High Definition DVR – High Definition PVR

Review by Daniel And Barbara Sullinger:

June posting

ok I would have given this 5 stars but this comes with current problem with it, this has optical in for 5.1DD recording at this time hauppuage can not get this to work so you are stuck with PCM 2.0 or audio from the analog imputs, now to the rest, it records video at 1920×1080 at same or near Blu ray discs, you have a choice of bitrate constant from 1 to 13.5 Kb or on variable all the way up to 20.2, this records in the same codeec (AVCHD) as blu ray and HD DVD discs, it will take any component imput, I have mine through my receiver where my Dishnet PVR HD, PS3, HD DVD and Oppo DVD player runs through, just for test purposes I tried all my devices and what I test recorded from dishnet, blu ray, DVD and HD DVD the test disc looked no different than the original source, once you capture your source you can then edit or add chapters then you get to add a real cheapo menu and then put in what disc you need to burn either a DVD-R or a dual layer DVD Disc, it takes about 10 minutes to author your recording to Blu ray standard and burn on your normal DVD as a true Blu ray playable Disc, beware once you burn your DVD as a blu ray playback DVD you will not be able to read it in your computer again unless you have a Blu ray Rom or Blu Ray Burner, once and if Hauppuage ever gets the 5.1 DD fixed this could be the killer to blu ray Discs, hauppuage claims by next driver release they will include the 5.1 fix. Beware this is Xp service pack 2 or Vista operating system only, also you must have a fast computer to use this device and its programs, I have a dual core 3.4 gig Intel, 2gigs of ram, 2 – 500 sata HDD and had to buy a nvidia 7600 512 meg video card to get this up to speed and at the fastest bitrate 13,500 I cant do anything else on the computer, but this is the problem with Hi def, its power hungry, now I can finally put my hi def movies of all 6 star wars and 3 lord of the rings on DVD for 1080i blu ray playback, you can also convert the finished files over to movie factory 6 to burn on a normal DVD for HD DVD playback also.

August update…

Ok been doing alot of capturing, have made 40 dual layer DVDs for blu ray playback and 10 dual layers for HD DVD playback. the video qua;ity is great if you keep it above 7.8 bitrate, only major drawback is no 5.1DD audio, I am now Beta tesing the 5.1DD audio driver right now, wow this makes a huge difference with the sound. Problems still, wont work with the arch software yet, sync problems, but works with TSmuxer. There seems to be heat related issues with some boxes, mine stays on 7, 10, 15 hours at a time never gets overly warm and never locks up. I have done well over 100 captures with this device. Having an Lg blu ray burner and blanks getting below each, this might be the future for capturing and buring HD content at the PVR’s full 13.2 to 20.0 bitrate in the future. If hauppauge can just tweak this 5.1DD driver a bit more I think this will be a great little device.

October update,

I am now a beta tester for hauppauge and I finally got 5.1DD drivers and TME software that works, so now I got a card that finally works capturing movies the way I wanted it to, 5.1DD and can also edit with the software and no more sync issues, burn to dual layers DVD’s or blu ray discs.

December Update

Ok Hauppauge support finally has Drivers and software out for general public that makes this device work properly. you can capture 1080i from any component ouput using the 5.1DD and you get a great captured TS or M2TS file ready to burn to a blu ray or dual layer DVD with or without menu. since october I have captured and burned over 50 movies onto disc in 5.1DD and they look great, the ones from the 1080p sources look really great. Now I manually record all my movies, so I do not know how this works with a timer or sageTV.

Feb Posting

some here wanted me to post to let you know of known problems with this and dishnet, I find there is no exact problems per say with the PVR1212 and Dishnet, you should know that sometimes when you use this device with the dishnet you get out of sync problems and digital tears in the picture, most, if no all is the blame of dishnet or most likey the channel the show is broadcast from. Example: I have tried 7-8 times to capture and record Spaceballs from MGM HD channel every time its out of sync and every time its being played out of sync on MGM HD over dishnet before I even capture it. Please keep in mind when using this device, HD content is never perfect and they “big hollywood” does not want you to capture and record their programs. So dont be surprised if “they” are always trying anything to foil you capturing a Hi Def Digital program, be it dish, cable, PS3 or HD-DVD. so far I have captured and burned onto dual layer DVD’s 130 movies from all such sources all coming out perfect, be it analog, 2DD or 5.1DD audio. yeah where else can you watch on a disc, star wars, lord of the rings, batman, star trek movies in hi def, way to go hauppauge.

