I just waited over 30 minutes to get a chat representative to solve these problems, and halfway through the chat my Comcast internet, which of course has terrible reliabitlity, went out and cancelled the chat. I would chalk it up to Comcast trying to shut a complaining customer up, but never attribute to malice what can be easier explained by incompetence.
Anyway, even though I have literally never had a single positive experience with Comcast's customer service in the 5+ years I've been forced to use them, I figure it can't hurt to throw another complaint into a black hole. It's already typed, might as well copy/paste it here.
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The DVR Manager is a UI disaster. I'm trying to record the NBA Playoffs on both TNT HD and ESPN HD. The problem is that since both series are called "NBA Playoffs" in the guide, the two series recordings constantly conflict.
If I successfully set up a series recording on TNT, then I can't record a game on ESPN without screwing up the TNT series recording. If I select a game that's on ESPN, it gives me the option to either record the individual show (since it's not part of the existing TNT series) or cancel the series recording ... which cancels the entire *TNT* series even though I'm currently editing an ESPN episode. It's like when there is a shared name, the DVR manager gets confused and doesn't know which is which.
If I select an individual ESPN game on the website's TV guide and select "Rec Series," it gives a completely useless error message:
"There was a problem with your request to record.
To update your Priority Manager, please refresh your browser."
So I can't set up a series recording on multiple channels. If I set one up on TNT, then the DVR Manager also thinks there's one on ESPN … except there isn't one on ESPN, and no shows are scheduled to be recorded on ESPN. But if I manually set up a single ESPN game to record and select that ESPN episode in the guide, it shows the settings for the TNT series recording. But there are of course no other ESPN episodes set to be recorded because they're not part of the series, which is TNT-only.
Basically, the DVR Manager cannot record separate series if they share a name. It's a mess.
—— UPDATE ——
In the more than half hour I waited to chat, I ran into another problem.
One of the episodes in the TNT series recording shows up with the "won't record" icon. I look, and it's because there were already two other TV shows set to record in that time slot as part of other series recordings (Mad Men & Silicon Valley).
Okay, I get that. It can only record 2 episodes at a time, and the TNT game was a third. The error message is:
"This episode will not record. Try re-recording the episode if it was accidently cancelled."
So I cancel one of the existing series episodes on another channel to free up room.
Then I go to the TV Listings page and select the TNT game I want to record in that spot. It should work, right? Because I canceled one of the episodes it was conflicting with.
Wrong. In classic broken Comcast fashion, I get this message:
"There was a problem with your request to record.
This Recording already exists, you cannot add it again."
I thought the brokenness of Comcast's tools couldn't get worse, but there you go. One page says to manually re-record the episode, and the other page says I can't do that because the episode exists.
How on EARTH can you charge people money for software THIS bad?