Well since DirecTV is forcing me to choose between them and Tivo, I don't really care what DirecTV is offering for programming, if it means I have to lose Tivo for some knock-off with smaller fonts, I don't want it and will have to go where Tivo goes. For me that's going to mean FIOS and Tivo Series 3

I had DirecTV's idea of a "DVR" for a week and after it crashed once a day I sent it back. A Hyundai and a BMW both have four wheels, seats and take you from point A to point B. No matter how much the Hyundai dealer tells me the Sonata is just like a BMW, it isn't. Likewise, no matter how many DirecTV reps tell me "it's the same thing as Tivo"...it isn't.

Unfortunately I'm held hostage by their 2-year contract which expires in December for me so I need to work around my problem until then. I'm going to try reinstalling my InstantCake and preserving my data tonight. I'll post what happens.

IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Does anyone know if I buy the latest InstantCake with 6.3 and install over my old 3.15f install that was sliced to 6.2b (I think..or maybe it was 6.3b), will it still be able to preserve my data? I'd be happy to buy the latest version because I'd rather have TivoWebPlus 1.3 pre-installed.

i spoke to someone at DirecTV who told me that they were working on just such a solution but I found it hard to believe then, and now. I think the HR10-250 has a hardware MPEG-2 video decoder on-board and the new format they're using is MPEG-4. I can't imagine the video decoder on the unit is re-programmable. It's much more cost-efficient for manufacturers to choose a hardwired solution for decoding than it is a reprogrammable one.

On other news, my hard drive had bad blocks and Seagate's repair utility said they weren't where data is stored. I told it to correct them and now it hangs on the "Almost There. just a few minutes more..." screen. I think I'm going to lose all my stored movies, including the Star Wars flicks in HD. :-(