ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
My observations
Somebody recently said on a DVR forum that people either have a great experience with Replay TV or an absolutely horrible experience. Fortunately I've had a great experience. Here are a few observations:<br />1.Pausing and rewinding live TV gets to be addictive. It really does change the way you watch TV.<br />2.The ability to network your PC to the Replay is great. You can use a free program called Replay PC to retrieve shows. The files are huge, sometimes as much as 3 gigs for an hour. You can then use a program like Windows Media Encoder, also free to shrink it down to between 300 megs and 600 megs. <BR>I guess the files are so big because they have to be high quality enough to fill a TV screen opposed to a monitor. That also explains why people are constantly whining that it takes so long to share shows over the internet with other Replay users. Consider this though, under what circumstances will sending a 3 gig file over the net ever be a swift experience? From Replay to your pc it takes about an 90 minutes though.<br />4. There's also been lots of whining about the fact that the channels take a couple of seconds to change. Yes, it's true. But after thinking about it I realized that pausing and rewinding live TV is actually impossible. What the Replay does is record everything  just a little in advance of showing it to you. The unit is probably taking a few seconds to build up something you can actually rewind to. <br />3. You can watch a recorded show while you're recording a show <br />4. The one big complaint that I have is that it sometimes doesn't change the channel to what you want to record. 60 minutes of anything other than what you wanted to record is 60 minutes too many. I've had this occur twice and that comes out to about 3% failure. This is the reason why I give Replay TV 4 stars instead of 5. The purpose of a \\"DVR\\" is to \\"R\\" what I want.<br />5. The commercial skip doesn't always work. It's actually looking for the fade to black and fade from black that precede and follow commercial breaks. If the station goes to and from breaks in another way, you're out of luck. Some people try to put a percentage on it but it depends on what you watch. I love Discovery Channel and it seems to work just about 100% on that channel. On CBS it's about 40%. The \\"Quickskip\\" on the remote makes that a lot more bearable. It skips ahead 30 seconds at a time, press it a couple times and you're in business.<br />6. It's true, the blue power light is like a blue halogen headlight in the  dark. In a bedroom this ..., but common sense will allow you to find a solution to that. I've found that the Replay will actually record a scheduled show when the power is off. You'll just see a red record light turn on.<br />Is the Replay TV perfect? No it isn't. It has quirks and oddities much like Windows. Sometimes you just have to reboot the unit to get it to act right. However, I've found that I can live with it because the pros far outweigh the cons.