ReplayTV 2020 Digital Video Recorder
Heaven's Gift for Commercial Haters
I have lived a about month with my new ReplayTV model 2020 and find it a mixed bag of wonderful convenience and frustrating limitations. On one hand, its ability to pause live TV is a revolution in the way TV can be  watched. On the other hand, it falls short in the ease, and sometimes even  in the ability, to record the shows you want to want it to record when  you're not there.<br />For someone who hates commercials as much as I do,  ReplayTV is a gift from heaven. It's so cool to enjoy a live show or movie  on commercial TV without repeated interruptions by annoying ads. If I'm  going to watch a program that has commercials, I'll pause the ReplayTV at  the beginning for five minutes or so (to make a snack, check my e-mail, go  to the john, or even sit there doing nothing). From that point on, I can  watch the slightly delayed show without any commercials at all,  interrupting the program only couple of seconds at a time to punch the  Quick Skip button on the controller to vault past the commercials in  30-second chunks. It's a great way to improve the quality of time spent  watching TV.<br />Recording shows in advance with ReplayTV is less rewarding.  There are two basic ways to record future shows. One is to find the show in  the ReplayTV Channel Guide (it lists programming going forward about a  week) and set it to record with a few presses of a button. The other way is  to create a Theme Channel, where the ReplayTV searches the listings for a  keyword you have specified and records any show whose listing (title,  description, actors, director, theme, subject) contains a match to that  keyword.<br />Recording a show from the channel guide is fairly  straightforward, except for sports events and other programs that might run  longer than shown in their listings. In that case you have to also record  the show(s) following the event. Since recording each show requires a  sequence of button presses on the remote (which is not very easy to use  quickly--the guide responds slowly to input and there are other issues,  mentioned later, that slow down the process), it gets to be a pain to  record multiple shows, or even to locate a show far in advance. What's  missing, when you know the channel and time of a show, is a VCR-like  interface that lets you quickly program the record start time, end time and  channel. (According to a ReplayTV representative, the addition of a  time-based programming feature is planned for this year.)<br />Theme channels  do not work for me as well as I'd hoped. You can enter a word or phrase to  search, but you are likely to capture and waste recording space on matches  you don't want. For example, if you want to tape all episodes of Friends,  entering &quot;Friends&quot; as the keyword will get you Friends, but also  Barney &amp; Friends, not what you had in mind. Entering &quot;The One  With&quot; (all Friends episode titles begin with &quot;The One With&quot;)  will get you only Friends episodes, except the occasional ones where the  phrase is inexplicably missing from the listings. Try &quot;Aniston.&quot;  This actor's name is good to use since it appears in almost every Friends  listing (but not all), and it's alphabetically the first name listed (the  listings cut off after a certain length, so &quot;Schwimmer, &quot; for  example, will often not appear), so it's a good choice. However,  &quot;Aniston&quot; will also tape every airing of any of the several  movies the actor appears in, as well as every tattletale ET-type feature  about her. There's no way of preventing an unwanted match from recording in  advance. All this illustrates the need for a more sophisticated search  function, similiar to Yahoo! or any other search engine on the Internet,  where you can specify precisely which terms to search for and also which  not to (using &quot;and,&quot; &quot;or,&quot; &quot;not,&quot; etc.) I  think something like this would be within the ability of most users, and it  could be added as a selectable option so as not to confuse newbies.<br />I  have a major problem personally with theme recording of my favorite  baseball team's games, which is one of the main reasons I bought my  ReplayTV. I subscribe to a premium service on DirecTV called Major League  Baseball Extra Innings to see games of out-of-town teams. The problem is,  the names of the teams playing each game do not appear on the ReplayTV  listings, so you can't search for &quot;Yankees,&quot; for example, and  find their games. The service that picks up DirectTV's listings and  provides them to ReplayTV can't provide the team names (or game times  either), because the info is added to DirectTV's listings only a few days  in advance, instead of the week normally required. Not even the game times  in the ReplayTV guide are right; it lists them in arbitrary 3-hour chunks,  so after you have figured out the game channel and times from other  sources, you have to begin recording at 3 o'clock to catch the start of a 4  o'clock game, and waste recording time on an hour of blank screen. I'm sure  this problem is not unique to my situation and that subscribers to other  sports services have the same problem.