Pioneer DVR-633H-S DVD Recorder With 160 GB Hard Drive
95% Delightful.....5% Needs some work
***UPDATE***    My TVGUIDE has RETURNED!!!  Mysteriously...or is it?      I'm beginning to believe its absence has something to do with Cox Cable.  They have been screwing around with the channel line up for the last few weeks, and then as soon as they settled it and stopped adding those critical new channels to their digital line-up (10 new shopping channels, non-mainstream religious channels, and 10 spanish-only language versions of existing stations, makes me wonder what the heck happened to SAP?) my TV GUIDE came back.  Those of you whose Guide has stopped working, you might call your Cable Provider and see what they are up to.  I'm very suspicious that they were blocking it while they were shuffling things around.  Boneheads.    Anyway, I still love the thing, although I have uncovered something new to watch out for.  The box is VERY picky about what sort of DVD-R's it will record to, especially high speed record.  I bought a batch of Maxell 8X DVD-R 4.7GB discs a few months ago and they worked great.  Went back and bought what I thought were the same discs (turned out to be 16x's) and the box won't finalize them.  Have had the same experience with other brands of disc too.  Best luck so far are the Imation 8X's and the Verbatim 8X's, haven't had a single dud with either of those.  God help me, I still think the box is the best thing since sliced bread!...mrb 9/6/2006  ***********************************************************  I bought my 633H-s specifically for two reasons: 1) To turn an aging library of personal VHS and VHS-C camcorder tapes into a more durable media and 2)To automatically record movies, weekly sitcoms/drama, and sports without me having to think about it too much, in good quality, and giving me the option of burning whatever I wanted to DVD.    It has performed #1 Perfectly.  Essentially, I just need to find the best VCR I can, hook it up, and dump all the tapes to the hard drive (which I have done) and then mix and match them to DVD at myleisure.  That worked flawlessly.    #2 is where the 95% came in.  Everybody seems to complain about the TV Guide being erratic, mine worked perfectly for about three months, but for the last couple of weeks, it has completely lost its mind.  It's a real shame, because the thing is darned intelligent.  I told it once to record an NBA playoff game, and then to find the others, and it recorded every NBA playoff game on every channel for the next two weeks without fail!  It also is smart enough to look for programs regardless of time.  I told it get me the SNL's, and it basically found them all.  That's pretty cool.    But, about two weeks ago, all my channel listings went blank!  Here's the funny part....even though it can't find any programming, it still KNOWS programming.  I typed into the search field \\"Medium\\" and it found the show!  And I set it to record it, and it grabs every single one of them!  I can't get the listings to show that it knows what \\"Medium\\" is, but apparently it still does.  Weird!    If you have HBO/CINEMAX/ENCORE/ etc movie channels, you cannot beat this box for over the cable record quality, even picks up a good semblance of my HD channels.  And the coolest thing, any movie you grab on the hard drive that is about 2 hours 10 minutes or less, this thing will burn to DVD in 10-15 MINUTES!      That to me, is the coolest feature yet.    So, I'm still at 95%, puzzled and wondering if my Listings will ever return.  If not, I may go for the \\"peace\\" of disabling the thing completely.  But not yet, not as long as it remembers \\"Medium!\\".    thx....Mike Bertaut