An admission before I start. I fully concede I’m about to kvetch because one of life’s little unnecessary luxuries isn’t luxurious enough. Guilty. Get over it.
We have a very nice HD TV in the family room. It is connected to a Comcast supplied Cisco RNG200 DVR. Notice I used nice for the TV, not the DVR.
Nearly every operation on this DVR makes you think development stopped as soon as a feature worked. No one ever considered whether it worked well.
With football season underway I’ve got two games on the TV at once. The Phils/Mets take up most of the screen with the Giants/Panthers in a small window.
If you were designing this system you’d put the smaller window in a corner. It’s much less likely to intrude if tucked away.
Not on the RNG200! The inset window is where the screen’s corner would be if I was watching old school 4:3 standard def not 16:9 high def. This might be understandable if not for the fact the RNG200 knows I’m watching in HD!
I use an HDMI cable between the TV and DVR. That’s a ‘smart’ system which sends data in both directions. The DVR sees where its signal goes and knows the screen resolution.
With this system the out-of-the-way window ends up being near the middle of the action blocking things I want to see.
This is just one in a long series of almost complete and poorly enabled features.
- On-Demand is clumsy and excruciatingly slow.
- Scheduling a recording can take dozens of button presses just to find a show.
- The on screen program summary is often edited as if it isn’t meant to be read.
- Standard def duplicates of high def channels clutter things up even though as mentioned earlier the box should know I’m not interested in seeing them in 4:3.
When you see what’s available with a TiVo or even my homebuilt MythTV this seems more-and-more unnecessarily irksome. How Comcast does this in light of the competition from U-verse and the satellite providers is beyond me.