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The HR20 really wins on UI even against TiVo. The ability to have the current program running in a small window inside the guide or menu system is great.

Is that the only UI "improvement" you see? Because I find that marginally nice at best, and annoying at worst. It does minimize the UI space on the screen as you only have ¾ of the screen left available. (The video takes up the upper-right quadrant.) If given a choice, I would probably prefer the TiVo way.

The HR20 UI is unquestionably uglier, but that's probably neither here nor there.

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The HR20's remote is also terrible.

Totally agreed. Absolutely horrendous.

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Conflict resolution is better than TiVo, but I can't compare it to ReplayTV. With TiVo, you're only faced with one show to cancel when all your tuners are busy at a given time. The HR20 will present you with the two shows it was intending to record and which one you would rather cancel. Season pass priority is handled similarly to TiVo.

I've often wondered why the TiVo is set up this way. (I assume it's because it puts the new recording in the same queue it puts "normal" recordings in and there's not a good way to temporarily move the higher priority program down.) Generally speaking, though, as long as you have your priorities set up correctly, this is a non-issue 99% of the time. The one instance I can think of where it's not is when you want to record a different feed of the higher priority program instead of the one that would normally be recorded. It would be nice if it would at least tell you what the other recording is, though, even if you can't select it to not be recorded. (This might have been added, actually; it's been a while since I encountered this situation and really paid attention.)

TiVo does need a better prioritization UI, preferably at selection time. Basically, if there's a conflict at the time, you can choose whether to put the new season pass at the top or bottom of the list, and that's far from ideal. Not that I can think of a great solution. A beginning would be priority groups. Right now, I logically sort my season passes in a few groups: primetime network shows, primetime cable shows, non-primetime cable shows, filler. This is based on the fact that network shows only get run once, primetime cable shows get run a few times throughout the week, non-primetime cable shows get shown every 3 hours, and filler I don't really care if it misses or not. A similar schedule would be great built-in to the TiVo.

Does the HR20 do clipping or only full cancellation? TiVo added clipping at some point.
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Bitt Faulk