Review by K. Martin:

Here’s the summary:

– Not a DVR. This is a pass-thru from audio/video source to PC.

– Generates H.264 at Baseline Profile 1.0 only — not the High Profile 4.1 that x264.exe-based programs generate. The Baseline H.264 quality is not as good as the High Profile quality using the same bit rate.

– Generates default .M2TS files which are difficult to edit — use the .TS file output instead for easier editing.

– Arcsoft software is good for capturing and that’s it. The software for creating a disk always seems to re-encode — a process that takes my PC days or makes my PC hang.

– After capture, I have to use third-party software to finish production.

The product is not an easy out-of-the box solution. Hookup is easy, and the Arcsoft software installation is easy, capturing is easy, but it gets tricky after that.

When you capture, you can set bitrates. I set my 720x480i broadcast to 4.1 MB/s thinking it would be fine. When I made a disk and played it on the Blu Ray player, the video had a horribly compressed look. That was a straight H.264 file from the HD-PVR 1212 unit to disk without transcoding. But when I transcode some other high-quality 480i video using an x264.exe-based application with 4.1 MB/s the video quality is fine.

Now I made the mistake of capturing my first video in .M2TS. Tried to edit it. Lots of software doesn’t like .M2TS. I didn’t know that then, but I know now. Fortunately I was able to use the freeware TSRemux to convert the .M2TS file to a .TS file. Now apps like H264TS_Cutter and multiAVCHD are happier. Lots of crashes and failures with .M2TS.

Editing. I use H264TS_Cutter to cut out commercials. This app is handy — you take clips you want to save and create a cut without transcoding. This is important in the H.264 video world because transcoding takes days on my PCs, but the H264TS_Cutter makes a cut in minutes. You can also join two files in this manner. H264TS_Cutter has never crashed on me with .TS files. I tried using a little more complicated app for cutting — TS Packet Editor — but I had to reboot my PC after each file edit.

Creating a video disk. I use multiAVCHD. It lets me make a simple menu for the multiple titles. To get this to generate a Blu-Ray format file structure, I had to (after clicking Start) select the button [AVCHD compatible players] — the button [For all Blu-ray players] wouldn’t work in my Blu-Ray player.

The size of the output files determines what size disk I can use. I use Imgburn to burn to DVD-5, DVD-9, or BD-25 — this plays in my Blu-Ray player as long as I choose the UDF physical format and UDF 2.50.

That’s the quick way of taking the output from the HD-PVR 1212 and placing it on Blu-Ray compatible disk. If all this that I’ve described sounds like Greek, be wary of this purchase. You’ll need to do your homework on using these 3rd-party apps (though fortunately the ones I’ve described are free) to keep the production time to a minimum and spare yourself days of needless suffering. Had these tools been included and described in the bundled software for this purchase, it would have saved me about two weeks of trial, research, and error.

Review by L. Martzinek:

I’ve been converting videos for my ipod since November, and just started converting for my PSP a month ago. I’ve converted hundreds of hours worth of video and used at least 3 different programs for each device. Nothing has given me anywhere near the video quality that this does.

I’ve bought TV shows on Itunes and watched them on my 27″ TV and been amazed at how good the image quality was, but I’ve never been able to do as well with videos I’ve converted myself – until now. At the highest quality setting the recordings look just as good as anything I’ve bought on Itunes, and with 60GB of memory on my ipod file size isn’t an issue. (I recorded before and after I installed a very recent firmware upgrade – if you buy this, go to Neuros’ site and get the upgrade, it makes a difference)

Converting for PSP is easier than with any program I’ve used. You record directly onto the memory stick, and then just pop it into the PSP and there it is on the video menu. You only have to deal with the PSP’s #&%$@# file naming requirements if you want to move the files off the stick to archive them.

The other big advantage this has over everything else I’ve used is that this is a one step process – you record it and you can watch it on your device immediately. Everything else I’ve used was 2 step: you recorded or ripped in real time, then you converted, in real time or longer. This is half the work.

