Maven Mapper's

This was just stupid enough that I had to share it in the hopes that someone else wouldn't make the same mistake I did.

I was visiting my in-laws house for several days.  They have DirectTV and have a DirectTV Plus Receiver DVR (Model R15).

I have a TiVo at home and I'm very used to the ability to go into a recently deleted folder and recover a program that was mistakenly deleted or deleted too soon.

Apparently the DirectTV Plus Receiver DVR (Model R15) was made by fools hoping to trick fools like myself.  It doesn't have a recently deleted folder, nor any way to recover a lost program or mulitple programs.

I had recorded a series of shows (Meet the Press) and I wanted to delete the four shows in the bin so that the disk drive space would not be wasted.  So I walked through the steps to delete the shows, and hit delete.  It took about 20 minutes to delete 4 shows, which kind of put me on edge because it shouldn't take that long to delete 4 shows.

Well turns out the stupid DVR from DirectTV deleted ALL the shows on the entire DVR!

Holy Crappy Engineering Batman!

OK, so I figured, I'll just undelete all the shows that were incorrectly deleted.  No problem.  Little annoying but no harm no foul.

Wrong!

That's when I learned the brains at DirectTV failed to include an undelete capability in their DVR (the Plus version no less, I'd hate to see what the original looked like, probably didn't have a play button or something.)

I searched and searched online for something that would show me how to undelete the shows from the Tivo DVR.

Searched on the following phrases

How to undelete DirectTV Plus DVR

Undelete DirectTV Plus  DVR

Undelete DirectTV Tivo

Undelete DirectTV DVR

undelete, undelete, undelete

yada yada yada

Nothing came up.  Nothing showed how to do it.  Nothing said that it could not be done.

I went to the DirectTV website and searched endlessly for the product manual.  I looked there for about 30 minutes and gave up and started searching the house for the paper version.  That lasted about 15 minutes and I went back to looking for the DirectTV Plus DVR manual online and didn't find it.  I looked behind the DVR for the model number and found the manual stuck under the DVR!

I opened it up and went to page 26 and learned to my dismay, that there was/is no instructions on how to undelete anything.

I went to the FAQ section, which is supposed to cover Frequently Asked Questions but I quickly learned that in DirectTV language it means Frequently Asked Question that We Won't Dignify with a Working Answer and will Instead Opt to Show Our Customers Just How Stupid They Are! 

The acronym is longer ( FAQTWWDWAWAAWIOTSOCJHSTA ) obviously and may account for the extra amount of time it took me to navigate their website.

I did find the relevant question

A Program I recorded was displayed in the MyVOD(stupid acronym is trademarked but this is blogger and I don't know how to put the tm symbol in here and I just don't care.  DirectTV can take me to court and make a federal case out of it if they like, it will give me something to blog about) Screen, but got DELETED before I could watch it.

Well to make a long irrelevant answer short, they basically state that any user stupid enough to delete a program too early or to allow a program to be deleted automatically before they watch it is just shit out of luck because there is no Undelete capability on this TiVo knock off, so there!

So long story short the DirectTV Plus DVR (Model R15) Sucks and will suck especially hard for anyone that is used to using a DVR or TiVo with any type of undelete capability.  I highly recommned against this product and if you are unfortunate enough to have experienced the same problem I did, I apologize.

If you are looking for the DirectTV manual for the R15, here it is.

If you are looking for other manuals for DirectTV equipment, they are pretty hard to find also, but here they are.