ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
I Love This Piece of Equipment
I had gotten this thing for christmas a month ago. Without a doubt this one of this best things i ever recieved. I set it up with my network and cable box in all of 15-20 min. The set-up was a breeze. It was no harder to set-up than a VCR. The remote is very comfortable to use and the button placement was very easy to learn. The quality of playback is superior to anything out there. The Replaytv gives about 15 hours at high quality, about 25 hours at medium quality and 40 hours at low quality. High quality is fantastic, Medium is good and low is acceptable. If you are watching from about 15 feet (like me) Medium as your best bet, as you can not notice the difference between medium and high. The interface is quite nice, though not very colorful with a few shades of blue. It has alot of useful features, such as the photo transfer software which worked flawlessly on my Windows XP system. The Internet file sharing as excrutingly slow, but handy if you missed a favorite show. One of the better features is Myreplaytv which lets people program there replaytv to record, anywhere in the world, however navigation is a little slow. Accessing the setup menu is slightly delayed, but this barely becomes annoying. Rrecording shows is extermely simple. Just select a show in the guide and set it to record with all your prefrences. You can also set it to record every episode. There are also things called \\"replay zones\\", which lets you record all of the shows in a specific genre. The rewind and instant replay features work well. The best feature, however, is commercial skip which does that in recorded shows. It is about 80-85 percent successful. The only thing that i dislike is that i have to use the included IR Blaster, in which the box automatically changes the channels on my cable box. It is extremly slow, even after fine tuning, which did help. Overall an excellent product, and if you buy it and have to use the IR blaster, search the web to find out how to fine tune the IR blaster.