Philips HDR312 TiVo 30-Hour Digital Video Recorder
ReplayTV good, Tivo much better
Both are light years ahead of VCRs, both have ups and downs, either will change your idea of how television is watched.  They both pause live TV, find and record your favorite shows without the hassles that tapes create.   They both allow you to pay service costs up front (actually Replay  _requires_ it), and if you do they both cost the same.<br />Tivo advantages:  Suggestions.  You give shows you like or don't like up to three thumbs up  or thumbs down, and Tivo will look for things that match those preferences.   Note that your preference information is never shared with Tivo Inc.  It  never leaves your house, the box makes the suggestions itself.<br />Recording  by date, time, and channel.  Useful for lengthy shows you only want a part  of, events that may run past the scheduled end time.<br />Replay advantage:  Theme areas which will record things based on keywords or actors.  Tivo  doesn't yet have this, but will by at least Halloween, probably sooner.  As  with Replay, software upgrades for Tivo are done automatically during the  nightly call so existing Tivo owners will get it free.<br />Where Replay  scared me off was it's labyrinth of complex scheduling and show retention  rules and it's disk management, which essentially chops up the disk into  separate areas for each show.  If you make the shows &quot;guaranteed&quot;  (which does not actually guarantee the show will record), those areas won't  share space with each other, even if they aren't using it.  For  &quot;non-guaranteed&quot; shows space is shared, but no warning about  schedule conflicts is given so you never really know what's going to be  recorded.  Even Replay doesn't know if a show will pass all the tests until  moments before it's on, so it can't tell you in advance.  Think that  Frasier &quot;show&quot; area will catch double episodes?  Nope, show areas  only catch one showing per day.  NBC shows Frasier at 8:00 one night  instead of 9, but you're covered, right?  Nope, show areas won't find a  show if it moves more than one slot away from it's normal time.  So you use  a &quot;Theme&quot; area for Frasier instead of a &quot;Show&quot; area,  another way to do automatic recordings.  Set it for an hours worth of  programming and you're set!  Double episodes, hour long episodes, no  problem, right?  Except that theme areas grab shows from every channel on  the dial, and your UPN affiliate shows two syndicated episodes of Frasier  every night (this isn't hypothetical, mine does), so your Frasier theme  area gets those too.  So what, you say, they'll just get overwritten when  the prime-time episodes run?  Nope.  Replay theme areas won't throw away a  show until it's a day old, so when Frasier comes on NBC at 9:00, Replay  finds the hour-long Frasier area already full of shows it can't delete yet  so it doesn't record _any_ prime time episodes, even if there is space  somewhere on the disk.  The solution is to up the Frasier area to two hours  so it can hold both the syndicated episodes you don't want and any hour  long or double episodes you do.  You actually have to manage and allocate  space yourself, and to do it effectively you have to be aware of when  channels you don't care about show episodes you don't want since they can  prevent Replay from recording or keeping what you _do_ want.  Even VCRs  don't demand that much care and feeding.<br />A Tivo &quot;season pass&quot;  handles this neatly and simply.  It only records from the specific channel  you set it to, but it doesn't restrict the times or number of episodes that  will be recorded and it doesn't restrict shows to sharing a tiny portion  the disk, so you'll get long, double, or moved episodes (unless a moved or  extra episode conflicts with something else - neither Tivo or Replay can  record two things at once, so something won't get recorded if that  happens).  Tivos to-do list shows you everything it will record through  it's 10 days of programming data, and because Tivo projects it's space  requirements throughout those 10 days, it knows it advance when a new  recording would exceed it's capacity, and offers to delete some shows  earlier than planned or cancel the recording.<br />With Tivo you know what  will be recorded, you know what effect additional recordings will have on  Tivos spaces schedule, and recordings are kept as long as disk space  permits.  The Replay and Tivo forums at avsforum.com are an excellent  source of information.