American Idol Ruined By Comcast DVR
Matt Haughey of PVRBlog has posted about one of his major pet peeves with his Comcast / Motorola DVR — it can ruin shows (like American Idol) by showing you the live ending to the show while selecting to play the recording show in the DVR menu. Basically, Matt likes to watch American Idol delayed so he can fast forward through the commercials. But his Comcast / Motorola DVR shows the current live TV channel in the upper right corner of the screen while you are in the “My DVR” menu. So, as he was about to start playing American Idol from the beginning from the menu, he saw Ace Young being voted off in the upper corner of the screen, effectively ruining the show.
I definitely feel his pain. For those of us with a Scientific Atlanta DVR from Comcast, we have a problem like Matt’s but even worse. When you are watching a show that is recording on a Scientific Atlanta DVR from Comcast, when the show finishes recording, you are immediately brought to Live TV on that channel. Inevitably what happens is I will be watching American Idol delayed while it is recording and when it finishes recording, I will be thrown to Live TV and will catch the last few seconds of the show, which of course will be enough to let me see who was voted off of American Idol. This has happened to me more than once, and as far as I know there is no solution other than to not start watching American Idol until after it is over.
Unbelieveable as it is, Scientific Atlanta released their DVR with this “bug” and still has not fixed it. While Matt’s problem with his Motorola DVR is a pain in the but quirk, I wouldn’t call it a bug. And this bug is one of the reasons that Scientific Atlanta will lose all of their Cable company customers (like Comcast) to TiVo. As long as Scientific Atlanta is willing to release buggy software like this and not fix it — it has been like this for over a year — they will never be able to compete with TiVo.
It’s things like this that really make me hate Scientific Atlanta!
Technorati Tags: Scientific Atlanta, Comcast, DVR, PVR, TiVo, American Idol, Motorola
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Jeff said
am May 25 2007 @ 11:53 am
Hello, just so you know. The new Sci-Atl HD DVR’s do not have this bug anymore. My standard def DVR did exactly what you describe. Pissed me off, too. But fortunately, they have fixed it with their latest batch of HD DVRs. Just a FYI. Cheers!