ReplayTV RTV5040 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder
Some pros, but lots of cons
ReplayTV 5000 pros:<br />*  internet show sharing<BR>*  streaming shows between other ReplayTV 5000s on your home network<BR>*  commercial advance can automatically skip most commercials<BR>*  remote scheduling over the web<br />Things to be aware of:<br />* commercial skip isn't completely reliable.  It can fail to skip some commercials, and it can mistakenly skip parts of an actual show.  I find I have to turn it off more often than I'd like.<BR>*  internet show sharing takes from 8-24 hours to send a 30 minute show at common broadband upload speeds.  It's not something you'd want to have to use routinely to get a show the ReplayTV missed, and thanks to it's convoluted recording system ReplayTV can be annoyingly good at missing shows.<BR>*  calls to fetch remote scheduling requests made with it's web scheduling feature, MyReplayTV, only happen once a day even when using it's hooked via broadband, and the web interface won't even allow you to request shows that air before 6am the next day so you can't make last minute requests.<BR>*  only 4 days of trial use before the recorder disables everything, even channel changing and playback of shows it had already recorded.  Make sure you don't set it up until you have time to try it out.<BR>* despite having progressive output and a digital audio output, ReplayTV supports neither HDTV nor digital audio recording.  It has no inputs for digital audio or video, only plain old NTSC 4:3.<BR>* slow search features.  searches on ReplayTV take minutes, while searches on Tivo take seconds.  ReplayTVs search capabilities are also more primitive and less versatile than Tivos, and don't find as many shows because ReplayTVs guide data is less detailed.<BR>*  sluggish user interface.  User interface and other functions respond more slowly than Tivo or even previous ReplayTV models.<BR>* primitive recording control.  It can't automatically ignore repeats, doesn't have a multi-level recording priority system.<br />Reasons to avoid ReplayTV:<br />* very poor system for managing recordings.  ReplayTV provides no authoritative list of what will record like Tivo's to-do list does, and it's ability to warn you of conflicts in advance and let you control them is crude for some kinds of shows, nonexistent for others.  It's system for resolving conflicts is complicated without being powerful, making it difficult to predict and time consuming to manage.<BR>* wasteful disk management.  ReplayTV requires you to &quot;block out&quot; space for shows.  Make the blocks too small and you risk shows being deleted or not recorded even if the disk has space to keep them; make the blocks too big and you run into limits on how many shows you can schedule, even if the shows will get watched and deleted before they ever fill the disk.<BR>* stability problems: ReplayTVs software updates have been getting less stable of late.  Crashes, lockups, freezing video and reboots are not uncommon.  I've tried two 5040s in a month, both crashed every 2-3 days on average, and so far one recording was lost to a crash.  Both 5040s have suffered from sometimes severe bouts of freezing, pixellation, and stuttering or looping audio.  This alone would have knocked it down to zero stars if that was an option.<br />For more detailed lists of pros and cons search for comparison sites like pvrcompare.com or egotron.com/ptv.