ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Excellent!
Even after reading through all the bad reviews here, I still opted to buy this unit. After a week, we've had no technical problems with it at all. <br />There was some trouble with the activation of the unit; for some reason it didn't couldn't figure out that the activation fee had been paid. I called Technical support, and got to talk to somebody immediately (no hold time). I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Tech Support going back and forth trying to figure out what was going on. They updated something in their database, and shortly after, my grace period was extended (so I could keep using the unit), and then few hours later, the issue was resolved. Although it did take some time (and the unit didn't record &quot;The Daily Show&quot; that morning), I'd still say that's pretty good.<br />If you have cable-TV and a cablebox, I recommend that you don't connect the unit to the cablebox, but rather get a splitter, and have one cable go to the cablebox and one to the RTV unit. That way, the RTV doesn't have to change the channel on the cablebox, and you can record something while watching something else. You can't record premium content though... <br />Works good with my broadband connection as well; it gets all the networking info from my firewall, and goes out on the internet to download the program guide and updates. However, sending shows to other users on the internet might not be a feature that'll be used a lot, and here's why: This unit records up to 40 hours on a 40GB drive. That means that a 1 hour show is about 1GB. That is a huge file to transmit over the internet, even if you do have broadband. My connection is capped at 300kbsp outbound, meaning it would take over 9 hours to transmit this file! And that's at &quot;standard&quot; recording quality. File size increases fast if you record at a higher recording quality.<br />Recording at standard quality is ok for most shows, but it can get a bit pixelated in high-speed scenes. For sport events, you should definately record at a higher quality setting, or that tennis ball will be one big square blur flying across the screen.<br />Commercial skip works fairly well, but it's not perfect. It misses some commercials, and sometimes it skips a little too far, so you may have to rewind a few seconds of the show to catch the beginning of the section. <br />Overall, a very good experience for us. The ability to search for shows, and easily record every episode without having to look for VCR+ codes and swapping out worn-out video tapes certainly makes it more enjoyable to watch TV.