There are only 2 real downsides: You have to hook up the video out to a tv because it has no display of it’s own, and it has no memory you can record onto – you need a memory stick or cf card. A potential third issue is the remote – you need it to do everything, even turn it on, so you really, really don’t want to lose it.

Overall, this thing is amazing. I wish I had bought it when I got my ipod. I could have saved over 0 that I spent on converting software, and a lot of time.

Review by Andrew Gray:

The Recorder 2 makes it trivially easy to get movies and TV shows onto my PSP. You pretty much just press the record button and it does the rest. Recommended!

Review by Carista J. Gamble:

The Sonicview 360 Premier, is a great FTA receiver. The design is sleek and not bulky. The light up of the display looked great along side the 500GB Mybook I had hooked to it’s rear USB port. The front USB port is really convinent for loading “*files*!”

Review by N. Schweitzer:

After years of sticking to a single-tuner model (except for the DirecTv versions), Tivo has finally released a dual-tuner model. For the most part, the only difference between this model and previous Series 2 Tivos is the ability to record two channels at once.

The box keeps the look of the more recent series 2 Tivos, except for a black-accented faceplate. The connections in the rear are laid out largely the same as past versions, with the exception of an ethernet port that has been added for wired networking.

The software has minor changes, particularly slight modifications to the menu background images and the newer “tivo introduction skit” that appears when the tivo is powered on. The software and hardware work smoothly. There seems to be a faster processor included, as navigation through the menus is quick and smooth.

The dual-tuner functions work well. Having grown accustom to the single-tuner model, it took me some time to get used to the ability to change channels while recording (and that what is on screen is not necessarily what is being recorded). It was also pleasant to schedule 25 season passes without a single conflict-such is the benefit of being able to record two shows at once.

But the dual-tuner function needs some explanation. The people who benefit most from the DT function are those who have analog cable without a cable box (as I do). I simply plug in the coax cable into the tivo, and it is ready to go. (Note: there is only one coax input-the signal is split internally and sent to the dual tuners.) If you have a cable box or digital cable, things start to get a bit trickier. In fact, in order to use the dual-tuner feature, you MUST be able to receive at least some channels through an analog cable connection. This means that if you have purely digital cable that requires a digital cable box, you will NOT be able use the dual tuner functions, as there is only one connection allowed between the cable box and tivo. I suggest you go to tivo’s website and download the product manual for the DT tivo and read the part about connecting tivo to your cable. If it seems like too big of a hassle, you might want to wait for the series 3 tivos that will include cable-card technology (which allows you to use digital cable without the cable box).

One additional note, tivo has stopped supporting over-the-air antenna tuning with this model. If you hook up an antenna to tivo, it will only receive channels 2-13. Any broadcast channels above 13 will not be received.

And for those who are thinking of “upgrading” this tivo to a larger hard drive-the DT tivo is upgradeable in the same ways that past series 2 models were. I used the standard methods (which are published all over the internet) and replaced the 80GB hard drive with a 250GB one. Upgrading, however, voids your warranty (which is only 3 months anyway).

Overall, I am happy with the DT tivo, but that is in large part due to fact that I receive analog cable without a cable box. Many of you who have been using antennas, cable boxes or digital cable will likely be somewhat less satisfied with this model.

Review by C. Keeley:

When I received my new TiVo I rushed right in to install and play with my new “toy”. The instructions were clear and I followed them to the letter. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the second of the “dual-tuner” channels working. After many hours and much fiddling I gave up and called customer service. As it turned out my RF input was not working properly; however, I found out something extremely important. New laws require that all signals be digital beginning in 2009. Many providers are currently in the process of changing over now, and according to the customer service rep. the second channel of the “dual channel” system is analog only and therefore useless in the new digital environment. I was not made aware of this fact when I purchased the unit as it would have made a definite difference in my decision to purchase it.

Review by :

I own a Sony Sat-T60, which is the version of Sony’s Tivo unit that has the built-in DirecTV receiver. I agree completely with all the great things other people have said about Tivo, however, I have one big warning about the Sony Tivo box: the cooling fan is annoyingly noisy. It cycles on and off to keep the machine cool, and when it’s on, it’s noticeably louder than my computer. This could be a big problem for you if you’re one of those rare intellectual types who occasionally sits in a room with the TV off, perhaps to read a book purchased on Amazon.com. I called Sony to ask about the noisy fan, and they said, essentially, “Yup, it’s loud alright. Tough luck, dude.” Naturally, the sound would be muffled if you keep the box in an enclosed entertainment center, but if you don’t have such a cabinet, beware. I have also owned a Phillips Tivo w/ DirecTV and it was perfectly silent, and worked just as well as the Sony, if not better. It’s also cheaper. Get the Phillips.

