The Comcast HDTV PVR from Motorola has been available for awhile now in our area. The menu screens for the (relatively) new Comcast HDTV PVR are easy to read from a distance. The cost of this box, if it’s available in your area, is an extra $4.95/month over the cost of your existing Comcast HDTV box (for a total of $9.95/month extra) which puts this on about the same pricing as a TiVO subscription. It’s my understand that this is one of the relatively few options out there of being able to record HDTV. It also supports dual-tuner functionality so you can record something on one channel and watch another at the same time. That’s a biggie feature for a family room set.



When you press the menu you have the following options: On Demand, TV Listings, Mini Guide, DVR, HDTV, Search, i-Channels, Help and Settings. Here’s a brief explanation of these options:

• On Demand - access various content stored on Comcast servers at your leisure. I’m a big fan of On Demand because of its convenience factor. If you have a movie channel (we have Starz currently) then you’ll be able to select from dozens of movies and new movies are added/replaced every Monday. We like the On Demand Court TV stuff but they rarely change that out which is a bummer. Some of this content becomes a bit stale, but the premium channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc) are pretty good about providing new content. You cannot record any On Demand content.
• TV Listings - An online tv guide
• Mini Guide - an abbrieviated version of the TV Listings menu
• DVR - add new shows to record or watch prior recorded shows 
• HDTV - search for what’s on HDTV right now
• Search - search by title, author and more
• i-Channels - a specially formatted webpage like channel that shows news and other content. Doesn’t look like it’s too customizable at this point, but this is promising for more web interactivity (customized RSS feeds someday maybe?).
• Help - get help on how to use the various features. Like too many other online help systems, it’s not very well fleshed out.
• Settings - Change various settings like setting the channels you receive, favorite channels, etc.

The DVR Recordings menu makes it easy to manage existing series (to record every episode of your favorite shows), remove shows taking up space in the 80 GB drive, check what is scheduled and add a new recording. If you record a lot of HDTV stuff you’ll see that 80GB evaporate pretty quickly as HDTV takes a lot more space.



The DVR menu offers nothing really new but everything you expect to be here seems to be. You can save the equivalent of TiVO season passes (called “Series Manager”) so that you can watch recurring series at your leisure.



From the settings menu you can choose the channels you watch most often so if you press the “Fav” button on the remote a channel listing will show up for only those channels. Useful for turning your hundreds of channels into the dozen or so you might actually watch somewhat regularly.



I don’t know much about the i-Channel service. It would be cool if this could be programmed with RSS feeds or something, but it looks like something entirely programmed by Microsoft / Comcast. I need to learn more about this service as I see some cool interactive possibilities but right now the information on it is lacking.

Overall, the Comcast HDTV PVR is better than average for those with Comcast HDTV cable who don’t already have TiVO. Similar to the MCE 2005 I miss the auto favorites record function that TiVO has where it tries to record shows you might like. Sometimes that serendipitous function pulls out some interesting stuff. I like the movie feature of the MCE 2005 where it shows the movie boxes and that’s missing from Microsoft TV’s menu and would be cool to see it implemented here.

Also, the search didn’t quite work right which I reported to Comcast. Despite programming in our custom channel list (and favorites) the search kept returning results for all the channels (including the ones we didn’t have) which makes the search not as useful. They say they are going to fix that though. The TV quality for analog channels can be downright bad sometimes which Comcast already knows is a problem. Grade: B

• Netflix to offer movie downloads in 2005
• HBO On Demand deals with age old cable frustration
• Cable moans and groans — switch from Satellite or not?
• A la carte Cable TV: which channels would you keep?
• Replace TiVo with Media Center PC?
• TiVo not dead or acquired yet, Yahoo buddies up