NBR. Cool. I've been gone for a while and was just able to get back to this forum this morning to see the reports of NBR.
After playing around figuring out how it works this evening I think I've gotten it pretty much. My thoughts: This will be no problem for all us technically inclined people that hang out around here to figure out, but I don't see a snowball's chance in hell that I could explain it to my mom over the phone. I don't think she would even be able to pick it up with a personal two week long demo. But in all fairness, I've only played with NBR starting from the timer screen. Maybe there's a simpler way into it from Guide, but I haven't gotten the chance to look yet.
I've noticed a few minor glitches. I had an old weekly timer set for a show. I created a Pass entry to handle it from now on. The Daily Schedule showed it in queue for this Sunday (the next time it's broadcast). So far so good. Then I deleted the old manual timer. The new NBR timer was still listed (you would obviously expect this), but the Daily Schedule no longer listed the Sunday broadcast that had previously been in queue. There was not way I could find to get it back. I finally had to delete the new NBR timer and recreate it from scratch. After that the Sunday broadcast showed back up in queue.
I have yet to find that New vs. Repeat setting that some have eluded to here. Maybe you only see that if you approach NBR from Guide. I'll work more this evening to see if I can locate this.
If you make a typo in entering a search string for a NBR timer, you can't go back and edit your mistake after you've created the timer. I suppose this is OK enough. Just be sure and watch that the characters you type come up accurately. The NBR screen seems to respond slowly to my keypresses and I think I got a little overanxious and missed my typos before it was too late.
I created a NBR search string, for Title only, that said "Med" (I was looking for "Medical Investigations"). It didn't locate any upcoming broadcasts (not unexpected this time of year), but it found lots of other stuff with "med" in it. Including a show named "Webmaster". If anyone can point out the "med" in "webmaster", please do so!
I wish they had some kind of functionality where you could do some tuner picking when creating a timer. Like a prompt for "Which Tuner?" and you could enter "1", "2", "1,2", "2,1" that would signify (respectively) "tuner 1 only", "tuner 2 only", "tuner 1 preferred, but 2 OK if 1 is busy at run time", etc. This would provide one more weapon in your arsenal to handle conflicts.
What I would REALLY like is to be able to plug my USB keyboard into the back of the 522, hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to a different virtual terminal (this thing IS based on Linux, you know?) and then do things much faster with a real keyboard for input. Hey DISH, how about:
# addtimer --search_string "The Simpsons" --search_channel "7,20" --search_days "1,2,3,4,5" --search_hours "1800-2300" --episode_type "new" --preferred_tuner "2,1" --protect_recording "no" --scheduled_priority "2" --delete_recording_after "30days" --timer_expires "12/31/2006"
Well, I can dream can't I? Stack these things up in a script file (like typical for iptables) and that would be sweet. Of course, explaining this new user interface to my mom might be even MORE challenging than what we have now!