Moxi MR-1500T3 HD Digital Video Recorder

Other products by Moxi

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 17 x 3 inches ; 10 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 14 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• Note: Gift-wrapping is not available for this item.
• ASIN: B001GQ8MT8
• Item model number: MR-1500T3
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank

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  Electronics > Televisions & Video > Digital Video Recorders

• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 25, 2008

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

From the Manufacturer Want to bring the best content from your cable provider, the Internet, and your home computer to your HDTV? The Moxi HD DVR makes it easy to access it all from one menu with one remote--and all with no monthly DVR service fees.

Moxi’s huge 500 GB hard drive records up to 75 hours of HD and 300 hours of SD programming, and it's expandable up to 1000 hours of HD shows with a 6.0 terabyte external drive.

You can also add a Moxi Mate, which allows you to access your Moxi HD DVR from other room without having to add another dedicated unit. It’s an easy, inexpensive way to enjoy DVR functionality on other HDTVs in your home.

Key Features

• New -- Multi-room sharing with the Moxi Mate
  
• New -- Traditional grid programming guide
  
• Expandable to 1000 hours of HD recording with 6.0 terabyte drive
• No monthly DVR service fees
• Emmy® Award-winning Moxi Menu with HD graphics
• CableCARD™ support--no need for a cable box
• Includes backlit remote control

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With a Moxi HD DVR connected to a broadband home network, you’ll get:

	Moxi Menu Easy-to-learn, incredibly fast, and all HD. The Emmy Award-winning Moxi Menu makes browsing fun again. The always-on TV Picture in Guide lets you keep an eye on what you were watching, TV icons let you spot programming easily, and the two axis design is simple to navigate. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Live TV Control Rewind, fast-forward, and pause live TV while you're watching. It's TV on your terms. Two Tuners Moxi lets you watch one program while recording another or record two programs while playing back a third on your Moxi HD DVR and a fourth on your Moxi Mate. Record your favorite movies and TV shows at the same time and enjoy them later on your main TV or, with the Moxi Mate in another room.
	Multi-Room Sharing No need to play musical DVRs trying to remember where you recorded what. Access all of your Moxi HD DVR’s recorded content from another room on your Moxi Mate. Start a program in the one room, and resume where you left off in another.
	HD Recording Record all of your shows in up to 1080p resolution, so you get the same crystal clear picture quality as the broadcast. External Hard Drive Support All about the HD? You might need some extra recording space. Attach up to a 6.0 terabyte eSATA external hard drive (sold separately) and expand what you can store.
	Media Link Use DLNA server software on your computer, available with an easy download to stream music, photos, and videos to your TV. If you use PlayOn software on your computer as your DLNA server, you’ll get access to Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and more all on your TV. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	View Photos in Moxi Mosaic Tired of just seeing one photo at a time? Check out Moxi’s whole new way of viewing photos. All photos in an album are laid out in a grid that looks great and allows you to find an image quickly. You can navigate the photo mosaic easily with the arrow buttons on your remote, or let it automatically cycle through full screen views of each photo alternating with the mosaic. For a full multi-media experience, add Rhapsody music! Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Flickr Photo Sharing Share photos with your friends and family from the comfort of your living room with Moxi's full screen HD photo viewer. See the latest shots from friends and family by connecting to their Flickr accounts. In fact, view any publicly-shared Flickr photos on your TV in a full-screen slideshow. That’s interconnectivity! Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Grid Guide If you like to search for TV shows in the traditional grid format, with time slots across the top and channels on the left, Moxi’s got you covered. With the touch of a button, you can switch the Moxi Menu to Grid Guide view. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Rhapsody Rhapsody’s award-winning music service makes it easy to find what you like and fun to find something new. Access Rhapsody’s library of millions of songs in the Music Guide. Use Playlist Central to discover new music or pick a station from Rhapsody Channels. Receive a 30-day free trial of Rhapsody Unlimited (value $12.99) with the purchase of a Moxi HD DVR. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	MoxiNet Get the latest news, sports, financial and entertainment information on Web pages specially designed for display on your HDTV with the ease of your remote. Bookmark your favorite Websites for access from your TV. SuperTicker Keep an eye on weather, news, sports, and financial information without leaving your full screen TV program--just by hitting one button on your cool backlit remote. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	TV Filters Stop searching through every available channel. Use Moxi’s categories that filter the list down to specific types of programming: HD, Movies, Sports, Kids, News, Music and more. For each of these categories, you can see programming up to two weeks in the future. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Channel Favorites An easy way to get to your favorite programming, Favorites automatically show you the channels you watch the most. And you don’t even have to program them in. Just watch your shows and Moxi will figure it all out.
	Automatic Conflict Detection If you schedule three programs to record at the same time, Moxi will automatically detect the conflict and let you solve the problem on the spot… even online! Moxi’s online scheduling is synched real-time to your Moxi box. It doesn’t check in later after the mistake has been made. Recorded Series Priority Put your series recordings in priority order so that Moxi will automatically record the higher priorities if they conflict.
	Online Scheduling Away from home and forgot to set a recording? If you’ve got a Moxi HD DVR, just sign into your Moxi account from your computer or PDA browser while out and about and make sure your program is waiting for you when you get home. Moxi’s online scheduling updates your recording schedule in real time so that you can handle conflicts on the spot.
	eControls Control lighting, A/V devices, and IP cameras (sold separately) from the comfort of your couch. Put multiple devices and timing delays into scenes for a specific purpose, like “Movie Time”. Set up a schedule to control any device or scene automatically. That means you can use your cool backlit remote for your entire system! Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Flip Bar Your mini Moxi Menu for full screen TV. You can use the Flip Bar to check out what’s on other channels without leaving your show. Use the flip bar to get program information, see what's on next, and record a program. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Find and Record Options Search for a program by category, title, air date/time, or keyword. That’s right, even by keyword. Just type in an actor’s name if that’s all you know, and Moxi will find your show. If you see a program you like, you can see all of the times it's on.
	Series Recording Options Choose to record the entire series or one episode only. Or, choose to record new episodes only. Recording Management Options Moxi will automatically delete your oldest programs to make room for new ones. But if you want to manage your recordings, you can do it all from one place--watch, delete, protect, or keep for a certain period of time. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Recorded TV Access Find and manage all of your recorded shows in one easy-to-browse list. View all of the programs you have scheduled to record so that you can make sure you don't miss something important. View all of the programs you have scheduled to record so that you can make sure you don't miss something important. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Commercial Skip Skip over commercials with the press of a single button Add On/Stop Early For programs with undefined start/end times, you can add time on to the beginning of your recording or stop recording early. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Arcade Games TV not entertaining enough for you? Pass the time playing games on your Moxi, including Blackjack, Quizmaster, Sudoku, and more. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Parental Controls Protect your kids from what you don't want them to see. Moxi gives you the option of blocking programming by rating or content. Click image to see it larger in a new window.
	Top 10 Schedule a recording based on what other Moxi users are enjoying.

