At weaKnees, we’ve been getting endless questions about the new DIRECTV DVR Plus – the R15, and asking us to compare it to the TiVo-based DIRECTV DVR R10. The question generally boils down to: Which is better? In an attempt to give you the information necessary to answer that question yourself, we’ve written up a comparison of the units, with an emphasis on details of the new non-TiVo R15 since most of our readers and customers are somewhat (if not very) familiar with TiVo DVRs.

Read on for the full scoop, feature-by-feature comparisons, screenshots, physical comparisons, and our conclusions.

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Engadget has posted a note about another update to the software in the R15. While this is interesting in itself, what we find more interesting is that the comments below pretty well echo what we’ve experienced and been hearing from our customers: the R15 falls pretty short of the R10.

We’re also working on a comprehensive comparison of the R10 and the R15 (watch for it here) and when you go through the details, we feel pretty firmly that the R10 is the right choice. We thought that maybe our experience and those of our customers were all biased because of our experiences with TiVo, but the Engadget comments seem to suggest that the feelings may be a bit more universal.

Pretty big news on the hard drive front today: Seagate is buying Maxtor. The bulk of the drives we sell are made by one of these two companies. So this could either mean increased innovation in the drive world, or increased prices due to less competition. Or even both.

Maxtor had most of the early business in DVR hard drives – early on under the Quantum company which they bought in October 2000 (for just a bit less than Seagate is paying for Maxtor now). For the entire first generation of standalone and DirecTV TiVos, Maxtor/Quantum made all of the drives. But that has changed, and all TiVo DVRs today ship with either Western Digital or Seagate drives from the factory. Maxtor hasn’t been able to keep the price competitive apparently. We’ll see what the future holds.

We don’t exactly have a huge amount of stock of 500 GB drives, but we have enough that we’re able to ship orders for the 130 hour HR10-250s and a few kits. Each day we get another shipment of the 500s and we’re keeping up with demand. So we’ve added kits based on these for the HD TiVo. On our site, you can now order for the HD TiVo:

-add 500 GB kit
-replace 500 GB kit
-dual 500 GB kit

They’re all on the HD TiVo Upgrade Kit page.

Beginning today, WeaKnees is shipping the Terabyte TiVo – a TiVo DVR with dual 500 GB hard drives for a total of one terabyte of capacity. This unit can record 130 hours of HD content, 870 hours of SD content, or some of each. The units are here. For now, due to the number of drives we have, we only have these drives pre-built in the DirecTV HR10-250 TiVos, but we’ll have them in standalones, DVD burners, and R10s soon enough.

These units are in very short supply due to the scarcity of the 500 GB drives. We have a bunch that we’ll have in customers’ hands before Christmas. We’re not yet sure when the next batch will be in.

If you’re looking for a kit comprised of one or two 500 GB drives, email us with the specifics of what you want, and we can get you the price and expected availability.