Also, now the Moxi supports Switched Digital Video. Certain cable companies have adopted this format on new stations, and even the CableCard doesn’t pick them up. Now the Moxi can, just like TiVo. All you need is the SDV tuning adapter from your content provider if you indeed require one.

Digeo has rolled out more video codec supports for the Moxi HD DVR. The company is specifically not listing which formats the Moxi HD DVR now support, but it seems like most H.264 and even MKV containers should now work – even though officially Digeo hasn’t said this. At least the company is addressing what was one of my biggest complaints previously.

The summer update also adds compatibility with LaCie 4big Quadra 6 TB drive via the rear eSATA port. Do you know how much HD programming can fit onto a 6TB drive? 1000 hours. That’s a lot.

So the Moxi Mate. This is designed to be a second room streaming device. You’re limited to only one per full size Moxi HD DVR though. The little fanless device allows you to stream all the content from the full size to the second room. In addition to the remote content, the Moxi Mate can also access all the network content via the DLNA network and PlayOn software. However, a person cannot tune in stations nor schedule recordings from the Moxi Mate.

The Moxi Mate will cost $399 retail, but is available in a $1000 package that includes the $799 Moxi HD DVR. Expect it to be available on Moxi.com tonight and on Amazon by Friday.

The software should start hitting Moxi HD DVRs later today and is expected to be complete later this week.

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All you have to do is fill out a form to be entered in one of the giveaways. The other giveaway is a bit more involved, but also includes a 500GB external hard drive and an extra $1000 bucks for your home theater setup. Both include a one-year Rhapsody Unlimited membership and a PlayOn license. I wasn’t a big fan of the DVR, but free is free. What do you have to lose?

User interface

The Moxi looks stellar on an HDTV. The interface was designed with high-def in mind. The company even won an Emmy for the interface. The colors are bright and pop on the screen. However, the beautiful look doesn’t transform into a user friendly interface.

The Moxi’s GUI isn’t a treat to use. In fact, it’s kind of a pain. It often seems like actions require an extra click or two on the remote to perform a given task. For instance, to watch a show found via the guide, a user needs to hit the OK button to select the TV program and then hit the button again to actually watch it. Even hitting the play button brings up the same screen before the program is displayed.

Something similar happens when browsing network shares as well. The system always asks you to confirm that you actually want to step back rather than performing the action requested by the user. More on network sharing further down.

It’s little things like that which are more irritating than true deal breakers. Perhaps it’s just that the GUI is different than every DVR I have ever used, and I’m not over the learning curve yet. The guide is something that I don’t think I could ever get used to though.

This is one thing that I cannot stand about the Moxi. First, the vertical bar doesn’t offer nearly as much info as I want. It only displays what is currently playing on all the stations and the user has to select a station to see what’s coming on an hour from now. TiVo offers a similar guide layout, but there is also the grid option that shows multiple stations’ upcoming lineup simultaneously. Yes, the vertical bar does allow the currently playing station to be displayed while browsing the guide, but so does the grid menu on most cable providers’ stock DVRs.

The search system really surprised me when I opened the app for the first time. Look at that pic. Trust me, I do not subscribe to some of those stations shown on the screen. It seems the the search app shows the content provider’s entire lineup alphabetically starting with numbers. The results are laughable to me, but many people could find it extremely offensive. The search should only show programs on stations that are available. Perhaps that setting is somewhere in the menu, but it should be enabled by default.

I strongly feel that past the core functionality of recording and timeshifting television, the second most important function of a DVR is to present outside content to the viewer: Internet video, network stored files, and such. The Moxi scores high marks on paper but fails miserably in practice. It’s almost like the Moxi designers settled for “good enough” rather than “really good” in this regard.

The Moxi tech supported shocked the hell out of me when they told me that the Moxi HD DVR does not support AVI playback at all. A lead engineer explained it to me that it has to do with the Broadcom chip at the device’s core and compatibility issues with the file format – MKV files aren’t supported either. He said that sometime soon there will be a firmware update sent out which should enable this feature.

Until then though, users will only be able to playback MPEG-2, H.264-encoded MPEG-4, and WMV files on the Moxi HD DVR. This is a dealbreaker for me. It doesn’t sit well that a high-end device in 2009 doesn’t support AVI playback when my original XBOX and first generation DLNA devices stream the files fine.

A software update for the Moxi rolled out a few weeks ago and touted that the DVR now supports YouTube and a bunch of Internet video sites. It does, but not with a built in app. The Moxi DVR also now supports Hulu, CBS, Netflix, CNN, and ESPN, but through the Windows-only DLNA streaming program PlayOn. My friends, this is a cop out.

