ReplayTV 4040 40-Hour Personal Video Recorder
The piece of hardware that forever changed my life...
Can you imagine?  You're into a really good show, and suddenly your wife starts nagging you about something... the trash, the dog needs to go out, dinner is burning!  :D  So you hit PAUSE???  Yes!  Pause on live TV!  Okay, so this is no different than TIVO.  What is though is the broadband connection that allows you to send shows over the internet to friends and family, along with the ability to send any type of video you've recorded on the DVR from say your camcorder (forget even trying DVD's... Macrovision won't allow you to do this, as it's enabled on this device: unless of course you buy one of those nice little devices on the net that disables it :D) You can store your own digital photos on this and display them as a slide show screensaver for when your unit is on pause.  Going on vacation?  Forgot to tell it to record the Drew Carey Show?  Hop on the net from anywhere in the world and from [...] you can program it to record!  <br />Skips commercials (I hate that I pay for TV and have to watch advertising... it's like the networks are getting paid twice for the same thing!   I DON'T GET PAID TWICE AT MY JOB!)  The major networks are scared to hell of this ability, because it will fundamentally change the market for advertising on television... and they HATE UNPREDICATBILITY AND CHANGE!  They want to TELL YOU HOW TO WATCH TV.  Then want you to watch what they WANT YOU TO... WHEN THEY WANT YOU TO!  Well, now... they can shove primetime right up their rears!  Primetime in my house is WHEN I'M READY!<br />Also, if you buy multiple ReplayTV 4K's, you can network them together and stream shows back and forth from one room to another.  [...] has a replaytv and showstopper forum which contains a lot of info also on how to pull video files off of your replayTV and then use your CD Burner to write them as VCD's and/or DVD's (if you have a DVD burner) so you can watch them at a later date, without having to use up hard drive space on your computer or replaytv to store it!<br />If you don't have a TIVO and you were thinking about it... don't even bother.  There's no reason you should buy anything other than Sonic Blues' ReplayTV 4K.  The only hard decision is WHAT SIZE RECORDING TIME SHOULD I GET?  <br />Nobody tells me what I'm going to do with television services I'm paying to watch.  I'll watch them when I choose and commercial free!