Review by J. Garay:

There’s no other way to put it – I LOVE my Tivo! (Sony SVR-2000)
It has completely changed the way I watch TV and it means I can watch what I want to watch WHEN I want to watch it (and skip commercials)! While not recommended for everyone, I hacked my Tivo to be a total of 160 hours (two 80GB drives). I now have tens of shows available for watching whenever I feel like it. There’s always something on! My non-technophile wife even said that she was getting addicted to Tivo (a tremendous two-thumbs up from her!). All in all, this ranks up there on my list of all-time coolest products ever.Strengths:
- Features of the service – time shifting of programs, pause/rewind/fast-forwarding of recorded and live programs
- Hard drive access is instant – no waiting for tapes to rewind
- Ability to create a video-on-demand system
- Strong support of user community – search for “Tivo Community” on the web for more information
- Hackable!Weaknesses:
- Can be slow to load some screens
- Best if you can split your TV signal to watch something else while Tivo is recording
- Basic recording level is coarse – I recommend Medium (about 20hrs of time on the SVR-2000)

Review by D. Allen:

Despite the fact that I am very nearly the perfect customer for a DVR, I have held off the purchase of one, a decision mostly revolving around the monthly subscription fee versus the relatively few amount of things I avidly watch on television. With the brand new, subscription free, MOXI HD DVR sitting on my entertainment shelf, all that has changed … I get to watch what I want and when I want to with a much better picture quality than provided by Comcast hardware (see below) without tacking on more costs to the ever rising price of having cable in the first place.

First off, the MOXI HD DVR is very attractive box and came with a complete set of cables, many of which you may not even touch if you are using the HDMI interface. Setting up the MOXI was, overall, a painless experience, if not a little time consuming. At first boot up, the device was contacting the mothership with instructions to find any updates to the MOXI software, which it found, downloaded, and installed. One minor nitpick here is that it did not provide the unit ID that is used to register at the website until after this 30 minute process was over. It would have been nice to be registering while I was waiting for the update.

Next came the M-Card install (multi-streaming cable card, allowing dual feeds for the device), and overall, went off with relative ease, despite a little trepidation on both my part as well as the Comcast@ customer service rep. He was not familiar with the MOXI brand and we both got a little nervous when the MOXI wouldn’t recognize the card for a channel scan (but did get the card’s ID info) until the customer rep was astute enough to suggest that I remove the card and try it again while the device was powered on.

Following that, there was what I can only assume was growing pain as the MOXI took several minutes to scan the channels and then start displaying me digital gibberish (a fascinating display of colored squares from improper decoding) for a few panic filled moments before finding it’s place in the digital stream and displaying a perfectly wonderful HD image of the selected channel.

In fact, the image was so good, I started comparing it back and forth between my Comcast HD receiver unit to only confirm my suspicions, that the MOXI decodes both 4:3 content and HD content with far better quality than the Comcast unit does (which is very poorly if you ask me). Unless I am mistaken, the Comcast DVR is based on the same unit that the HD receiver is built on, so this is one place where initial price tag of the MOXI pays off.

From here, it has been a fun journey of playing with all of the features of the MOXI HD DVR, some of which are great and others are fascinatingly not very good at all. The interface overall is very nice, and more so once you get used to it. It is obvious that MOXI has taken the user interface design as a serious consideration. Recording shows and series is a breeze, playback even more so, and I love the various channel categories (all HD, all Movies, etc.), which admittedly the Comcast DVR has as well, but in a far less attractive menu system. I may have missed how to do it, but it would be great to be able to move through the channel guide display one page at a time rather than navigating one channel at a time (with hundreds of channels, I constantly use the page up and page down buttons on the Comcast remote). On that thought, I really like the MOXI remote as whole.

