OttoBlog
2007/06/08: Moxi DVR
At long last, there was a software upgrade downloaded to my Moxi Digital Video Recorder (DVR).
The last noticeable "upgrade" was nearly two years ago, and the only added "feature" was the removal of the 30 second skip (reassigning that button to "15 minute skip", which is a duplicate of what the button right above it does).
This upgrade added several things:
- More games. Mah Jong was the one I tested before I got bored. They're limited in what kin d of interface you can have using a remote control as an input device, but it looks to be decent. There also appears to be a version of Pong, Breakout, and a few other familiar games.
- They put back the "30 second skip" button. Well, they left it defaulted to being the duplicate "15 minute skip", but now added a menu item to change it back to 30 seconds, or to assign it to a 3-minute skip.
- Upload images from a DVD. As far as I can tell, this is useless since I think the DVD bay is empty. And if the DVD bay weren't empty, uploading images would seem to be one of the lamest features associated with it. More useful would be to transfer movies from a DVD to the Moxi (taking up recording space, but would be useful if you rent a DVD and have to return it before you have a chance to watch it) or to record a movie/TV show from the Moxi hard drive to a blank DVD.
- Copy music from a CD/DVD to Moxi. Again, with the disk bay empty, this feature appears to be a no-op. Otherwise, I could see myself using this feature mostly as a way to listen to my own selection of music as I'm falling asleep (since I have my DVR in the bedroom).
- A way to find out what percent of the hard drive is full. I swear, Moxi was the only DVR in the world that didn't provide a way for users to know how close the unit was to deleting shows due to the hard drive filling up.
- Message Center. Marginally useful.
- Slo-mo. I swear, Moxi was the only DVR in the world that didn't allow users to view recordings at any positive speed slower than regular viewing speed. They only made one slo-mo speed (my VCR has 8 speeds between 0x and 1x, plus another 8 speeds between 1x and 32x) but it's a step in the right direction.
- Support for an external hard drive, connected via the rear USB 2.0 port. This is easily the best upgrade they added. This will save me $15.00/month as I can switch back from the Multi-Room Moxi to the Single-Room version ($13.40 savings) plus it'll take off the MoxiMate charge ($1.50) for hardware that I don't have. I can buy an external hard drive that will hold about 20 times as much space, and it'll pay for itself in about a year. After that, I'm making a profit.
Here are some of my suggestions for future upgrades:
- More slo-mo speeds.
- Reverse slo-mo.
- A simpler way to turn closed captioning on and off. Currently, one has to hit MENU, arrow over (about 8 times) to OPTIONS, scroll up three times to CLOSED CAPTIONING, hit SELECT, scroll up to ENABLE, hit SELECT, arrow to OK, and hit EXIT. Just about every TV made in the last 20 years can turn on Closed Captioning with a single button (and usually has an option for automatically toggling closed captioning with the MUTE button).
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