Asymmetrical Information

The Tivo people couldn't buy copy like that. They should send you royalties.

Replay does everything you say Tivo does except it doesn't give suggestions. Additional benefits of the Replay include 30-second commercial skip button and NO ADS while you are in pause mode. Also, they don't aggregate and sell your data.

Good article though. I might go buy a mixer. And your cranberry recipe from pre-Thanksgiving was the hit of my feast.

Its knot that your knot a good righter; ewe are. That's why eye and sew many others reed you're blog. Its just that sometimes ewe confuse homonyms like its and it's.

oh, one other thing about the Replay which the Tivo might or might not also have is the "screensaver" where you can upload your own pictures. I love having my daughter's 100 best photos on a slide show. It's very cute.

I feel as passionate about DVR tech as you do. They'll have to pry my Replay from my cold, dead hands. Damn, I love that thing.

Far better ad copy for Tivo than I've ever see them produce for themselves, and I speak as a Tivo shareholder.

But I concerned about their current plan to introduce pop-up ads that appear during fast forwarding. Not only will this piss off consumers, it will make TV advertisers hate them (Tivo) even more than they already do...

I've got a Replay and two Tivos, and I like the Tivos better. They do have a 30-second skip, it's just an undocumented feature that you get through the grapevine like the Animal Style burger at In-and-Out. The sequence is select - play - select - 30 - select. The Tivo season pass is more powerful than the Replay way of recording every show by time slot, because shows move sometimes, and the wish list feature is also very very good.

The best thing about Tivo compared to Replay however is the video quality you get with the DirecTV combo unit, which takes MPEG off the air and records it on disk with no loss of quality at all. And dual tuners is also nice.

There's a lot of room for improvement in Tivo, but it's considerably better than the alternatives.

How did your Tivo die? If the hard drive failed, you can easily replace it with another one and bring your Tivo back to life.

If the circuit board fried, however... Well, I hear the coloring of the new Tivos is quite snazzy!

you know... one can build their own dvr machine (essentially just a very small pc with a big hard drive), download FREE softwere off the internet, and say goodbye to subscription fees and pop-ups. they come with remote controls, fit in your t.v. cabinets, and can be used as a second p.c. when you're not watching the boob tube. you can even use some parts from an old p.c. that's getting ready for the scrap heap...recycling for the entertainment junkie...

I love my TiVo too. I don't think I could live without it. If I had to choose between my Husband and my TiVo...I'd pick my husband, but only if he agreed to spend his days sitting by the VCR collecting programs for me to watch.

henry: I still don't think putting together a DVR from a PC is anywhere near as easy and straightforward as buying a TiVo, especially if you want to talk about free DVR software, but if you have any suggestions or guides I welcome being proven wrong.

The true advantage of TiVo has basically been that the interface and overall design of the unit is so good that it's totally accessible.

Henry, if you're skilled enough to put together your own DVR, you should be earning enough to buy all the gismos you want.

Just another shot at Henry's comment, from someone who is more than capable of doing all that he described: In the real world, average people neither have, nor WANT, the ability to do so. Seriously. You might find one or two potential converts here and there, but people who know how to build a DVR device or other variant of Home Theater PC are usually already doing exactly that. The rest want a fire-and-forget device like the Tivo.

I own a RePlay 5060, and love it. The main reason I bought it over Tivo was that at the time Tivo couldn't get program guides any way other than via modem, and since I don't have a land phone line, it would render the Tivo useless. I believe Tivo now can get the guides via a broadband connection

One of the things I really like about RePlay, though, is an opensource program called DVArchive. It's Java based, so it will run on anything, and it sets your computer up as a virtual RePlay, letting you save shows to your PC and then stream them back to the RePlay, or save them as MPEG's.

I'm pretty sure the RePlay does the transparent guide thing, although I never watch TV anymore. Because I have an older model, it also has the automatic commercial skip feature that newer RePlay's don't.

I too have a Rio Karma and it is simply THE BEST HANDS DOWN. You should add that it plays every format, is compatible with every on-line music download service (that I have tried at least), it updates its software automatically, it allows you to use it as an extra hard drive for files, etc etc etc.

allright- it's not as easy as walking down to the local megamart and buying one, but it is an interesting option- especially when you consider that you can put as many or as few features you want in it (including things tivo can't do).
but i do concede that it is not for the average couch potato...

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