ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
A few rough spots, but well worth it
I had been tracking the PVR's waiting for the price/performance to get down to a reasonable level. The 5040 came out at the sub $250 with rebates we decided to jump. <br />I consider my self a techie - so I can tolerate some hitches as an 'early adopter'. I'll run through my experience: <br />Price: The switch from $250 lifetime to $10/mo to month was the kicker. I wasn't going to gamble a long term commitment on a new unproven technology/business. But for $10 month I can switch if something better comes along. <br />Setup: Setup was a breeze. i already had my home network setup, and the 5040 just worked. Our cable TV subscriber was listed so the EPG setup was easy. <br />Recording: The EPG is easy to use and setting things to record is straight forward. So far I haven't missed any shows. The 40 hour recording time advertised is at standard quality, you'll only get about 10 hours at high quality. For us, we ran out of room pretty quick. Standard is ok *if* your input signal is good. <br />Unfortunately for me, most of the shows we watch are on our local CBS affiliate. For some reason this channel looks *awful* through the replay. if you check out the boards at planetreplay.com or avsforum.com you will find more complaints about the tuner/quality. I am probably going to switch to DirectTV, which should improve things. <br />[update] <BR>I know there have been complaints of poor quality throught the built in vidoe tuner. I was having problems as well with my local channel 6 (CBS) looking espescially bad (compression artifacts). The picture looks good through my VCR, but bad on the replay. Unfortnately a lot of the shows we wanted to record are on CBS. <br />I was able to dramatically improve the quality by installing a 10db signal attenuator and an FM blocker on the feed to the RTV. I have an OpenHouse (Multiplex/ChannelPlus) video distribution amplifier which was causing the signal to be too strong on the shorter cable runs in my house. <br />I bought a packet of fixed attenuators from smarthome online, a variable 0-20db attenuator and the FM blocker from radio shack. Probably cost a total of $20. Use the variable attenuator to dial in the amount, then use the corresponding fixed attenuator. <br />The picture quality is now acceptable on channel 6, and really good on the other channels. <br />this doesn't mean the RTV tuner is blameless - but before you throw your RTV out the window you should make sure your signal isn't too weak or too strong. It could be that MPG compression will cause a marginal signal to look *really* bad. <br />[/update] <BR>MyReplayTV.Com: I was not impressed by there 'remote programming' site. Shows i setup to record via the internet didn't always get to my Replay. <br />Photo Transfer: The software didn't work at all at first, but I upgraded my computer from Win98 to XP and that seemed to fix things. <br />Internet Sharing: This is a great feature, but as a practical matter it has its drawbacks. Its not the RTV's fault - most broadband ISP's limited upload speed. An average 1 hour show (~2GB of space) will take all night to transfer. But if you miss your favorite show its a great feature. <br />Customer Support: I haven't had to deal with this yet. i have heard they are going through some growing pains right now.