For the most part, recording has gone well in both standard and HD resolutions, with one exception of several playback errors encountered from a recording of Mission Impossible III (HD). At several points during the movie, it failed on the decoding of the recorded movie so badly, that it kicked me to TV once, rebooted the device once, and several times required that I attempt fast forwarding, pausing, restarting, etc. in order to get a video stream back.

Other than this yet to be repeated recording experience, most things have played back error free and with great quality. The few other errors during recording that I have encountered result in a visual line of noise at the top of the screen that looks like an old VHS tape alignment problem, but the shows themselves have been intact otherwise.

Recording series is brain dead simple and my only complaint here (and there might be a way to do this that I haven’t found) is that I find myself changing the default settings for recording a series every single time. In theory, this device is should be able to hold over a couple hundred hours of non-HD and well over a hundred of HD content, yet the series recording options are set to the almost the most spartan, space conserving settings that require you get to your recordings within a couple days. In my case, this is almost never the case and might even be a couple weeks before I have a couple hours to sit and watch some of it.

Another great feature to mention is scheduling recording from the Moxi website. I haven’t used it outside of testing, but I like the idea a great deal and bet it will be helpful the handful of times I know in advance I want to watch something, but will not be home in time to see it.

This very feature filled device would be beyond fantastic if they did one, brain numbingly obvious thing … give me access to a web browser for that love of GOD!!!! Here are a few reasons:

A> I want Pandora, not Finetunes (which I never did actually ever find a way to create a play list on … which either says I am missing something so obvious that my great intellect glanced over … heh)

B> I want Picasa slide shows, not Flickr (which also was slow and sometimes only semi-functional).

C> The big wide world of the Internet … aka … freedom of choice. DRM issues aside, it is no longer acceptable for networked devices running full PCs under the hood to try and corral me into their business partnerships.

Some might point at platform stability as good reason to avoid an open browser use on a dedicated device as the MOXI HD DVR, but one of the other problems I have encountered a couple of times is the seemingly random rebooting of the device. So, that is to say, I doubt letting me run a browser in kiosk mode and flash apps such as Pandora within would do much to make the platform less stable.

One last note worthy mention is the PCLink to Windows Media Player, which involved some voodoo to get working (even after the security changes … still uncertain what the final incantation was to make it work … might have been the chicken blood and candles), I had access to all images and audio in my desktop machine’s library (which is not much, since I use Winamp). So far, this has been a much better experience to use than Finetune or Flickr on the MOXI and I think this was a decent feature to include. As, it seems is common in the DVR world, it will not however let you playback video files over the PCLink, which is a somewhat baffling decision and one that I can only presume are related to copyright protection or the potentially problematic playback of a user’s video collection of various formats (mov, mpg, avi, mp4, divx, wmv for example) and codecs (an endless sea of possible codecs) being problematic on a black box device. Still, I would love to be able to play at least common formats, or if nothing else, divx would be a welcome standard.

I feel like I have given the MOXI HD DVR a tough time of it in this review, and this is where the rubber meets the road folks. I have no other experience with DVR’s on the market, but the MOXI has gotten me pretty hooked on the use of one. Overall, the MOXI HD DVR has been a joy to use and has been no more finicky than the Comcast HD receiver, but does provide far superior picture quality. That fact alone has me happy with the device, but the multi-stream HD DVR, absence of subscription costs, and ease of use of the MOXI makes it a product worth considering.

At a street price of around 0 and iffy, service specific side features, it is a somewhat tougher argument for the tech savvy, as building a PC based DVR system gets nothing but easier. For everyone else, the MOXI should satisfy and not having to add another monthly payment onto your ever tightening paycheck will make this unit popular for many, and in the long run will save you money despite the heavy upfront costs.

I think the MOXI folks need to do a little more finessing and re-tooling the “extra” features, but even with a steep initial investment and some quirks, I give this device a thumbs up for the DVR hungry. Just remind yourself that the lack of a monthly fee will pay off in the long run and you will enjoy your sexy new entertainment center black box!

Review by J. Crawford:

Brief:

Pros,

- DLNA support watching my divx movies, hulu, mp3s, jpgs, from my tversity box was super easy. The DLNA menu is much faster than the Xbox360 or Dlink dsm-520.

- Menu is much easier to read than the motorola or tivohd, all three used different methods for moving around. all were just as intuitive.

