TiVo TCD540040 Series2 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Excellent  if you are willing to sacrifice AV quality
Excellent but to be fair there is room for improvement for audiophiles and videophiles.<br /><br />1. Can not do (neither live or playback) dolby digital 5ch. Downgrades feeds to stereo.<br /><br />2. You will be watching downgraded/reprocessed mpeg video.  (My crisp clear digital cable feed looses quality when passes through Tivo) Forget about HDTV. You can not Tivo HDTV. On a large screen TV this will obviously be more visible.<br /><br />Here is how it works:<br /><br />You cable or SAT box will process digital feed. Tivo inputs only  analog video so digital video will be converted to analog S-Video. Tivo will encode analog input to digital MPEG format and will write it on harddisk. With an indistinctive time lapse, Tivo will read recorded MPEG video and decode it from digital to analog. Analog S-Video will go into TV set. You well end-up loosing quality crips clear video and audio.<br /><br />PS: I still keep my Tivo. ( I bypass TIVO with the help of my reciever when I want to watch movies)