I have heard rumblings about DirectTV using this to replace the existing HD TiVo so they can use MPEG4... My concern is that I have seen nothing that is as good as a TiVo at being a PVR!

If there is no information on the HD DVR, how good is their SD DVR compared to TiVo?

Plenty of discussion on the SD DVR, the HD version is not out, AFAIK. But it is supposed to start trickling out this month, Los Angeles first. The SD DVR is not as good as hardly any other DVR, certainly not Tivo. I haven't looked at it this summer, but when it first came out it was buggy as hell. Dropped recordings, glitches, etc. To be fair, all DVRs pretty much came out buggy. But you'd think Directv would have it covered a little better after many years of Tivos in the house.

Try here:
http://www.dbstalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=82

The only thing that seems beneficial for the new one is the fact that the MPEG-4 takes up less space, which give you more room to save HD content. I think it's 40 hours, instead of 30 hours for the Tivo.

I've heard that MPEG-4 would allow for less recompression before broadcast, which could actually end up in better PQ.

Not compressing the hell out of it would also allow for less compression before transmission to the satellite. But Directv has proved that picture quality is no longer their interest. They just want more and more channels up, so they compress, compress, compress to fit in more channels. The new giant sats will make lots of bandwith space available, but word is still out on whether PQ will be decent. Here in Mpls, the locals look better from Comcast or an antenna than they do from either Directv's or Dish's MPEG4-based LiLs.

And the new DVR will only have more hours available if it has the same size hard drive. That is not known, AFAIK. The original commentary was something about a 160GB, which is horrible. But that was months ago, maybe over a year. So could easily be wrong.