I’m a DVR guy now!

The Palatial Abode entered the middle-of-the-first-decade-of-the-Twenty-First-Century this morning, as the nice DirecTV installer guy pulled away in his van at about 11:30 a.m., leaving a DirecTV HR-20 HD-DVR receiver behind, installed, and fully functional.

So, what do those obscure letters and numbers mean? Well, it’s basically a satellite TV receiver with a hard disk inside it, which can record up to 200 hours of standard television (or, 50 hours of high definition TV).

So far, so good. I’ve recorded the movie Heartbeeps (a terrible little thing featuring Andy Kauffman and Bernadette Peters) and also, simultaneously, an hour of CNBC’s “Street Signs.”

The big, big, big plus is . . . it records.

The major disappointment is that the on-screen guide is significantly slower than the HD-20 receiver (which moved upstairs to be Snookums’ Tennesee Lady Vol/Sports Pack-and WE/Oxygen network receiver). But, for the ability to record programs up to two weeks in advance, I’ll take that trade. I’d had difficulties with my old VCR tapes (getting eaten by the recorder) as well as my older (2000-vintage) DVD-recorder unit (not recording reliably–that might have been due to bad media but it was really consistently bad).

(I also need to figure out how to re-program the upstairs DirecTV receiver remote to control the TV . . . a minor implementation detail to be sure, but Snookums seems to hate on a visceral level the concept of more than one remote control in any room . . . )

I’ll post more if and when I find really neat or really awful things about DirecTV’s HD-DVR receiver.