Directv HD Questions
 

In the next day or two, I'm going to call Dtv to see about adding a second HD unit.

Will they give me another HD unit for free?
We're apart of the 'protection' service, will that make a difference in regards to if they'll charge us or not?
Will they have to come to the house to install it?
Can someone explain the 'whole house dvr' to me.
It's my understanding that you need 2 HD units to use this service.
Will we still be able to record 2 shows on EACH dvr?
Will our third non HD dvr be able to be included in the whole house dvr?
Do they charge add't $$ for this service?

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

seriously dude, call their CSR. 1-800-DIRECTV

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

Will they give me another HD unit for free? Depends on how good you are at negotiating

Will they have to come to the house to install it?Yes, if you want whole-home DVR

Can someone explain the 'whole house dvr' to me. It connects the DVRs in your house via wifi. Essentially you have 1 DVR that records everything and you can access the queue from all the other boxes in the house. The only problem with whole-home DVR is that only 1 box can access the DVR queue at a time. Which means if someone is in the living room watching something, then you CANNOT have someone else watching something in the bedroom/office/etc.

It's my understanding that you need 2 HD units to use this service. Well it would be pointless to have it without at least two different receivers.

Will we still be able to record 2 shows on EACH dvr? No you will not.

Will our third non HD dvr be able to be included in the whole house dvr? It depends on the model.

Do they charge add't $$ for this service?[/QUOTE]

Like the other poster said your best best is to call them and see what the CSR can do for you.

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

Wow, I didn't know that about Whole Home DVR, I had assumed that you could still record things on each DVR and share the playlists. That sounds like you basically lose the functionality of the other DVRs as anything more than receivers for the first DVR. So you'd essentially be limited to whatever space was on the first DVR anyway, right? Sounds terrible.

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

Yeah, it's greatest system. Recently I moved in a guest house on my parents property to save some rent $ and my mom and I thought whole home DVR would be great because we would have access to each other's queues. But the second we found out that we'd only be able to access the queue's once at a time, we decided to keep the seperate boxes.

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

I have whole home DVR with DTV and I have two DVR's in the loop. We have 5 receivers total so it made sense to have two DVR's. I tend to record all my stuff on one DVR and my fiancee on the other so we avoid most contention issues.

I have experienced the problem with not being able to play from a DVR that is already playing recorded content on another receiver, but I can certainly record two shows at a time per DVR. So with two DVR's in the loop I can potentially record 4 unique programs at the same time - 2 on each receiver.

The biggest issue I've had is the boxes losing sync with each other. If one of the DVR's gets reset or knocked off the network for some reason, I basically wind up re-running the network test on each machine to re-acquire the signal. It was worse in the beginning of my service when I assume the boxes were resetting a lot due to upgrades being processed.

Also keep in mind if you go with a 2 DVR setup and want to connect to your home network for On Demand content, you need this small internet box they have which wires into your LAN router. Basically they ran a cable wire from a splitter at one of the boxes into this internet box and the patch it into my Linksys router with an RJ45 cable.

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

We have whole-home service with 2 units and access the same playlist at the same time all the time. We have 1 HD-DVR and 1 HD receiver only, not sure if that is why we can access the list at the same time whereas folks with 2 DVRs can't?

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

We have Whole Home with 2 HD-DVR's. We can watch a recorded show on each DVR at the same time, just not the SAME recording at the same time. We can also record 4 shows at once. It's lovely. :)

Re: Directv HD Questions
 

If you care you can watch YouTube and listen to Pandora if you DVR is connected to the internet.