<br />Overall, your satisfaction with  ReplayTV as it currently is--enhancements are in the works and are  downloaded to your set automatically along with program guide updates  during the night--will depend on which features are most important to you.  I think it's worth the price of admission for the way it lets you take  control of viewing live TV, but its shortcomings in other areas are  frustrating. If these are overcome, ReplayTV vaults into the elite cool  category right up there with sliced bread.<br />Summary of Pros  <BR><BR>Pausing live TV--fantastic feature makes ReplayTV worth the price  of admission.<br />Theme channel recording--when it works, it's great. Turn on  the Replay TV and your favorite programs are there waiting for you.<br />Quick  Skip--heroic champion in the war against the commercial. Instantly skips  forward 30 seconds in a recorded or delayed program each time you press  it.<br />Instant Replay--Helps conquer the &quot;What'd he say?&quot;  syndrome--instantly backs up 7 seconds in a live, recorded or delayed  program so you can catch what you just missed.<br />Setup is not as bad as it  could be, given the way in which the ReplayTV has to interact with your  cable, satellite, TV, VCR, phone line, etc. Instructions are pretty clear  and helpful support is available by phone.<br />Customer support--ReplayTV's  customer service and tech support reps are accessible, friendly, and seem  to really care about your satisfaction with their product.<br />Summary of  Cons <BR><BR>Remote control is not comfortable. Have to shift it awkwardly  in your hand to reach the commonly used buttons and to press the recessed  &quot;Select&quot; button, for example.<br />Channel up and down buttons and  the arrow up and down buttons don't repeat when held down in Channel  Guide.<br />Theme Channel recording--search function is weak, unwanted shows  are recorded, no way to tell ReplayTV not to record an unwanted  show.<br />Mysterious glitches--too many instances of discovering that the  last few minutes of a show didn't get recorded, or that an entire program  didn't get recorded. In the latter case you're left with only dubious error  messages like &quot;No video signal&quot; or &quot;You do not subscribe to  that station&quot; (YES I DO).<br />Record quality--Standard mode is  marginally acceptable. Medium and High quality modes drastically decrease  available recording time. Standard is OK for most programs; the quality of  the original signal makes a big difference. Digital satellite programs  record much better than cable programs. On some of the marginal local cable  stations, the lack of picture quality can be distracting. There's  distortion and &quot;noise&quot; around shapes on the screen similiar to  low-quality Jpeg images on the Internet. Occasionally sound and picture go  out of sync. Fast-moving images get distorted; for example, when the camera  is following a running player the background gets all hashy. However, I  find I can still watch a baseball game in standard mode without having the  experience lessened by picture quality issues. Football or hockey might be  different.<br />Replay Zones--these are preprogrammed theme channels provided  by ReplayTV, some as a result of promotional deals. Useless. How much of a  chance is there that I really want to record _all_ NBC comedies?<br />Remote  control is too directional.<br />Need to be able to delete unwanted found  theme shows before they get recorded. When you set a theme channel with a  keyword, you can review all the matches it finds for the coming week. But  if unwanted shows are found and slated for recording, there's no way to  delete them from the queue. So you end up wasting precious recording time  on shows you don't want to see.<br />Need to have record programming by  channel/start time/end time. Sometimes it's still the easiest way.<br />Need  to be able to add extra recording time onto the end of a program when  recording from the channel guide, say in 15-minute increments, to handle  events like sports that run over their time slots in the program guide. I  believe VCR Plus has this feature.<br />The channel guide reacts too slowly to  input and it takes s