Product Description

Designed to unleash your high-definition entertainment, the Moxi HD DVR is the perfect HD TV companion. With a digital cable subscription and a broadband connection, you can enjoy content from your cable provider, your PC, and the Internet. Once you've purchased a Moxi HD DVR, unlike other DVR's, you'll pay no monthly subscription fees. Born in HD, the Moxi Menu is the only user interface with HD graphics and an Emmy Award. The Moxi Menu makes it easy to find what you're looking for and fun to find something new. The 500 GB hard drive lets you record up to 75 hours of HD or 300 hours of SD programming. Along with the best DVR in the world, you'll get a music jukebox, photo display, game arcade, and news browser.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars MOXI HD - a long look, April 8, 2009

By	D. Allen - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Despite the fact that I am very nearly the perfect customer for a DVR, I have held off the purchase of one, a decision mostly revolving around the monthly subscription fee versus the relatively few amount of things I avidly watch on television. With the brand new, subscription free, MOXI HD DVR sitting on my entertainment shelf, all that has changed ... I get to watch what I want and when I want to with a much better picture quality than provided by Comcast hardware (see below) without tacking on more costs to the ever rising price of having cable in the first place.

First off, the MOXI HD DVR is very attractive box and came with a complete set of cables, many of which you may not even touch if you are using the HDMI interface. Setting up the MOXI was, overall, a painless experience, if not a little time consuming. At first boot up, the device was contacting the mothership with instructions to find any updates to the MOXI software, which it found, downloaded, and installed. One minor nitpick here is that it did not provide the unit ID that is used to register at the website until after this 30 minute process was over. It would have been nice to be registering while I was waiting for the update.

