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Dish Network vs DirecTV?


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both have great integration into control4. Dish is SDDP, DirecTv is IP address based.  DirecTv mini's are unable to control power over ip. Dish Joey's will lose control if they were to switch control to another hopper. I personally prefer the Hopper, Joey hardware from dish, more powerful hardware, and now built in sling video! Directv is better on channel selection and typically less gaps when it comes to contract time!

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DirecTV has the advantage in sports--lots of little things that add up, not just the packages they have (blackout search and special channels for big events like big golf and tennis tournaments just two examples). Other than that pretty much a wash.

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I've installed both and lean toward DirecTv.  Yes the genie's can be a PITA due to power commands but nothing says you are forced into using the dumb things either. 

As for Dish, I have been underwhelmed by them over all. 

 

Either way its not Uverse so you are ahead of that battle.  Easily the worst box on the market

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Yes the genie's can be a PITA due to power commands but nothing says you are forced into using the dumb things either. 

 

Unfortunately if you want 4K on an unsupported TV you are forced into using Genie Minis.  For now anyway.  I never had one before.

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  • 1 month later...

I am using the IP version of the driver but for some reason it doesn't give the feedback in every room.  

 

I have Dish network IP driver and i have the same issue. When the controller gets rebooted I lose feedback for show metadata in all rooms and cannot use the channels page.

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  • 3 years later...

Bringing this back because I am trying to see if one integrates better over the other. Sports packages are not a concern and there will be no mini's connected since it will only be 1 DVR connected to an HDMI matrix

Are the latest directv and dish equal in terms of reliability/feedback with control4?

Thanks

 

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1 hour ago, Cartnj said:

Bringing this back because I am trying to see if one integrates better over the other. Sports packages are not a concern and there will be no mini's connected since it will only be 1 DVR connected to an HDMI matrix

Are the latest directv and dish equal in terms of reliability/feedback with control4?

Thanks

 

In your one particular case since you don't have genie minis, yes, but IP control is not reliable on the genie minis - no power on/off and if you get into a menu you have to reboot. Dish is a far superior integration as ip control works flawlessly on the hopper 3 and joey 4k boxes, and the Dish hardware is still ahead of DirecTV - 16 tuners, sling built in to stream all channels and DVR programs, OTA antenna support, 4K built into the DVR, tiler allowing you to watch 4 shows at once built into the DVR, faster response on the GUI....

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2 hours ago, DawnGordon said:

What commercial skip options are there on DirecTV?  I'm really used to TiVo's Commercial Skip, which is great. I know that Dish has a CS system as well.

 

There is a big difference between DIRECTV and Dish with this. DIRECTV has 30 second fast forward. It is not instantaneous and you see the picture during the 30 second "skip." I programmed the 3 "dot" buttons on my C4 remote for 1 minute skip, 2 minute, and 3 minute skip. This works pretty well, but it is not nearly as efficient as Dish. You hit the skip forward button on Dish and it happens almost instantly. The only downside is when you go too far. With DIRECTV, you might see the game or show come back on and you can interrupt the skip by hitting play at anytime. 

Overall, I much prefer the instant skip forward of Dish.

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My wife got talked into switching Dish > Direct at costco recently. I was a dish customer since the days of their first reciever and I've had Direct for about a year. Here are my thoughts:

Sports package - DirectTV has the win here. I'm not a sports fan so I don't care. My football addicted friends are much happier hanging out on the weekends though.

C4 Integration - Works flawlessly on Dish with Hoppers. I had two hoppers but no Joeys (long story) so I can't speak to Joey functionality. The experience was >= using the dish remote, zero lag. Direct TV Genie and genie mini integration sucks eggs. I will talk about the hardware in more detail but what was said about certain menus on the minis are IR only is completely true. You can get stuck in deep menus via IP control and not be able to get out, freaking genius. The interface is also super laggy. Using the IR remote things like bringing up the guide take a second or two on direct (instant on dish). Using the C4 integration adds another second to that. My C4 dealer didn't want to do IP control for those reasons but I have receivers in places I don't have wiring for IR bugs so I'm stuck. 

Video quality - Direct looks like they do a saturation push on all the content but they seem to heavily reduce the motion bit rate on a lot of the content. The result is a heavily saturated image with a crapload of macroblocking. Dish looks like they run a reduced color space to save bandwidth but keep a high bitrate for motion. The net effect is if you have a small crappy TV or don't notice macroblocking, direct probably looks great. If you have mostly larger TVs or heaven forbid a projector Direct is almost unwatchable due to macro blocking and pixelation. I feel like I'm watching TV in 8bit. Both will steer higher bandwidth towards high profile events. Superbowl looks great on both for example. I have also noticed that on Dish the prime time stuff looks fantastic. They have some satellite technology that lets them re-use spectrum in sections across the US and I think that buys them something there. I have a Direct TV bigot friend and he thought I was crazy saying the video quality was poor on Direct until he came over and looked at it on my Sony 940E and my JVC X560 on a 120" screen...It is much more watchable on the bedroom TVS which are much smaller. I would imaging many forum members have much better displays than I do.

