Moxi 2-Tuner 500GB HD Digital Recorder Review

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(More customer reviews)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 satisfyand 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!

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