Next came the M-Card install (multi-streaming cable card, allowing dual feeds for the device), and overall, went off with relative ease, despite a little trepidation on both my part as well as the Comcast@ customer service rep. He was not familiar with the MOXI brand and we both got a little nervous when the MOXI wouldn't recognize the card for a channel scan (but did get the card's ID info) until the customer rep was astute enough to suggest that I remove the card and try it again while the device was powered on.

Following that, there was what I can only assume was growing pain as the MOXI took several minutes to scan the channels and then start displaying me digital gibberish (a fascinating display of colored squares from improper decoding) for a few panic filled moments before finding it's place in the digital stream and displaying a perfectly wonderful HD image of the selected channel.

In fact, the image was so good, I started comparing it back and forth between my Comcast HD receiver unit to only confirm my suspicions, that the MOXI decodes both 4:3 content and HD content with far better quality than the Comcast unit does (which is very poorly if you ask me). Unless I am mistaken, the Comcast DVR is based on the same unit that the HD receiver is built on, so this is one place where initial price tag of the MOXI pays off.

From here, it has been a fun journey of playing with all of the features of the MOXI HD DVR, some of which are great and others are fascinatingly not very good at all. The interface overall is very nice, and more so once you get used to it. It is obvious that MOXI has taken the user interface design as a serious consideration. Recording shows and series is a breeze, playback even more so, and I love the various channel categories (all HD, all Movies, etc.), which admittedly the Comcast DVR has as well, but in a far less attractive menu system. I may have missed how to do it, but it would be great to be able to move through the channel guide display one page at a time rather than navigating one channel at a time (with hundreds of channels, I constantly use the page up and page down buttons on the Comcast remote). On that thought, I really like the MOXI remote as whole.

For the most part, recording has gone well in both standard and HD resolutions, with one exception of several playback errors encountered from a recording of Mission Impossible III (HD). At several points during the movie, it failed on the decoding of the recorded movie so badly, that it kicked me to TV once, rebooted the device once, and several times required that I attempt fast forwarding, pausing, restarting, etc. in order to get a video stream back.

Other than this yet to be repeated recording experience, most things have played back error free and with great quality. The few other errors during recording that I have encountered result in a visual line of noise at the top of the screen that looks like an old VHS tape alignment problem, but the shows themselves have been intact otherwise.

Recording series is brain dead simple and my only complaint here (and there might be a way to do this that I haven't found) is that I find myself changing the default settings for recording a series every single time. In theory, this device is should be able to hold over a couple hundred hours of non-HD and well over a hundred of HD content, yet the series recording options are set to the almost the most spartan, space conserving settings that require you get to your recordings within a couple days. In my case, this is almost never the case and might even be a couple weeks before I have a couple hours to sit and watch some of it.

Another great feature to mention is scheduling recording from the Moxi website. I haven't used it outside of testing, but I like the idea a great deal and bet it will be helpful the handful of times I know in advance I want to watch something, but will not be home in time to see it.

This very feature filled device would be beyond fantastic if they did one, brain numbingly obvious thing ... give me access to a web browser for that love of GOD!!!! Here are a few reasons:

A> I want Pandora, not Finetunes (which I never did actually ever find a way to create a play list on ... which either says I am missing something so obvious that my great intellect glanced over ... heh)

B> I want Picasa slide shows, not Flickr (which also was slow and sometimes only semi-functional).

C> The big wide world of the Internet ... aka ... freedom of choice. DRM issues aside, it is no longer acceptable for networked devices running full PCs under the hood to try and corral me into their business partnerships.

Some might point at platform stability as good reason to avoid an open browser use on a dedicated device as the MOXI HD DVR, but one of the other problems I have encountered a couple of times is the seemingly random rebooting of the device. So, that is to say, I doubt letting me run a browser in kiosk mode and flash apps such as Pandora within would do much to make the platform less stable.

One last note worthy mention is the PCLink to Windows Media Player, which involved some voodoo to get working (even after the security changes ... still uncertain what the final incantation was to make it work ... might have been the chicken blood and candles), I had access to all images and audio in my desktop machine's library (which is not much, since I use Winamp). So far, this has been a much better experience to use than Finetune or Flickr on the MOXI and I think this was a decent feature to include. As, it seems is common in the DVR world, it will not however let you playback video files over the PCLink, which is a somewhat baffling decision and one that I can only presume are related to copyright protection or the potentially problematic playback of a user's video collection of various formats (mov, mpg, avi, mp4, divx, wmv for example) and codecs (an endless sea of possible codecs) being problematic on a black box device. Still, I would love to be able to play at least common formats, or if nothing else, divx would be a welcome standard.

