all network-ready home entertainment

I picked up a ReplayTV for $150 in a major big-box retailer. The signs were CLEARLY posted about the $12/month service fee. I easily set up my unit, used customer support a few times, which was very helpful, and have the entire system up and ready to go in about 2 hours. It's awesome, and I saved over 1 hour of time watching a football game due to skipping commercials!

The recording features are fantastic, and I'm going to buy another one for the bedroom so I can shuffle video around the house.

Connect hte ReplayTV to your computer and you can send photographs to ReplayTV and display them on your TV screen. Very cool.

Also, you can record movies and burn them onto DVDs on your computer. Again, very, very cool!

ReplayTV can be plugged into a phone line or a typical "ethernet" type of cord (if you have high speed internet).

Make sure to plug the IR blaster all the way in. My remote appeared to not work due to the plug not being all the way in.

Simply put, this machine with this capability is amazing. It's going to change the way I watch TV, and I am very happy with the price of $150 with some extra monthly service.

29 Days.. that is how long our 80 hour replay tv unit lasted. Set it up on April 9 and on May 8th we came home to find it stuck on the 'Please wait one moment' screen. Since the 8th was a Saturday, ReplayTv's customer support was not open. After extensive research on the internet we believed the problem to be hard drive failure, and apparently fairly common. On Monday a call to ReplayTv's support group confirmed it was HD failure and we were told to return it to the point of purchase (Amazon.com in our case)

We had already signed up for the lifetime subscription. In order to get a refund you must submit to Replay proof that the item was sent back. Amazon's return system is automated, and since it was 1 day out of the 30 day return time (from waiting the weekend) I couldn't print the shipping label from the Amazon website. A call to amazon fixed that.. but the whole refund process took several weeks for both companies, numerous phone calls and was a huge hassle.

After having the unit for a month we were really hooked, and I can honestly say it changed the way we watched tv. It was great to be able to sit down and watch the things we enjoyed, without being subject to what was on at the moment. So when it broke, it was very frustrating to not only be without the unit, but to have lost all of the shows that were on the drive.

Outside of this problem we had some difficulties setting the unit up, that to this day we still don't know what the problem was. Calling customer support was of no help. They were clearly going through a script, that had no relationship to the problem we were having.

Once up and running, we found it very easy to use and reliable, although the search function was limited. The best example I can think of is that a search for 'Law and Order' did not turn up all or even most instances - and there is no '&' on the onscreen keyboard. Searches must exactly match the title in the listing and keyword or partial matches are not possible.

We spent alot of time reviewing and comparing different units prior to making this purchase. Picture quality was very important - the picture on even the low and middle settings is very good. Also important too us was that Replay units have component video (and composite and S-video) where Tivo only has S-video and composite. Replay's have built in ethernet (you need to buy an adapter for Tivo), and until recently Tivo charged for the 'Home media option' which has always been free on Replay.

Personally, I was upset that the unit didn't even last 30 days and that this was a common problem. One that you can cure yourself by hacking it, but it voids the warranty, which I couldn't justify because the warranty wasn't up. Add to that the lousy customer service and their lousy hours. So we are going to try a Tivo unit.. the selling point for us being that for $150 they will replace the unit if it breaks after the warranty period, they have better support hours and the some of the user features are better. We will miss the component video though :)

I only have one complaint and that is when you hook up with DishNetwork you have to make sure that your ReplayTV doesn't go to a channel that you don't subscribe to because the ReplayTV won't be able to switch away from it. But I've been able to avoid the problem and have been a big fan of it since. I have it networked with my brother's ReplayTV and we can use both to record and I can watch my brothers recorded shows through my box. Pretty cool.

Set up isn't too difficult, and barring any whacky issues you can be up and running in less than 10min.

Subscription is still cheaper than Tivo, but I don't know how long ReplayTV will be around. I'm not saying it is a bad company, I just see Tivo commercials more than ReplayTV.

I haven't had a problem with it but....I hope ReplayTV would make a change so you don't have to use the Infrared blaster to change channels on DishNetwork boxes. Hopefully they'll make a back of the box wired connection for it in the future.

I recommend this box.