You all always seem to be a very intellegent bunch and have all the greatest gadgets so I figured you'd be the ones to ask this. Football season is starting and I work sundays so im gonna be missing most of the games so I was thinking of getting one of those units to record them (sick of vcrs and tapes crappy quality) and was wondering if you all could tell me in your opinion which one is best and why. Thanks!

Do you have direct tv ?

If you have cable you may want to see if they offer a PVR. While it probably wouldn't be as good as a tivo/replay but you could try it and see if you want a PVR or not.

I have been using Tivo for many years and currently have a 60 hour series 2 I did try a Replay TV for a short time.

What I did not like about the Replay TV was I want to be able to tell it to record a show evertime it is on regardless of what time or channel and it would not do this.

The things I liked better about the Replay were that it was much faster (tivo can be painfully slow going through menus) and it is very easy to extract the shows thanks to DVarchive.

You may want to do a search there have been many threads on this topic.

What I did not like about the Replay TV was I want to be able to tell it to record a show evertime it is on regardless of what time or channel and it would not do this.

This is not true. I would not want a non-DirecTV customer to ignore ReplayTV because of this statement. With a ReplayTV, you must set up a Theme Channel recording in order to do this. Unfortunately, theme based recordings are "less important" than all other recording types. Thus, if the theme recording and one of your normally scheduled recordings conflict, the theme will not record.

I've only got a TiVo as ReplayTV doesn't exist over here but I'm pretty happy with the TiVo. Installed a bigger HD and a cachecard and it's great. Loads of storage and fast. All these addons together mean that it's quite expensive tho.

I don't have a ReplayTV (cannot hack it for use here in NZ) so I can't comment on that..
But TiVo ahhh bliss.... 700hrs recording time, cache card, tivoweb, and resolving conflicts between networked TiVo's..

Well no I do not have Direct TV. Have considered upgrading to our local cable companys digital cable tho (just have standard right now). Never really liked the idea of the dish cause in storms you loose or get crappy reception. I noticed something on the tivo site about season passes where youget the entire season of a show. that seems like a cool idea. there are a couple shows I could use something like that for. for their service can I hook it up to my DSL instead of my phone? Do you even need to hook them up for an outside connection? ive been trying to find the time to read thru all the stuff on their sites, but i find it better to get outside opinions on em cause their web sites are gonna try and make it look better then it is. Thanks for all the replys.

Well when I had the replay if I told it to record a show everytime it was one it would only record it when it was on at the time and channel I picked when I set up the recording. If I did a theme then I wouldn't be guaranteed that the show would get recorded.

I guess that I don't think that is the same as record it everytime it's on.

If you had direct tv tivo has a unit that replaces the driect tv tuner and will record two channels at once that's why I asked.

With the Tivo series two you can get a usb to ethernet adaptor and connect it to your network to get updates over the internet. The Replay comes with ethernet built in.

With the Tivo you can set it to record a show everytime it's one, everytime there is a new episode or everytime it's on including repeats. You can also tell it what shows you like and it trys to find other shows you may like and records them when it's not doing anything.

I set a season pass for shows I don't want to miss and give thumbs up to shows I like but don't care about missing then I always have something I like recorded.

Well when I had the replay if I told it to record a show everytime it was one it would only record it when it was on at the time and channel I picked when I set up the recording.
This is because you didn't set up the record as a Theme.

If I did a theme then I wouldn't be guaranteed that the show would get recorded.
Themes are not guaranteed because episodes of shows that a Theme would record could easily conflict with other recordings you have scheduled. This could make it too easy to miss a first-run episode of a show in favor of the Theme recording a repeat of something else you've already seen.

The point I'm trying to make is that stand alone ReplayTV and stand alone TiVo are essentially equal; they simply have different names for features and different looks. The only one-up TiVo has on ReplayTV is with DirecTV.

I did try the themes but as you said that doesn't guarantee the show will be recorded.

If I go and find when the show is on and tell it to record everytime the show is on then if the shows time changes it won't get recorded. With the tivo I just pick the show tell it to record it everytime it's on and that's it I don't have to worry about it getting moved or when it's on.

Like mythbusters for instance discovery moves it around all the time so if I told it to record everytime it's on I would have to keep redoing it everytime the show moves. If I did a theme then it wouldn't always get recorded.

Most of the stuff I watch is on cable and they tend to rearrange the show times often so maybe it woudn't be a problem if I watched the networks.

My thoughts:

- If you have standard cable now, and want to upgrade to anything at all, I would not recommend digital cable. As far as I've seen (and your mileage may vary), I get absolutely terrible signal on my Cox digital cable. The quality is terrible. Yes, our satellite goes out in heavy rain, but it's worth it when it does work, and having dual tuners is worth it as well. However if you have multiple Tivos in your home, the dual tuners become less of an issue with conflict resolving and program sharing.

- I recently notice that you can get an SA Series 2 Tivo at Best Buy of all places for $89. That's for the 40 hour.

- upgrading Tivos is a piece of cake. Instantcake, actually. I recently used that program and it was so easy, it took a mere 10 minutes of work to go from 35 to 114 hours.

