Contour 2 Could Use Improvement
I've just been forced to upgrade from the ROVI box to the latest Contour box. I can see where some improvements have been made but there are some VERY useful capabilities that have been removed from this system. Of course they were never in Contour 1 either. I tried that one first but could see immediately that it would not be desirable (Too many faults to go into here)
Let me explain where these new systems are lacking
1. I don't know why Cox is not aware of this but many of us like to use our two tuners to swap back and forth. We pause one during commercial then go to the other and un-pause, watching until a commercial or our buffer is empty. This requires no set of a recording. That ROVI box and the SWAP button were genius. Why didn't anyone in engineering acknowledge that when the specs were developed for the new systems?
Question: Do I not have two tuners continually acquiring content in a FIFO buffer on the latest system?
2. Regular recordings of shows have a limit of an additional 1.5 hours compared to 3 hours on the ROVI. Why? What is the resource limitation? No room for another variable in the code? I mainly record Hockey, Baseball, and Golf, and. These events almost always go past 1.5 hours. I don't see any reason for a downgrade in this capability from the ROVI. Please make your product designer aware of this.
3. With the ROVI, if I didn't allow enough time on a recording I still had the tuner acquiring content in it's buffer and could simply exit the recording and rewind the buffer and watch.
Question: Is there a way to do that with the latest Contour.
4. The Contour box feels like an under-powered computer. Rewind/FF/Play has lots of lag. Again, the 20yr old ROVI box performed better. When you stop from a high speed FF it places you about 20 seconds prior to where you hit the play button.
5. Tiles for programs and recordings are HUGE. There could be so much more information displayed in the guides if the text and icons weren't so large. This would minimize scrolling.
6. Guide Menus and Recording Options Menus do not Wrap to the beginning of the list when you get to the end. That means you have to manually scroll back up to the top. This is pretty basic User Interface stuff. In the case of extending your recording by that whopping 1.5 hours, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the recording options, then all the way back up the CONFIRM button to complete the action. Not nice.