- 2 hour live buffer is really nice… tivo is 30min…

- compatable with 4TB eSata drive from lacie. Tivo maxes out at 2TB total storage regardles of how it is installed.

- Ticker is kind of like a widget, nice. also there is a webpage display but it is currently really slow… could easily be a bug though. (you can view web pages from the moxi)

- worked right away after upgrading channel lineup. (the tivo required me to manually add the new premium channels)

- Just a response to other reviews as of july 10th when i recieved this box I have had no crashing, and my recorded content is flawless. Also the remote is indeed backlit.

Cons:

- Tivo has a much better search, smarter more intuitive.

- box to box streaming and box to pc streaming need to be fixed.

- moxi mate needs to be released.

- no discount for second/third box.

- streaming HD from netflix/unbox/blockbuster

All of the cons listed are being addressed by moxi and they expect all of them to be released this year… (with the exception of dlna 2.0 streaming to a pc client.)

I purchased the moxi and tivo HDXL the same day within 4 days I had both units at home waiting for cable cards. Fios tech came out only had one card and installed it in the tivo so I used the tivo for 4 days before another tech could come out and set up the moxi. he had not seen a moxi and after showing him the cablecard pairing screen he was able to get the box running in 20 minutes. both tivo and moxi were effertless in there set up on fios.

After using them side by side for 3 weeks I decided to send back the tivo for most of the reasons listed above but also my tivo crashed on me twice and stayed locked up not recording anything. I would really like to see the search and schedule features brought up to tivo level, and of course the box2box and live tv streaming would be nice. one note on box to box… some tivo content can not be transfered if there are 5c flags due to the transfer method of tivo not being encrypted. Moxi uses a dlna 2.0 copy method so that no transfers will be blocked.

I would highly recomend this product to anyone looking for a DVR and want more open standards. Especially if you are already used to streaming from dlna product like tversity, playon or twonky. Also being able to have 4.5TB of recordings

UPDATE: Moxi summer software update added support for native mkv and avi files. This is great for streaming from a pc no more need to transcode.

Also moxi to moxi and moxi to mate streaming is working great. and lastly digeo has test esata drives up to 8 TB from lacie and verified they work with the moxi (those drives are currently close to 00 though…

Review by William Kasting:

First, I need to inform you that all of my home television programming comes from an antenna on my roof. No cable or satellite whatsoever.

When the Series 3 debuted earlier this year, I contacted TiVo about recording two HD channels at the same time from an antenna and was told that would not occur. That one would be in HD and the other in standard definition. That, along with the price made me pass on this unit.

When the TiVo HD came along, I contacted TiVo again and was told by one technician that it WOULD record two HD shows and by another that it would not. With the cheaper price, I decided to give it a try and am glad that I did so.

I am happy to report that this unit will definitely record two high definition programs at the same time from an antenna. No splitters, amplifiers or other hardware. Just plug it into the Antenna connector on back of the box.

Setup and activation was easy. The most difficult part was figuring out the maze of cables behind my TV and Stereo amplifier, but that is hardly TiVo’s fault. I already had it set up when I called to activate the box. When I got off the phone and turned it on, it was ready to download the Guide. Very hassle free.

The remote, while nothing fancy, has a good layout of buttons and is programmable so that it will turn my TV on and allow me to change its inputs while the volume and mute buttons control my amplifier. About the only other thing I need for it to do is actually turn the stereo on. But getting up once to turn on the stereo is a small price to pay for being able to record HD programs and pause live TV.

On some forums users have been reporting macro-blocking and pixelation when using some cable cards. I have no experience with that, but can report that I have not seen this problem using an antenna. In fact, I see no difference at all in the quality of the broadcast than I did when the signal went directly to my television.

After a bit over a week’s use I have no complaints at all with the product or service and would recommend it to others.

Review by Daniel C. Hatfield:

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1OPZD59RUSO2 TiVo TCD652160 HD Digital Video Recorder: Complete, hands on video review of the new TiVo HD box. Includes set up, scheduling and recording programs, watching Live TV, broadband extras such as Rhapsody, and Amazon unbox. Brought to you by The Digital Lounge (www.TheDigitalLounge.com). Please rate and comment on this video. Your feedback is appreciated!