Guide -The direct TV guide is sized for smaller TVs and you get far less grid data per square inch of TV. If you are using lots of 32" and 42" TVs you may like it. On a 65" tv the Direct guide is a joke and looks like it's for toddlers and blind people. The other huge issues I have with the direct guide is all of the dammed advertising. 50% of the channels are either pay-per-view ads or shopping channels. Dish has all the shopping channels clumped in one section, Dish also has PPV ads that overlay the PPV channels but they are only in just one or two other places in the guide, spread evenly throughout. I did remove all the extra PPV and shopping channels from my Direct guides but the net result is about 10 pages of ads crammed together (orignoally spaced out by PPV channels) that I have to skip over. I cringe every time I use the guide on Direct. Another annoyance is that direct does not make current time the absolute left side of the screen. That sounds like a weird complaint but it lets you accidentally select a show thats over. This triggers a screen to try and watch the old show via on demand or something and you're in laggy menu hell waiting for that to come up so you can cancel it and then waiting for the overlay to disappear so you can get back to your show or load the guide again.

Skip - Fast forward and rewind are nearly unusable on direct. I want to rip my hair out every time. The+30 sec skip does a "fast forward" so you have to wait for what you're skipping over. Presumably the purpose would be to make sure you dont miss anything. That is completely rendered useless by the fact the  the reverse skip is only 3-5 seconds. If you blow over something you have to reverse skip 70 times to get back. Dish does an instant +30 and -10. If you're skipping commercials you skip forwards until you see the show, skip back once or twice and you're done. I wind up either watching commercials or missing parts of the show on direct. This leads me to the heavyweight feature on dish...

Auto commercial skip. - Dish has this on all the primetime programming. Direct does not. I didn't watch commercials on Dish, ever. I watch tons on direct. Hate it.

Recording - Both have good capacity. The thing I really love on Dish is primetime anytime where it records prime time on all the major networks. I didn't pay attention to having to manually record prime time shows are and I just used prime time anytime. Direct does not have this. I have to make sure to record everything like a cave man. 

Whole home DVR - Works great on both platforms. I didn't have Joeys but I was able to both search and use recording capacity on one hopper from the other. The Genie also works very well.

On Demand content - So win goes to Direct for most on-demand content. I would also like to take that away and give it to Dish because of a few issues I've had with it. Unfortunately Dish has little on demand and the interface is beyond terrible/unusable so Direct wins here. The issues I've had with on demand are 1. Took three week, 10 service calls, and three new genies to get it to work (yes that means re-paring with C4 each time you get a new receiver and a complete wipe of settings including your possibly hand-edited guide to remove the HUNDREDS of PPV channels and shopping channels). When activating on demand they tell you it should take 24 hours to work. They lie. It should work before they leave or don't let them leave.  2. You can't fast forward or commercial skip on demand content. This means I'm stuck watching commercials again.

Hardware - Direct TV hardware is super cheap and crappy. It feels like a plastic box of air. The power supplies are external so you wind up with wall warts and extra cabling all over the place. Dish hardware feels like decent mid grade AV gear. Internal power supplies and plenty of interfaces. Beyond that, there are significant differences between the products beyond what you see from a user experience perspective. Dish has hoppers and joeys. Hoppers are the mothership and joeys are the remote unit. You can get 4K units for both. You can technically run the Joeys over IP. Each hopper/joey has its own IP and streams/talks to the internet itself. This means anywhere you have a network you can put a joey and you can have a 4K tv at any location.

On Direct they have Genies and Minis. The Genies are the mother ship and the minis are the remote. Only minis support 4K. This forces me to have a mini in the AV rack where you would think that I could put the main unit with the noisy hard disk. Go figure. The minis and the genie also communicate on IP, but despite having ethernet jacks on every unit it will only work on a MOCA IP over coax connection. The main unit gets an IP address (you pair with C4) and it relays commands and streaming media. That's right, the main unit is a proxy/speedbump for all the minis. This explains the lag but also means you better have COAX where you want to put a TV. This is probably fine for older houses but I only have cat 6a in the upstairs bedrooms. so I've had to go back and pull coax where a TV was wanted... That's right, discard the 2016+ technology for 1970s technology.... The other infuriating thing is that somewhere along the dozen or so service calls to get my streaming to work they told me that in a large installation I needed to disconnect ALL of the genies/minis and have a dedicated MOCA to ethernet bridge. This required a second coax (that also had to be pulled) to the av closet.

4K Content - I never had a 4K reciever on Dish, but I think they had 4 channels just like the early days of HD. I also suspect it's the same crap playing over and over interspersed with 4k commercials for the other 3 channels you're not currently watching. So probably not worth the fee. I do have two 4K Direct recievers. I can't use one of them because of noise issues with the genie I can't put it in any of the bedrooms so I have my main unit on the 4k TV in the living room. They have one channel that barely has any content and like the early days of dish 4k it's a lot of commercials for itself and repeated content. What is there (rare event or soccer game) is absolutely spectacular. I also don't think it's worth the fee.

I really took Dish for granted. The better streaming on Direct isn't worth it in light of netflix/hulu/prime etc. and the ability to stream other channels natively on any of our streaming devices. I am ultimately going to cancel Direct when the contract is up. I may not go back to cable/satellite but if I do I will be getting Dish, no questions asked.

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