ReplayTV RTV5516 160-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Great product!  Beats the pants off my homemade DVR
I built my own DVR using an old computer and an video capture card.  The weekly listings were free, but the quality was poor and the user interface was dreadful.  At least it got my wife hooked on the DVR concept. <br /> <br />With the ReplayTV, it took us less than 10 minutes to realize that it was a much better product than my home-grown DVR.  Recording quality is very nice on the 'medium' setting.  This gives us 80 hours of recorded TV (160 is for 'low' quality setting), but 80 is a LOT of TV.  And the limit is not a real problem because I am using a program called DVArchive on my PC that makes my PC look like another ReplayTV.  Any ReplayTV can stream to or from another ReplayTV on a home network.  So when my ReplayTV gets filled up, I can offload some of the shows to my 200GB hard drive computer and still have access to the shows via streaming! <br /> <br />The user interface is very nice and easy to understand.  We watch most our TV as recorded shows now so we can skip over the commercials.  There is a skip forward and skip backward button on the remote that makes it easy to jump through commercials.  Also being able to pause live TV is pretty cool.  And once you are about 15 minutes behind 'live' broadcast you can usually skip all commercials and never catch up to 'live' before the end of the show. <br /> <br />I wish it could record High Definition Digital, but a HD DVR probably won't hit the market for a while.  But this ReplayTV will record any down-converted signal so once I upgrade to the HD TV the ReplayTV will still benefit from the better reception of digital broadcast. <br /> <br />The only downside is that the remote doesn't work too well from an angle - meaning we have to work the remote from directly in front of the Replay.  Not too horrible...