Review by john@ez-mtg.com:

I’ve been thinking about getting a Tivo or ReplayTV for about a year and finally got a ReplayTV 5040. Here’s my opinion:Price: With two mail-in rebates my final cost was 9. This is a lot of technology for 9!Quality: The box is well built and solid. There’s a big fan to keep it cool. The choices of inputs and outputs is complete. You can fit this device into any home threater system any way you want. I have a 36″ HDTV and have this connected using S-video. I tried composite video and it was slightly worse. I didn’t try the component video outputs.Setup: Setup was easy but did take a while over a cable modem connection. During the setup it seemed to update the operating system which took about 25 minutes. Total setup was about 40 minutes. I don’t know how long it would take over the built-in modem.Recording: The programming guide is easy to use and setting things to record is straight forward. I only record at high quality so I only get about 10 hours of recording time.Picture Quality: The picture is acceptable but not as good as the direct feed to the TV. When you watch a show throught the ReplayTV you are ALWAYS watching the recorded version. There is about a 1 second delay between the “live” picture throught the ReplayTV and the “live” feed from the cable company. This is what allows you to pause and rewind a live TV show. Because you’re watching a recorded version of the show and the recording is digitized and compressed the picture quality is slightly worse than the original. I find the colors to be a little washed out. Customer Support: EXCELLENT! I was worried about calling tech support when the IR Blaster couldn’t change the single digit channels on my cable box but was pleasantly surprised when my hold time was less than 2 minutes both times I had to call. The fix was simple but undocumented in the manual or on their web site. To get to the advanced settings for the IR Blaster you have to press the “Zones” button when the list of codes for your cable box appears on the screen. This lets you set certain properties of the IR Blaster like the minimum number of digits to send to the cable box. It was sending a “2″ for channel 2 and I needed it to send an “02″. Bumping the minimum digits to 2 fixed the problem. I also got a tip from their tech to put all zeros in the delay boxes to speed up channel changing which is fairly slow. Changing the delays to “0000″ helps slightly.I like this better than Tivo. This thing is light years ahead of an old VCR!

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Hi everyone. I had hoped that when I bought my ReplayTV 5040 that it would work fine. BUZZZ-wrong answer. It died on me about 6 weeks after I bought it. (Infinite reboot problem) Alright, no big deal, I’ll just send it back. On January 27th I called technical support and after some troubleshooting and it was determined that I had to send it in. I was told that I would have a new unit 10 days after they got my unit. I sent it in and UPS delivered it to ReplayTV on January 31st. It was delivered at 10:09 AM and signed for by “Cooper.”

Two weeks later I sent an email to technical support asking for a status report. No response. Two more days went by and I sent another email to which they replied with this cryptic quote: “Your RMA is in process and will be fulfilled as soon as possible.” Not very helpful. After patiently waiting for nearly a month, on or around February 27th I decided that I should try to give someone a call, so I called in and they had no record of my unit or even me! The guy finally said he would have to put me on hold. I held for over 30 minutes and then got sent into his voice mail. I immediately called back and had to tell my story all over again. The new person I talked to was very polite, found my information and said she would “escalate my case.” Great, I thought, finally! After more discussion she said I should have my unit very soon. I told her that I would like a confirmation email when the unit was shipped.March 6th rolls around and I still have not heard anything from anyone at SonicBlue so I called in again. This time I got a man who was sorry to hear about my case after I told him the story. This time he gave me a case number and told me the he would “escalate” my case to the supervisory level. I told him that I though that had already been done! He told me that it should now get some high level action. I ask him to send me an email when the unit has been shipped.Today is March 11th and I since I haven’t received an email, I decide to call tech support and see if they can give me a status report. I happen to talk to the same woman that I spoke to on February 27th. She apologizes to me and says that my case has been “escalated to a higher level” and that she will check with her supervisor for the status. After about 10 minutes she gets back on the phone and tells me that her supervisor told her that the unit should have been shipped, but that they don’t know for sure. (At this point I am taking everything they say with a grain of salt!) She suggests that I call back in two days and they should be able to tell me for sure if the unit has shipped.That is where things stand right now. I can’t say that I can give any advice based on this report, but I thought people should be aware of the situation.
————–Epilogue: The day after I posted the above review I had an email exchange with other people at SonicBlue and they sent me a new unit 2nd day FedEx. Once I got to the right people they were very responsive.