Philips HDR312 TiVo 30-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Worth its weight in gold!
I have the 30-hour Tivo unit which I purchased after considering the ReplayTV unit.  Tivo   has it won hands down.  Setup is extremely simple and Tivo provides excellent setup guidelines and user manuals.  The first  setup call is lengthy but Tivo warns you of this before you start.  The  maintenance calls vary in length but the actual call time is short although  the computer may do some &quot;housekeeping&quot; that takes longer.  For  those concerned about recording time, I made some trial recordings as  suggested by Tivo and found the &quot;best&quot; quality (9 hours total  time) to be indistinguishable from live TV.  The &quot;high&quot; quality  was still excellent and better than my VCR at SP.  I now use  &quot;medium&quot; quality for all my recordings except for anything that I  wish to archive onto VCR or sporting events that may require finer detail.   This gives me over 19 hours of recording time.  Hopefully, Tivo will  provide easy upgrades of their hardware just like they do their software.   Finally, the user interface for Tivo is amazing.  It is extremely  user-friendly; I was immediately running Tivo without looking at the manual  and the variety of ways Tivo has sorted programming makes deciding what you  want to watch simple.  No more TV Guides!  Tivo sorts programming by  channel, time, genres, showcases, and the Tivolution daily magazine  delivered to the receiver every night in the update call has even more  topical recommendations.  And the &quot;Thumbs up&quot; or &quot;Down&quot;  really works.  Tivo makes fairly good calls about programming you might  enjoy and records them on available space leaving you to decide if you want  to watch them.  If you do and tell Tivo you liked the show with the  &quot;Thumbs up&quot;, Tivo learns again!  Our television viewing has never  been the same.  For copyright reasons though, you can't make digital  archives of your recorded programs.  That seems strange to me since analog  copies are fine!  I highlyrecommend the Tivo personal receiver system!