DIRECTV HR22 HD/DVR Satellite Receiver

by DIRECTV

Product Details

• Item Weight: 4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• ASIN: B001HZPKUM
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,030 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
  • #65 in Electronics > Televisions & Video > Satellite Television > Receivers
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 15, 2008

Product Description

DIRECTVs latest HD DVR receiver, the HR22. Packed with features - the HR22 boast MPEG-4 format compatibility, multiple screen format resolutions, and DIRECTVs popular DIRECtV+ PLUS DVR technology.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice box, but it's SLOWWWW~!, October 30, 2008

By 

Mushroom Samba~ - See all my reviews

This review is from: DIRECTV HR22 HD/DVR Satellite Receiver (Electronics)

So I recently switched from Dish Network to DirecTv, and this is the box I chose. It has a great feature list, full HD resolution support (1080p only w/ HD on demand movies), good storage capacity, and uh ... well that's about all I expect a box to do. While the box works fine for watching television and such, it is unbelievably slow to respond to remote commands.

When navigating the guide, making menu changes, or browsing recordings this thing is slow. Not sure if it's just a software problem or what but it is pretty frustrating.

Recent firmware update added 1080p on demand support, but failed to address the speed of the box.

Has some other cool features, e.g. able to stream music, videos, and pictures from a networked pc. Pretty cool in theory but only the music and pictures will work unless all of your video files are in the mpeg-4 format ... no .avi support. On top of that the box is even slower to respond with streamed content.

All in all the box performs really well. Recording individual episodes or whole seasons is easy and works for me 100% of the time. The DirecTv to PC software lets you watch any dvr content on your pc which is a nice bonus. The HD channel selection you get with DirecTv, if you get the full bundle, is pretty extensive. One thing ... I miss travel channel HD. Not available. /sad face.

This box is great at what it does, it just does everything incredibly slowly. Hopefully a future firmware update will address this, but in the meantime I'm going to be really frustrated.

*****EDIT*********
Just wanted to update this review a bit. As others have mentioned I do get the occasional a/v skip with recorded material; it's nothing major and doesn't really bother me, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get one or two skips in any recording. I have to wonder if this is in any way related to the way disk space is managed by the box.

Some other thoughts
I connected an external drive, Seagate 1.5tb, to see if I was able to replicate the a/v skipping in recordings. After two months daily use the a/v skips started to appear, so it's not a faulty harddrive. This drive had worked perfectly on a win7 system, never stuttering even under heavy simultaneous read/write loads.

Another minor annoyance is that using an external drive doesn't actually add storage, not in the literal sense; the external drive behaves as a replacement drive, meaning all newly recorded content goes directly to the external drive while your internal drive remains empty. Seems pretty stupid to me.

Aside from the a/v skips the box is still functioning normally. It's still slow as all get out, but it works. Also glad to have the Travel Channel HD added to the lineup, not reflective at all of this hardware but it bears mentioning.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars You aren't going to like it, October 31, 2008

By 

Steve Hullibarger (Sacramento) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: DIRECTV HR22 HD/DVR Satellite Receiver (Electronics)

After many very happy years with standard definition DirecTV using a Hughes DVR and Tivo, we went with high-def in July (2008). Love the TV set (another brand), hate the HR22 DVR and the kludgy service. The menus are not intuitive at all. The delay between the remote and the response on screen is awful. Often you will run over many selections after continuing to hit the remote in expectation of a response. Some on-screen menus are different from the manual. We experience audio drop-outs and pixelation in recorded programs. Several times everything has stopped and required us to reset the system.... with the corresponding long waits for information to download. I have heard alarming mechanical sounds coming from the box. Ever heard a hard drive before it crashes?

This is the third box DirecTV has installed - the first two failed. And it's no better.

I went looking to buy my own HD DVR, but I can't find one. Everything seems to be for cable only.

My advice? Wait until DirecTV and Tivo finish their remarriage vows and get hardware from Tivo.

23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars BUYER BEWARE, February 19, 2009

By 

Hamilton "Hamilton" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: DIRECTV HR22 HD/DVR Satellite Receiver (Electronics)

BUYER BEWARE - If you already have DirecTV and activate a new receiver, your agreement will be extended by two years from the date you activate the new one. I was not aware and was not informed by DirecTV. Now, the equipment doesnt work and they will not replace it unless I extend the agreement for another 2 years.