These Internet video sites are only available through the DLNA network and require you to set everything up on the computer, which must be running for this service to work on the Moxi. There isn’t a built-in app that allows you to, say, search YouTube for a video directly from the DVR. The service does allow access to the top viewed, favorites, and new videos directly from the Moxi interface, but everything else has to be added to your personal queue from a computer. It’s lame and not the way Internet video should be accessed in a modern-day connected device.

It seems so elementary that at least YouTube should have a dedicated app in the device allowing access to the entire library of content. The same goes for the rest of the video services. If Digeo wanted the Moxi to be a game changer, there would be a dedicated app for Hulu. That function alone would have won me over dispite all my issues with the DVR. Anyway, the current method for internet video isn’t good enough for an $800 DVR. Period.

Folks, there is one shining light to the Moxi HD DVR though and that is the SuperTicker. I love this thing. Press a button on the remote and the little ticker at bottom of the display will pop up and give you a shit-ton of info. Everything from local weather, to sports scores, to news will tick across the bar. It’s wonderful and a true innovation, but doesn’t make up for the rest of the Moxi HD DVR.

Hardware

The Moxi HD DVR does come packed with some impressive gear – expect for the small 500GB HDD, but we’ll get to that. The DVR has a powerful Broadcom chip at the core, which is what provides all the pretty eye candy. Plus, the DVR outputs up to 1080p via HDMI and Dolby Digital over both Toslink and Digital Coax connections. The rear panel USB jacks and eSATA also allow users expansion of the DVR’s storage.

The Moxi is equipped with dual channel buffers that allow watchers to swap between stations without losing the ability to rewind on those stations – a huge plus over the average cable company’s DVR. With two buffers, you can pause one station, switch to another, and then switch back to resume watching on the original station. Oh, and this buffer is huge at three hours. Just so you know, TiVo has dual buffers too but they max out at 30 minutes.

Truth of the matter is that the Moxi sounds great, but pales against the TiVo HD XL, which is its main competitor. The TiVo has an ATSC over-the-air tuner, is THX certified, and comes with a 1TB hard drive. I really expect Digeo to update the hard drive shortly, mainly because 1TB drives are dirt cheap these days and it would eliminate many people’s main complaint about the more expensive Moxi HD DVR.

The remote is a curious thing too. It looks well laid out, but it doesn’t really work well. I often confused the playback controls with the navigation controls. The button layout is too similar and they feel almost identical. And there are buttons on the remote that do almost the same thing. The Moxi button located directly in the middle seems to do the same thing a button in the top row and the zoom button. Maybe I’m dumb.

Pricing

The Moxi HD DVR isn’t cheap – sort of. It costs $800 but there is payment plan in the works to break it down into easier payments. There isn’t a monthly subscription fee to use the Moxi DVR and not a single advertisement stuck anywhere in the system, so that’s a plus.

Let’s do some quick math.

TiVo HD XL has an MSRP of $599+ $12.95 monthly fee = $755 for the first year and $155 every year after.

TiVo HD XL $599 + $299 lifetime service fee = $898

Moxi HD DVR costs $799 and there isn’t a monthly fee

This clearly shows that the Moxi HD DVR does cost less if the TiVo HD XL is purchased at full retail. However, Amazon is currently selling the XL HD at $498, so it would work out to be nearly the same cost as the Moxi after the lifetime fee, which truly levels out the playing field.

Conclusion

I’m not sold on the Moxi HD DVR. Both my wife and I have used it for a couple of weeks and we’re ready to switch back to the TiVo. It’s not that the Moxi is a bad DVR. Hell, it kicks the crap out of nearly every cable or satellite DVR system, but it fails to live up to the claims that it’s better than TiVo. Perhaps as the Moxi DVR grows up a bit, it will work out the major kinks and become a killer DVR. It sure looks nice…

Stay tuned for a Moxi vs. TiVo post. We’re going to put the two head-to-head, feature-to-feature, so you can decide the winner.

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Pros

• GUI looks great in HD
• The SuperTicker is truly innovative
• No monthly charge
• No advertisements

Cons

• Remote poorly designed
• Menu is buggy and inconsistent
• Only one layout offered for the guide
• Expensive at $799
• Must have broadband Internet

Deal Breakers

• No over-the-air ATSC tuner – cable only
• AVI and MKV file playback not supported
• Only a 500GB hard drive

We hear that the program will not be available to everyone initially. Until some legal issues are ironed out, 13 states and the DC region will only be able to purchase the box with the streight $799 pricing.

