Some neat stuff’s been announced at CEDIA this week.

DirecTV officially announced their HR21 Pro DVR. That’s great news…if you rack-mount all your a/v components. Still no word from DTV about the rumored return of Tivo to their DVRs, or of when their mega-rollout of HD channels might happen.

Dish Network revealed a trojan horse! The VIP211 receiver is their current entry level one-tuner non-DVR HD receiver. Welp, they just announced a coming-soon firmware upgrade that’ll turn it into a DVR! You’ll just need to add your own external USB hard drive to make it work. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rolled out a similar update for the VIP222 shortly after…turning it into a poor man’s VIP 722.

Series3 Tivo users are finally getting multi-room viewing and TivoToGo. Tivo has a great product, but they’re really slow with their software and hardware updates. They also seem to be obsessed with adding obscure features rather than improving their core service. It’s almost like they lost their focus somwhere along the way. Swivel Search? Kid-friendly now playing lists? Amazon movie downloads? Banner ads during fast-forwards? No more lifetime subscriptions? Ugh. The longer I go without without Tivo the less I miss it.