Customer Reviews

DIRECTV HR22 HD/DVR Satellite Receiver

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This unit is actually much better than the HR21. I purchased this unit from Directv on 8-31-09 and received it the very next day. After setup I noticed that the menus and functions are much quicker and very responsive. I like my HR21 except for the fact that it is very, for the lack of a better term, laggy. I was kind of scared at first when I noticed they had shipped me the HR22 instead of the HR23 but not now. It's definitely not better than the Tivo models but after using the HR21 for over a year this thing is like comparing a Kia to a Ferrari.

The picture on this box is good. The features are good. Everything works as it should just slow. The box shuts down about twice or so a week indicating that the card is not in but you know it is. You lose a piece of your show and then it comes back on. If you call DirecTV, by the time the tech assistant gets on the line, the box is working. Trust me, they did not do anything to make it work. It will do it again in a couple of days or so. However, it is the best HD box that I have found so far that is compatible with Directv. I just found out last week after owning the system for 4 months that accepting the box from Direct TV means they automatically increase your contract for a year without notification. After complaint about the legality of the contractual scam, they sent me the fine print document. That's why my next one I buy will not be through them or free. Once they get their claws into you they are not so nice to you anymore. Recommendation, do not accept box from DTV buy your own.

this model is a total piece of junk. don't waste your time or money with this receiver. i have had direct tv for years and never had problems until i got this receiver. it was installed by a direct tv tech one week ago and it has had nothing but problems since day one. it was not receiving guide info, then it lost the satellite signal and can't get it back. i have an hr 23 as well and that model works perfectly but when you go through direct tv, you have no control over which model receiver they will send you. they almost always send the hr 22. you are better off buying the hr 23 and spending the money than to get the hr 22 through direct tv and have a receiver that never works.

I've had two of these for a year and a half and just bought my third for $99. from directv. I think they work fine cosidering what they do and that they are essentialy small computers with hard drives. I've never had one break and they got much better with a update they did a while back. I used my moms dvr from comcast and that makes mine look 10 years newer in technology. Comcast DVR is so much slower and hardly shows and channels in the guide, those are much worse.

I wanted to get a second reciever for my bedroom and wanted to buy one so I didn't have to sign another contract. The HD DVR works well and meets is functionality. The downside is that there is a lag that can become very frustrating.

This is a garbage receiver. It is painfully slow, it gets confused and forgets commands. It does not have enough ram. Get an HR24.

I have long been a proponent and fan of Tivo-branded DVRs, and generic DVRs just seemed like junk to me. The cable company provided DVRs are especially bad. Since DirecTV does not yet have an equivalent of TiVo HD (one is coming in 2010), I took the plunge and got the HR22 to supplement my existing DirecTV/Sony SAT-T60 TiVo boxes, which are not HD.

To my surprise, I confess that I actually like this HR22 better than my old TiVo. The HR22 is far superior to the cable company DVRs, and it has some features that I did not have on my TiVo. For example, when you pop up the guide or the DVR menu, your current program (whether live or a recording) continues to play in a window on the screen. When you are searching for a program, you can use the remote keypad to type cell phone text messaging style rather than pointing and clicking on the letters. You can do it either way, but typing it seems much faster.

The response time can be sluggish at times, but it is significantly faster than my TiVo.

The broadband-based On Demand programming is very fun, and I did not have any On Demand features on my DirecTV TiVo. Similarly, the interactive channels such as News Mix and Sports Mix are nice, since this box lets you choose which window gets the sound.

The picture quality is excellent.

There is no built-in WiFi, so you may need to improvise to add to your home network. I am using an Apple AirPort Express to connect the HR22 to my wireless network (HR22 wired to AirPort Express, AirPort Express connects it wirelessly to AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule main base station).

One annoying feature is a very bright blue light in the center of the box, but you can easily disable this light by pressing the console's left and right buttons at the same time 4 times (I discovered this via a Google search).

The only difference between the HR22 and HR23 is that the HR22 requires upconverter dongles between the box and each of the two cable feeds (Google for more info). So make sure you buy these dongles if you go with the HR22 (DirecTV provided these to me for free).

For TiVo users, you lose TiVo Suggestions, and the equivalent of the Wish List is weak (but you can search by keyword, etc.). There is also no Netflix On Demand like there is on cable-based TiVo HD.

Finally, the rumor is that the new TiVo software for DirecTV HD coming out in 2010 may just be a premium download for this hardware rather than its own hardware, so there is a chance this box can be converted to TiVo software in 2010.