Can the HR25 and HR24 receivers be used without being connected to the dish. For example, if I record say the superbowl, can I bring my receiver into work hook it up to my tv and watch the superbowl that is stored on the hard drive?
Maybe. If the dvr is disconnected for too long, it will not play. If you do it within a couple of hours to a day of disconnecting, it should work. There is no HR25, but there is an H25. It's not a dvr.
My experience has been No, you can disconnect the Sat feed and still watch recordings, but if you unplug it, it will look for the Sat connection when you power it back up, unless others know how to get around that, I will say no.
Last Sunday we had a freak storm...ice/sleet then snow which mucked up the dish here at the apartment complex....making all signals go kaput
Before that we lost some signals and like a dumas I did a red button reboot to try and get the rest of the channels (long story).....which made it so I couldnt download the guide.
I unplugged the receiver and 4 hours later plugged it back in. Once it went through the menus and got to the "downloading guide" (which wouldnt load...again no signal) hit MENU and one of the options says "playlist" which will allow you to play the DVR stuff. I could catch up on 4 hours of Alaska State Troopers that night