- I happen to think that the experience of using a Tivo is unsurpassed.

- switching from phone line to network on the Tivo is actually really simple (despite what many Replay people often say). No, there's no built-in ethernet, but all you need is one of any number of USB>ethernet adapters and you're set. Alternately, you can attatch something like a Linksys WUSB11 to connect to your wireless network. After the hardware is set up, a simple change in the dialing prefix sets you up to get the program guide info from over the network.

- oh, and soon Tivo will have a program where you can send recorded programs to your PC where you can watch them or record them to DVD (or it may have already started...)

I have Comcast cable where I live. they keep pushing us to try their digital cable. they keep removing good channels from the basic cable so eventually will have to go to digital. If I had a single tivo could I record one channel while watching another? Or do I need two for that? I noticed alot of sites about how easy it is to upgrade the tivo. That was a big selling point for me. buy the cheaper one and upgrade it my self. I do have a wireless network so the linksys wusb11 would be the way I would go. was going to ask about that next. From what i have read the tivo can only handle 160gig drives except for the direct tv one i believe. Is this true? Thanks again everyone for your insight. this is very helpful.

You cannot record one channel and watch another with the stand alone tivo but you can watch a recorded show and record another. I have mine record pretty much everything I want to watch and then watch it from the tivo. That way I can skip the commercials.

The older standalone Series 2 Tivo's (running 4.x software) can't be made to work with a LBA48 kernel. The newer versions (which appear to be silver in color) run 5.x software, and come installed with an LBA48-compatible kernel from the factory.

--Dan.

I've used both and vastly prefer TiVo. I could explain why but this comparison does it for me:

http://pvrcompare.com/tivoreplayframe.html

Edit: It appears that Replay finally got rid of the terrible guaranteed/non-guaranteed model and does it's space management more like TiVo now. That's a definite improvement but it still doesn't have a To-Do list or exposed priority list for recurring recordings. I consider these absolute necessities, especially on a single tuner recorder.

Thank you for that link that was very informitive. based on that I think I would go with the TiVo, only problem I saw tho is it said comcast wants to make you use their DVR. I hate that crap. let me use what I want to.

The only difficulty might be if you get digital cable, you'll have a box that'll need to be controlled by the Tivo. If there isn't a serial port on the back of the cable box, you'll need to use the IR repeater, which really slows down simple things like channel changing. This isn't a fault of Tivo, I'm just bringing it up. If the box does have serial inputs, then that has worked really well in my experience, and fast.

Ugh, just called comcast and they said their digital box doesnt have a serial port, only can be controled by IR. That sux.

I still prefer ReplayTV for the following reasons:

1. Speed. I can quickly see what is on, what is in my saved shows, and navigate the menus.
2. No need to hack the box. If I want more storage, I plop a new hard drive in my computer and let DVArchive pull shows off the Replay nightly. I then just stream them back over the network to the ReplayTV. No need to add ethernet, no need to hack the unit, no need to void the warranty.
3. Internet show sharing. I know Tivo just got permission, but I've been enjoying it for months now with a few friends.
4. Commercial skip. True, the 5500 lacks auto commercial skip now, but it's one button press on the 5500 to skip the commercials. My 5000 and the 4500 do it automaticially.

If I ever get a second ReplayTV, number 5 would be the network conflict resolutuion where the second unit records what the first one can't, and allows the show to be played on either unit.

Oh, regarding "rain fade" with dish service. As I have said elsewhere, I have noticed signal loss on Dish Network 3 times since I have had them. I started service in 1999, and 2 of the losses were due to too much snow on the dish. Deicer works great to prevent this. Only once has a rain storm managed to knock out service, and it disrupted the show for maybe 5 minutes.

Part of it might be my elevation, since it has 7,000 feet less to go through.

I wish I could see the boxes that Comcast gives you. I wasn't able to find any technical info on them. Tivo has, I believe, 3 types of serial connections that will work, but it wouldn't suprise me if Comcast is trying to push their own technology. They're big on their "On Demand" service, which sounds really cool in theory, but I have a friend with the service, and he says it only works about 25% of the time.

I don't think that the tivo will only run one cable cable box with the serial. I use the IR blaster with mine and it works fine. If you want to flip channels it is way too slow but I almost always watch shows recorded on the tivo and if I want to browse what is on I just use the tivo guide.

Many cable systems and all satellite systems have dedicated boxes that are required to get any sort of useful signal. If one's system is like that, then you can only record or live-view one thing at a time. You could bypass the DVR and watch something that doesn't require the box, but this is likely to be nearly nothing.

If you have a cable system that doesn't require a box or if for some reason you can actually receive a decent number of channels at good quality over the air, then you can certainly view something other than what the DVR is viewing, but in my experience, such setups have always been uncommon and are only getting rarer.

I don't think Replay has any kind of Wish List function either. Wish lists let you select a particular actor, keyword, title word... and it will automatically record anything that is a match. For instance instead of a regular season pass, which is channel and show based, I use a wishlist for the title "STARGATE SG-1". This picks up Stargate no matter what channel it is on. It works well for those shows that are being used to fill in odd programming gaps.

Search your favorite search engine for TivoToGo.