I feel like I have given the MOXI HD DVR a tough time of it in this review, and this is where the rubber meets the road folks. I have no other experience with DVR's on the market, but the MOXI has gotten me pretty hooked on the use of one. Overall, the MOXI HD DVR has been a joy to use and has been no more finicky than the Comcast HD receiver, but does provide far superior picture quality. That fact alone has me happy with the device, but the multi-stream HD DVR, absence of subscription costs, and ease of use of the MOXI makes it a product worth considering.

At a street price of around $800 and iffy, service specific side features, it is a somewhat tougher argument for the tech savvy, as building a PC based DVR system gets nothing but easier. For everyone else, the MOXI should satisfy and not having to add another monthly payment onto your ever tightening paycheck will make this unit popular for many, and in the long run will save you money despite the heavy upfront costs.

I think the MOXI folks need to do a little more finessing and re-tooling the "extra" features, but even with a steep initial investment and some quirks, I give this device a thumbs up for the DVR hungry. Just remind yourself that the lack of a monthly fee will pay off in the long run and you will enjoy your sexy new entertainment center black box!

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars High quality, user friendly and well designed, February 15, 2009

By	Avital Gertner "http://www.creativityprompt.com" (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Moxi MR-1500T3 HD Digital Video Recorder is a great addition to our home's media center.

It is user friendly - comes with a complete cable kit (including: ethernet and component and even the batteries for the remote). It is very easy to assemble. The interface is well designed and there is no guess work in how to use it. The remote's layout is also well designed and the buttons are wide and easy to maneuver.

It has great features - Along with your ability to record your favorite TV shows and movies for later viewing (sans commercials), you can also use it for showcasing your home videos and photos, both from your hard drive or web based galleries (such as Flickr and YouTube).

Beautiful design - Its sleek modern design makes it a great addition to our living room and blends right in, unlike other appliances which can dominate the room...

Cons - It has a slight fan noise when working. It upgrades automatically, which can take as long as 30 minutes (which can cause delay).

All in all I am very satisfied with MOXI and would recommend it to other buyers.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Good The Bad And The Beautiful, March 26, 2009

By	Paul F. Sterbentz "Early Adobter" (Mountain View, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First let's make one thing very clear: there is nothing else on the market right now that gives you high definition, hard drive recording from cable, has 2 QAM tuners, accepts a dual tuner cable card, provides a decent schedule/programming interface, has no reoccurring fees, and has first class customer support.

If you do not own a computer, do not purchase this unit. If you are not subscribed to a cable company, do not purchase this unit.

The unit arrived packaged well. Setup took less than an hour. You make 3 connections not including the power cord: 1) the cable company's incoming cable 2) the HDMI cable from from tv. A six foot HDMI cable is included 3) the network cable from your router.

Once you are connected, you follow the on screen instructions to activate your account. Contrary to what others have said, navigating through the menu is not super intuitive and some of the more important features are buried in sub menus. Irregardless, you will eventually get the hang of it and in a few days be zipping through, at least, the recording and playback functions.

If you do not intend on using a cable card, which you get from your cable company for a nominal fee, you will be stuck receiving only the QAM channels which is about 25% of what the cable company offers. This is because the unit is not equipped with a QAM Free tuner which most modern tv's have built in. So the result is, you WILL be able to see channels on your tv that your MOXI will NOT be able to record.

The MOXI has first class, made in America, live person support. I ended up going on their web site and typing in my problem (wrong time displayed) in their "live" messaging box. After some text messaging back and forth, he contacted me by phone and we worked it out. He followed up a day later to make sure everything was going smoothly (it was). They can access your MOXI from their office and run diagnostics on it etc.

I deducted a star because there are a few clunky areas of their schedule/programming interface that need work. I was assured by MOXI support that they will address these in future operating system updates.

In summary, this is a good unit that is 95% there. If you want to record high definition tv without the monthly fees and a better programming interface with no commercials, it's the only game in town.

UPDATE - I sadly returned this after trying two of them. Both had tuner issues, ie picture and sound breakup under certain conditions. The MOXI 30 day guarantee worked as stated on their web site. Also their tech support continued to be the best I have ever experienced with any product - live people from the state of Washington.