 I purchased this 80 hour ReplayTV because I am sic ... Strengths: Ability to record by finding the show in the channel guide and pressing the record button. 30-second commercial skip is great and quality on the high quality setting is decent.
Weaknesses: Glorified VCR, no dual tuners, myreplay.com website is worthless, $13 a month is a little steep for how much the hardware cost, read description for others.
Summary: 2004-05-26 21:29:13 I purchased this 80 hour ReplayTV because I am sick of using video tapes that degrade in quality everytime I use them, but I am not ready to pay for DVDs yet. After attaching the ReplayTV to my hometheater I was pretty happy with the way it looked and how easy it was to connect. This is where my disappointments begin because I set my expectations too high.
After hooking it up messed around with it before connecting to the service to download anything. A message bugged me everytime I tried to get into the menu saying "Don't forget to register". The playback quality was pretty horrible with black in the picture. Black didn't seem to be a color, it was an absence of color which made dark scenes hard to see. This was corrected by the software updates. Changing the channel is a long process for a channel flipper because it takes 3 seconds from a button push to the actual picture popping up. This may not seem like a long time, but you miss the old way soon enough.
I subscribed to the ReplayTV service and was charged a partial month since they like to charge everyone at the beginning of a month. No problems there.
I started to record my first show and to my dismay I was not able to record a show and watch a live show at the same time. I could only record a show and watch a pre-recorded show or the show that I was recording in delay. I looked up in the manual how to watch and record two seperate shows and in the manual tells you to turn off your ReplayTV and use your TV's tuner to watch the second show! (just like a VCR!). You also cannot record two shows that are on at the same time. This could be fixed with 2 tuners, but ReplayTV decided that your $230 to $330 (and $13 a month) for an 80 hour is not enough for another tuner.
80 hours is only 80 hours in the lowest quality setting. You get about 26 hours in the highest setting which is decent for viewing in a TV 27" or larger.
Myreplaytv.com is where you can go to set up your replay tv over the internet. Good idea, bad implementation. Even if you are connected to a cable or DSL modem, the ReplayTV only connects once every 24 hours so you can't record something that is going to come on in the next day through the ReplayTV. The site has been down a few times that I have tried to access it, the channel guide is only one week from what I have seen, and site often doesn't work when you want to record something.
All in all, I wouldn't buy one of these again, but being an active person I miss too much of the shows I love and I will keep it around. I am one of the few people that can get away with only having one tuner because I don't watch barely any live TV and I don't record more than a 10 shows a week. Anyone who watches live TV a lot or wants to record a decent amount of shows will still have to choose between shows (something I thought the ReplayTV was supposed to correct).
EDIT: Decided to return the unit because it did not work for what I needed it to, suggestion for ReplayTV: 2 Tuners
I will see what I can do to return the unit through the seller since I didn't buy directly from ReplayTV.
If you purchase one of these, make sure that you do not activate the unit until you have tried it out for the 7 day period. Also, make sure that you read and follow the seller's return guidelines because the ReplayTV.com "30-day guarantee" only applies to purchases from their website only.
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