ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Frustrating at first, but now I love it
I had a difficult time getting everything hooked up correctly. Some of the instructions on the quick set-up guide were not accurate (especially concerning hooking up through a stereo receiver). Also, a day after I had it working properly in the middle of the day it stopped receiving video signals, even though I hadn't changed anything. I unhooked everything, started from scratch and now it works great. <br />Channel surfing is difficult as others have said, but the channel guide makes surfing not really necessary. It is so easy to quickly see what is on other channels. (and it's much better than the guide on our digital cable) The main problem with this is if you're flipping back and forth between two programs (for instance football games on New year's Day). It takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds to change channels.<br />Also, I haven't been able to get the myreplaytv.com functionality to work. I can see the shows that I have recorded (although it seems to be two days behind) but it doesn't display the channel guide. So I can't schedule recordings online like they say. I'm hoping this is something that will be fixed soon. (update:  this has now been fixed and works fine)<br />But, despite all that there are many many reasons why this is a great product. Easily finding programs you want to record, pausing live-tv (you use this more than you might imagine), instant-replay functions--all of these are great features. Also, since we have a cable box we were never before able to set the timer on the VCR to record shows that were on different channels. The IR blaster that comes with ReplayTV solves that problem. So...despite some minor issues I would highly recommend ReplayTV.