Just to clear something up. The live TV buffer recording feature was NOT removed because of a court ruling, patent dispute or any other legal reason. To everyone on this forum who is speculating that Comcast had no choice but to remove this feature because of legal reasons, please stop. You are just giving Comcast an excuse to do whatever they want to the customers who pay good money for their service. Comcast's old dual tuner HD DVRs still have this feature, as do most other service providers. It has nothing to do with TiVo patent disputes. There are only two simple and easily avoidable reasons for removing the live TV buffer recording feature. The first, as you've probably already heard, is cloud DVR. A very, very simple solution to this problem would be to simply only store in the cloud DVR the recordings that have started from the beginning of the program or recordings that have been scheduled in advance and exclude from the cloud DVR any and all recordings that were started after the beginning of the program while saving the entire program, including the portion from the live TV buffer, in the local storage of the X1 DVR in your home, thus eliminating the "inconsistency" between the cloud DVR and your local DVR. As for the difference in the used storage capacity between the cloud DVR and your local DVR, this doesn't really seem like a problem to me especially when you consider that X1 customers can have between 1 and 3 DVRs in their home, which affects how much storage is available to you anyway, but if it's really that big of a problem for Comcast, simply match the used storage status of the cloud DVR to that of the local DVR, I know Comcast has the ability to read that info from the local DVR. What this means is if the local DVR is 80% full and the cloud DVR is only 70% full, just match the cloud DVR's storage status to 80% full so that the local DVR and the cloud DVR have the same storage status. Again, it doesn't seem necessary to have the storage status on the cloud DVR and local DVR match, but if that's what Comcast wants it's an easy fix. The second reason Comcast removed the live TV buffer recording feature is that the companion boxes can't record the live TV buffer because the buffer on the companion boxes is stored in their own flash memory that's separate from the DVR's storage and thus can't be saved to the DVR. The solution to this is to simply forget about it. The live TV buffer on the companion boxes is already shorter than the buffer on the DVR, the companion boxes can't be and aren't expected to be exactly the same as the DVR. Crippling the DVR to match the companion boxes is obviously a much worse option than having the DVR being capable of one function that the companion boxes can't do. Especially, such a basic and expected DVR function. Comcast will get far, far more complaints about the DVR not having this function than they will about the companion boxes lacking it. I hope that someone will forward my thoughts to the people at Comcast who make these decisions. Removing such a basic DVR function from Comcast's flagship TV product was a very big mistake that Comcast needs to fix.
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