I got a ReplayTV 5160 for Christmas and I have to say that I absolutely love it. It's a DVR or PVR (however they are reffering to them) and a competing brand to TiVo. I figured some of you may be interested, so here are my thoughts on it so far...
First and foremost, ReplayTV allows you to pause and instant replay, rewind and fast forward through anything you're watching on television. Watching football with it yesterday was awesome. The buffer is the size of the entire free space left on its hard drive, so currently I can stay on a channel for like 50 hours and move to and watch any point in that 50 hours. The buffer will retain everything you've watched since you turned to the current channel, and it dumps it when you change to another channel.
The channel and program guide is very similar to Satellite and Digital Cable guides currently available, and setting it up to record a show is a snap. You can do a search through show titles, descriptions, actors, etc. for a keyword that you enter in. There's one button you can hit to tape something on the guide, or you can set it up to tape all occurrences of a particular show (I have yet to determine just how smart it is). I love the ability to skip commercials automatically. I basically just turn "commercial advance" on or off when I start watching a show, and it is smart enough during replay to automatically and instantly skip from the beginning of a commercial break to the end of it without missing a beat. They are still recorded though in case you wanted to watch them.
One of the coolest things about the ReplayTV 5000 series is its ability to plug into the internet. It's the main reason I chose it over the TiVo, as I don't have a phone line in my house. I ran an RJ-45 cable from my router to the ReplayTV and it has a fancy little wizard that connected it with no setup at all on my part. Once online, it negates the need for a phone line to get the program guides and such. I can hit MyReplayTV.com from any computer and tell my unit at home to tape a show, which is really sweet. The internet connection also allows two users with 5000 series units to upload shows to each other, though I haven't tried that yet.
The only major downside I've seen so far is that when you turn to a channel, there's a 3-5 second period of no video signal while it starts recording the new channel and deleting the buffer from the previous channel. It effectively puts an end to flipping channels, but the guides work well instead.
All in all, I'd say that if you watch much TV it's totally worth getting one of these. In fact, it's hard to imagine going back to watching TV without it, and I've only had it for about a week.
ReplayTV
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Hoarmurath
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Time Warner is charging $5 per month for the service, and $5 per month for the unit itself. But if you already have a cable receiver from them, you were already paying $5 per month for that, so you just swap boxes. The nice thing, in my opinion, about the TW box is that I don't have to have a phone line. Since I don't have a phone line at home, it makes having ReplayTV or TiVo kinda difficult.
