What do you watch? I've glanced through the listings and haven't found anything that I'm all that excited about, although I don't know if the whole thing has populated (hi-def section is empty?)

I don't have much to add to this conversation other than this tip I recently discovered:

The extremely annoying bright blue ring on the HR20 can be turned off by pressing the 'left' and 'right' buttons on the front of the DVR at the same time.

Each press will cycle to the next of the 4 available brightness options, which are:

1. My retinas are melting.
2. A 747 mistook my living room for a runway.
3. Slightly dimmer than the surface of the sun.
4. Off.

Personally, I like option #4.

What? Turn off the living room lightbringer?

That kind of sucks. I watch programming on all thee of those networks, so that is indeed a bummer. I will pay the $5, though.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but it seems that The Cartoon Network indeed stretches their picture to fill up the screen on widescreen TVs. They seem to do it better than TNT and TBS, though, as they also chop off a portion of the top and bottom, so that the is less distortion. But seriously, that is messed up. I thought most TVs would allow you to do this on your own if you wanted the picture to fill up the entire screen. It really sucks that some of these new HD channels are doing this on their own, so that all SDTV programming on them is messed up. Doesn't that destroy the whole reason for HDTV in the first place?

Looks like a lot of gaming stuff is up for VOD. I don't have G4 tv but it is available for VOD. Also something new I noticed is Game Invasion.

You're not crazy. DTV compresses the living sh*t out of their signal. Search for HD Lite and you'll see the nasty history and evidence. I'm stuck on DTV because the cable companies take over a month to repair their systems after hurricanes while DTV works even during a hurricane if I have power and I'm in the eye.

That's good to hear, actually. I did take some time to look at Charter's HD offerings, and they were pretty slim. I think I may just pick up a better antenna, and just watch more OTA when it comes to local channels. I had noticed how much better they look, but the cheap antenna I am using loses too much of the signal for me to depend on it. It is nice that the HR20 makes it easy to add an OTA antenna that still allows you to record OTA on the DVR.

I do wish the HD was better, but it is still much nicer that SDTV.

I had to go out searching for this tip a couple months ago because that bloody ring was driving me crazy. How that info was not included in the documentation is beyond me. (I, too, opt for turning it completely off.)

By the way, is anyone else with the HR-20 found it prone to lockups and other errors? I've had mine for a year and was constantly having to hit the red reset switch on it for the first few months. It seemed to get a lot better after a winter update earlier this year, but in the last week I've had two bizarre "bugs" crop up, one where it wouldn't register any remote button presses and one where I couldn't fast forward through Heroes without it resetting to the beginning of the episode.
---Todd

Yeah, that information (hardware problems) doesn't surprise me at all. Gonna stick with my existing unit, though. I've really only had two of those bizarre occurrences in the past few months, it just so happened they were within a week of each other. As long as they don't keep happening, I'm inclined to let it go. I was more curious as to anyone else seeing stuff like that.

That's disgusting to me, though, that they're doing away with the OTA tuner in the HR21. I do get the locals over the sat so that we get them in our bedroom, but our living room TV has an OTA antenna connected to the box, which I much prefer. For one, we get all the subhannels and a couple of smaller locals that aren't on DTV (plus the main channels look better on OTA). Also, the Indianapolis market *still* doesn't get CBS in HD via DirecTV, so the only way to get that is OTA. I think I'll be sticking with the HR20 for as long as possible.

On the bright side, I've been really happy to see so many new HD channels popping up on the channel guide. What was like a half dozen channels (not including premium and locals) is now more like two dozen. If I could just get Comedy Central and History International in HD I'd be almost completely free of watching channels in SD.
---Todd

He's right for the wrong reasons. It's all software. The lockups and crashes are all software as well as the HDMI, specifically the HDCP handshaking between TV's. An H20 last year would not work with my TV (HR20 worked fine) due to the DRM in the HDMI. Thankfully since my release purchase of my HR20 things have gotten much better. Oh god the nightmares I had to endure last November.

That was, likewise, when it was the worst for me. I never had problems with the HDMI, but I had lockups and recording issues at least once a week (or more) for a while there. It happened less and less with each software update, until it became an afterthought. That's why the two most recent incidents were very surprising to me. It had been a while since I last had to push the red button, which always makes me think of an episode of Ren and Stimpy, "We are fast being sucked in the heeedious vortex of a black hole. Our shipboard computer suggests one last alternative...."
---Todd

They moved it out of Alpha status and into Beta status only recently. I've been playing around with it since last spring. Nice for those who don't have a 360 or do not wish to deal with the 360. It's using the Viiv platform that Intel developed.

Right now it only does images and music.

This past Friday the latest Cuttin Edge beta has overhauled the UI and finally gave the yellow button functionality. I think some of the decisions went backwards but overall things went for the good.

The ethernet connection does the job, my HR20 has never seen a phone jack.