Thinking back, the only semi-advance gadget that hasn’t given me grief recently was an Archos 605 media player. It just worked. Files transfer onto the player by dragging and dropping via USB mass storage support. Then much to my surprise at the time, all the files I transfered onto the unit played back fine at the original resolution. There wasn’t any need to re-encode the files with some random program to a random resolution or format; it just worked and made me smile.

Now I’m playing with this Moxi HD DVR and cannot be more upset with it. I spent most of yesterday’s evening trying to get the network support up and running. The bundled software, PlayOn, doesn’t run on OS X or Windows Home Server so I dove into Google looking for another DLNA media streamer.

Before I finally gave up and called tech support, I tried a half a dozen pieces of software with no luck: Tveristy, TwonkeyMedia Manager, TwonkeyMedia Server, Nero MediaHome 4, NeoDigits NeoLink, PS3 Media Server, and the media streamer built into Windows Home Server. No luck. Eventually the tech support guy said streaming AVI’s can’t be done, but for some reason, that’s not good enough for me.

You see, the streaming software attempts to transcode the AVI files into WMV or MPEG-4 streams, which the Moxi supports. So I spent most of this morning trying again and also ensuring my post last night wasn’t incorrect. But here I am, defeated again. Streaming AVI or MKV files cannot be done on the Moxi HD DVR.

But it’s not just the Moxi HD DVR either. It’s everything for my iPod to a TiVo to Sprint Aircards to Logitech Harmony Remotes. Nothing seems to work out of the box properly anymore. I truly believe that every new gadget ships in a beta form and takes months of updates to finally reach a point for general consumption; the BlackBerry Storm comes to mind. It leaves me thankfully that I at least know how to use Google and don’t have to spend more money on a Geek Squad home visit than the gadget costs.

I hate gadgets. They suck. Now back to writing about gadgets.

Update: Watch this video. Our modern life is broken and why. via BB

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4101280286098310645&hl=en&fs=true

Sure, TiVo’s implementation of media streaming is far from perfect. The system actually copies the video file onto the TiVo hard drive, which is annoying but supports nearly every file format including the two in question here.

The Moxi is a DLNA compliant device but that doesn’t mean that it will stream AVI or MKV file formats as I just found out. I’ve tried TwonkyMedia, Tversity, and Windows Media Connect without any luck. It’s kind of a moot anyway as a tech support guy kindly pointed me to the user guide (pdf link – search for WMV) where it doesn’t list those file formats anyway. He also confirmed numerous times – I was being thorough – that the Moxi HD DVR does not support AVI streaming in anyway, shape, or form.

Two of the listed supported file formats stream fine: WMV and MPEG-2. However, I couldn’t get any MPEG-4 files to stream. Honestly, I only have two files of that format anyway ’cause everything is in AVI or MKV format so it could have been me.

There is no reason why this gigantic oversight cannot be corrected by Moxi with a simple update. No one would convert their entire library of videos to WMVs when a TiVo or hundreds of other devices support the file formats fine. It doesn’t matter how slick or cool the Moxi looks on an HDTV when basic functionality isn’t there.

This is big, Moxi. Fix it.

I finally received and installed a Moxi HD DVR after some shipping issues with Fedex . I have to say though, I’m not that impressed two days in. The company screams on the official website that the Moxi is superior to TiVo in almost every way – seriously, it does – but besides the pretty eye-candy GUI, I wouldn’t call everything superior. The Moxi has some sweet extra features that TiVo doesn’t, but I feel like the core functionality of watching and recording television isn’t all that better. 

Click through for more initial thoughts and unboxing pics.

I have two TiVo HD boxes in my house. I like ‘em. The interface is outdated, but it works well. Big props to the Moxi as it looks so much better in HD than the TiVo. That is probably ’cause the interface was designed this decade rather than during the Clinton administration.

However, the GUI doesn’t take advantage of an HDTVs real estate properly when surfing the channels. The layout is a vertical bar, which fits great in a SDTV but leaves a lot of unused space that could show more info on an HDTV. This complaint could be that I cannot stand the vertical channel bar and its limited info. TiVo offers a similar guide layout, but also allows for a grid type display, which shows future events on numerous stations simultaneously.

There are some cool features built into the Moxi. Superticker I found to be convenient. It displays a small ticker at the bottom of the TV that is easily navigated for sports, weather, and news info without taking away too much from the TV program. The Flickr support is superb as was the Moxi HD setup which only took a few minutes.

The TiVo HD XL  is still hooked up to the TV and is just one click away on the remote, but I’ll give this Moxi box a fair chance before coming to any solid conclusions. So far I have to say that I’m not as impressed as I thought I would be. 

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