Should I upgrade to Hooper/Joey

[Briant73]

Currently running a vip722 in the main living room which feeds the master bedroom TV and a vip222 in the family room, feeding the 2nd bedroom, both dishes are in dual tuner mode so up to four different tvs can be watched with different programs on them. The dish 722 and 222 are both connected to hdmi tvs on TV1 and tv2 is coax, with the 722 having a external hard drive hooked up. Both dish receivers have wired ethernet to them but there is no wired ethernet in the bedrooms.

I have read a little about the hopper/joey and it looks promising but don't want to limit myself or go overboard. With 1 Hopper and 3 joey's how would it work for recordings/viewing? Do I need ethernet to every Joey to watch dish tv? Would a hopper/3 joey's save money or not?

Sorry I know some of these have been answered but there's so much out there I thought I would ask, thanks for helping in advance.

 

[rdinkel]

How many of your four TVs are HD? One of the main benefits to the Hopper/Joey architecture is finally all TVs will be able to receive HD programming. Depending on how many folks you have watching TVs at a time, you may find one Hopper and three Joeys a little short on tuners--unless you mostly watch network shows during prime time.

 

[Briant73]

How many of your four TVs are HD? One of the main benefits to the Hopper/Joey architecture is finally all TVs will be able to receive HD programming. Depending on how many folks you have watching TVs at a time, you may find one Hopper and three Joeys a little short on tuners--unless you mostly watch network shows during prime time.

Three of the TVs current with the last one SD that may go to HD very soon. Up three TVs going at once on different channels. How many tuners are there for the configuration I talked about 3-4? So if I'm recording one 1-2 tuners we only have 1-2 independent tuners available to watch?

Now can you mix a Joey with VIP 722/222 type receiver?

 

[rdinkel]

The Hopper has three tuners. Joeys have none of their own. So if one tuner is busy recording, that leaves two tuners left to share between your four TVs. But you can also be watching something else that was previously recorded, DishOnline, or join what someone else is watching. If it were my house, I would go with two Hoppers and two Joeys, instead. Monthly cost would be the same as one Hopper and three Joeys, but it would cost you about $100 more up front.

 

[navychop]

No ViP receivers allowed with Hopper setups. In fact, it's all Hopper or no Hopper.

 

[dare2be]

Your monthly fees, if I got this right, would go from
$6 DVR + $14 ViP222 = $20
to
$6 DVR + $4 Multi-room + $21 (3 Joeys) = $31

It would be the same if you went with 2 Hoppers 2 Joeys as well, but the Hoppers wouldn't be integrated yet.

 

[lern4483]

Ill give you my two cents:

I have both. I enjoy them both.
Where direc tv excels in my opinion is sports programming.
I have them solely for the sports packages.

Their current lineup of dvrs HR24 is the best they have put out to date.
The new guide is excellent! Its actually the nicest guide I've seen to date.
I will add that the dvrs do get temper mental and are subject to slowdown.
Sometimes after I access a feature the dvrs gets sluggish.
Picture on direc is possibly the best. But I can see barely a difference with dish.

Dish:
More premium channels. More basic cable channels.
Does not do sports like direc does.
However, i still say the vip HD dvrs are the best
receivers out there. Not sluggish, lightening fast.
With the new Hopper system coming out I would not
make a switch to direc.

Go get the hopper system and stay with dish.

 

[Briant73]

Thanks for the answers. I have no plans to go direc tv currently just interested in the hopper/joeys to upgrade my current dish setup. Thanks for answering the questions I had because when I first heard about this I actually thought (hoped) that each Joey had it's own tuner for viewing and the hopper unit had 2-3 tuners for main viewing and recordings. I can see I was way off on that one.

I do like the idea of the Hopper plus Joeys giving me the ability for HD at mutiple locations and the ability to watch what's recorded on the hopper on any of those TVs but not sure about the cost and if it would be overkill considering our current viewing habits going to two hoppers. Lots to think about.