As of October 2009: the Dish Network DTV Pal DVR meets this need. It can be hard to find, but offers full over-the-air recording, pause live TV, and onscreen guide. You can select from the onscreen guide for recording, but the recordings are time based (not named based). It is a great unit for over-the-air viewers.

DTV PAL DVR has 90 day warranty and seems to be developing failures with less than a years usage 4-6 mo.

DTV PAL DVR has 90 day warranty and seems to be developing failures with less than a years usage 4-6 mo.

Well a few people have had problems, but it is hard to quantify the actual percentage of people with issues. I bet it is close the same percentage of problems with new Dish Network receivers. If they would have a decent warranty length, like 12 months it would be much better. I was one of the first to get one and have had no issues with mine since the firmware updates a while back, and it gets used a lot.

I know of a dealer that went through 4 before he got a "good one" he got sick of faxing proof of purchase to DISH. I've also seen non working ones on eBay people trying to get some of there money back. If DISH had real confidence in the DTV PAL DVR they would warranty it for a year just like other DISH products. DISH knows what they have built.

I guess this is the part where it's good to use a full-priced retailer that offers extended warranties...

We loved ours while it worked. One of the problems from the start was the time would get off for recording shows. We did reset the time but the DTV Pal was still off.
Ours quit working after 4 months. My sisters stopped after 6 months. I got online to see if there was a possible fix when Dish told me it had no warranty after 90 days.
It seems a lot of folks are having this same problem. The problem we had was it would go to Loading....please wait, then screen would go black then back to loading. We tried unhooking the cable and unplugging it.

I heard Sears was going to carry this. If that is true and you paid for the extended service on the unit, it would replace it each time it quit working.

Issues with Dish's DTVPal DTV converters?: Consumer Reports Electronics Blog (http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2008/08/issues-with-dis.html)
Scroll down for comments

The Official AVS Dish DTVPal DVR Topic! - Page 66 - AVS Forum (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15631727#post15631727)


DTVPal DVR Unboxing & Setup (http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2009-01/dtvpal-dvr-unboxing-setup/)
scroll down to comments






Problem with a DTV Pal Plus convertor box - FixYa (http://www.fixya.com/support/t2975069-problem_dtv_pal_plus_convertor_box)

I have two of them and have had basically no problems with them. I just wish Dish would let you incorporate its unit with cable tv usage.