ReplayTV RTV5516 160-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Never watch commercials again
I've had my ReplayTV for over a year so I think I can give you a good review of it. When I told my wife I wanted to get one she thought it was just another toy but once she saw everything it could do she was hooked. I don't watch a lot of TV but for the shows I like I just record them on the Replay and watch them whenever I have time. My unit will automatically skip 95% of the commercials and for the few that it misses you just hit the 30 second skip button and it jumps right through them. One of the features that I think is the greatest and I didn't see it mentioned much is the fact that if you hook it up to your home network you can get on your PC and go to a website called [...] and surf through all the shows that other ReplayTV users have shared on their ReplayTV's and when you find a show that maybe you forgot to record or just looks interesting you can request them to send it to your ReplayTV. Then the next time you turn on your ReplayTV you'll see a message that someone is sending you a show and you just have to accept it for the transfer to begin. I know Tivo users only dream about a feature like this one. It's great when I do watch live TV that I can pause and rewind shows for those times when I get a phone call or anything and I don't want to miss anything. When you take a one hour show and strip out the commercials it ends up only being about 40 minutes which is great when you just don't have a lot of time to sit around and watch boring commercials. You can connect your VCR to the ReplayTV and transfer all your tapes to the ReplayTV and then copy them from the ReplayTV to your PC and edit them or just burn them to a DVD so your home movies will last forever in digital format. The 40 hour model is pretty cheap and you can always upgrade the hard drive later or just move the shows to your PC to save space on the ReplayTV. As long as you have your PC turned on and the software running you can play the recorded shows on your PC right to your TV by selecting your PC from the onscreen menu on the ReplayTV. My wife says this is the best toy I ever bought.