First Look: Dish Video On Demand

DBSOgre said:
I have to say that I'm impressed, but cable still has the REAL VOD. I would love to have something like MagRack on Dish or the upcoming WWE VOD. That would be awesome. Unfortunately, I know that would be nearly impossible with satellite.

As far as I know, all cable VOD is Standard Def. That kills my interest in the thing.

Dish VOD will likely be the same.
 
Stargazer said:
I wonder why we could not compress the data to allow for more storage on the hard drive? Is that even possible? I know the picture quality would drop in doing so.

It compressed when you get it. Dish will have to bite the mpeg4 bullet to give you that. Never happen on SD.

Could have had a shot at HD if they had put it into all receivers since the 811.
 
The standalone Tivo receivers have different quality settings with them, but the satellite receivers that have the DVR built into them do not. I think they should at least give you the option of which quality you want it (perhaps even have some shows/movies record in a worse quality than others to save space on the hard drive).
 
Stargazer said:
The standalone Tivo receivers have different quality settings with them, but the satellite receivers that have the DVR built into them do not. I think they should at least give you the option of which quality you want it (perhaps even have some shows/movies record in a worse quality than others to save space on the hard drive).

They would need to have a MPEG encoder for that. the current D*Tivo and Dish DVR just record the bitstream to the HD. No encoder needed or included in the receiver.

NightRyder
 
Just how big is the "reserved" section of my hard drive on my 508 ? If Dish is going to send 10 or more movies to my HD every night, that has got to have an effect on how much free space I have available for MY recordings. And why would I want to pay for a movie for just one day, when I can do PPV and record it and have it and watch as many times and keep it for as long as I want for the same money ??
 
That is what I am wondering, recording a PPV to DVR would allow you to store it on there while you couldnt do that with a VOD (especially seeing that they want an extra dollar for each day thereafter to view it).
 
Another question - as a hard drive on a PC fills up it can slow down due to fragmentation. Are there any known problems with Dish DVRs that have nearly maxed out hard drives? Should I expect to see more of the "partially lost recording" message?
 
dlsnyder said:
Another question - as a hard drive on a PC fills up it can slow down due to fragmentation. Are there any known problems with Dish DVRs that have nearly maxed out hard drives? Should I expect to see more of the "partially lost recording" message?
There's been some speculation (including from me) as to a fragmentation problem, but no decent answers yet.

It's probably not a problem, though.
 
Like VOD or not, I must admit that Charlie is a genius. I know it's not the equivalent of cable VOD, but close enough. AND, in many ways it is even more attractive than cable VOD ( as far as Charlie's $ is concerned) because I think we will be much more likely to watch one of those movies if it's already sitting there on our hard drives ready to go.
 
minnow said:
Just how big is the "reserved" section of my hard drive on my 508 ? If Dish is going to send 10 or more movies to my HD every night, that has got to have an effect on how much free space I have available for MY recordings.
I understand that they can fit 8 to 10 movies in their reserved space. And again that reserved space does not take away from your recording area. (They hidden space has always been allocated it just has never been used)
 
8-10 movies. Let's assume 8 at 2 gig per movie. 16 gig?

I doubt they are reserving 16 gig on a 40 gig 501.

I just hope they give us the option to turn the feature off.
 
AJF said:
Like VOD or not, I must admit that Charlie is a genius. I know it's not the equivalent of cable VOD, but close enough. AND, in many ways it is even more attractive than cable VOD ( as far as Charlie's $ is concerned) because I think we will be much more likely to watch one of those movies if it's already sitting there on our hard drives ready to go.
Not at the price they are asking, I'd rather wait and rent the DVD, the picture is much better anyway, plus you get widescreen anamorphic and the extras and a week to watch it. Who in their right mind will pay $3.99 for the right to view a force-fed program in 24 hours? This is akin to the DIVIX fiasco a couple of years ago.
 
DarrellP said:
Not at the price they are asking, I'd rather wait and rent the DVD, the picture is much better anyway, plus you get widescreen anamorphic and the extras and a week to watch it. Who in their right mind will pay $3.99 for the right to view a force-fed program in 24 hours? This is akin to the DIVIX fiasco a couple of years ago.

You are absolutely correct.
 
AJF said:
Like VOD or not, I must admit that Charlie is a genius.

Well, like they said in Spinal Tap, "There's a fine line between genius and stupidity". Dish VOD (and Best of Dish, as well) is stupidity.

It's a waste of engineering resources that could be put to better use getting the existing features to work correctly, and adding features that consumers want and need. It's a waste of precious bandwidth. And...It's a waste of precious hdd space.

I have never ordered a PPV (unless I had a coupon), and do not intend to order a VOD. But, if I were interested in paying for a compressed non-HD movie, for some strange reason, I would simply DVR a PPV.
 
Did he say if the physical amount of reserved space is the same on all DVRs or is it based on a percentage of the total drive space for each? Stated another way, are they going to be able to fit as many movies in their space on my 508 as they can on a 510?
 
So when it's recroding a VOD show, will the screen be blanked out? What if you want to use your reciever while its recording one of these movies? Another odd thing I notices is, there was an "adult" section on the VOD screen. It's kind of wierd that Charlie will be storing porn on everyone's DVR.
 
WOW that's something I hadn't considered! That would mean that my DVR would be unuseable for the two hours or so allocated to recording all this junk because I wouldn't be allowed to watch the program in real time without paying for it. They really need to think this through a little more!
 
Yeah, between VOD and "best of dish" you might be able to fit in an hour or two of your own recordings. I'm sure they've got to have some inactivity timer set so it will only record if you aren't using your reciever and if you don't have anything else schedule. I would hope anyways. There's still the issue of wanting to user your reciever in the middle of a recording though.
 
One way I found to get around this - and eliminate that annoying screen saver too - is to set an event timer for sometime in the middle of the night. I had an open ended autotune timer set up for 3:45 am as an alarm clock for awhile and it worked great.
 

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