 1.5 months of DirecTV. The menu is supposed to be similar enough to DirecTV that my wife won't have a meltdown. 30-day money back guarantee, so if it doesn't work we can bail. We'll see. There are plenty of others to try.

[cynic]

I haven’t used a TIVO box for maybe 15 years but when I did their menu/gui became my bar. Nothing I’ve used since (DirecTV, Cox, U-Verse) comes close. 

[hamerhead]

UPDATE: Got a TiVo and it works great. Wife loves it (huge relief) and doesn't really miss some of the DirecTV stuff.  Big win there.

Meanwhile, I decided to give the Amazon Recast/Fire TV stick thing a try in the man cave since I already had an Amazon Prime account (and TiVo doesn't do Disney+). Big mistake. 1st off - if you don't have a smart phone you can't set it up. I had to download an app to my wife's phone in order to make it work. So that part sucked right off the bat. Then there's the clunky interface, crappy remote and bad picture quality. It pixelates/buffers/freezes at least 50% of the time, even on the recordings. The weird thing is it pulled in more OTA channels than the TiVo, but after trying 3 different antennas and running a cat5 cable to it with no improvement to the picture, this one is going back. Pretty disappointing.

The TiVo, on the other hand, set up in minutes, stays clean and clear on both live TV and recordings, picked up 29 'farmer 5' channels and has a remote and guide that are actually useful. I just ordered another.

[gtrdaddy]

Glad you found something that’s working well Tim. When you told me about your horrible ’net service I was worried you wouldn’t find a good solution. Watching game cameras is no replacement for Showtime After Hours or Days of Our Lives.