Random Waves of Insight

We've got Comcast DVR. A Comcast tech came to our house to switch us over to Comcast Digital Voice. His work order also said to install DVR. We didn't order that, but decided, hey, why not. We had been seriously considering Tivo, but Comcast slipped in at the last second for the devious win.

Anyway, now we really can pause live television. Whey you're watching TV on the DVR box, it will save a cache of the previous two hours spent on any given channel. So if you're watching Fox for 15 minutes, and you leave to go to the bathroom and come back and you just missed the part where Sarah Connor takes out another machine, you can just rewind to right where the commercials ended.

What's really great is that on our old non-DVR box, we could only fast forward or rewind On Demand programs at one inefficient speed. Comcast DVR comes with a variable speed with five different settings, from normal playing speed to super fast forward.

If you then change from Fox to NBC, the cache is completely reset. So now you've disposed of the ability to rewind, at least for a few minutes. Now, on NBC, the box is storing everything it sees, again for up to two hours.

You can record programs, too. The only downside is the hard drive can only store 30 hours of programming. So if you record a lot of different shows, you must watch them before it fills up, otherwise you'll have to get rid of the old to make room for the new.

What I'd like to see: Bigger hard drive, and a slot for downloading shows to your iPod or flash memory stick, which can then be used to upload shows to a different box.

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