ReplayTV.com has Refurb Replay TV units with a lifetime subscription for pretty cheep. Toss in coupon code RTVD10 for an additional 10% off.

After borrowing one from a friend, I have now ordered one of my own. As far as I am concerned, there are tapeless VCR devices, then there are true DVR/PVRs like the Replay. I've set mine up to record several of the ReplayZones so that I have miscalenous content any time to watch, either via my TV, or at my computer. All with no hacks to the unit.

I've got one of the first from this refurbished deal, and I can't say enough good things about it. DVArchive turns your computer into another PVR on the network for storage/viewing, so that you can transfer shows to your computer, and store them there. There's no need to try and cram 2 hot drives in the PVR, or break your waranty seal.

Make sure you buy a 5000 series machine, as it's still getting software upgrades. For any of you on the edge, buy now before they run out and start selling machined without Comerical Advance (brilliant) and Internet Show Shareing (pretty useless).

Matthew

US only, I assume?

as it's still getting software upgrades.

Has the channel change speed improved?

Internet Show Shareing (pretty useless).

The people at PlanetReplay.com would disagree. The usefulness of this hits home when the power/kid/other factor cancells your recording of a favorite show, and a quick post to a BBS can ensure you end up seeing it.

The commercial skip is amazing though. Not flawless, but in many cases it does very well. I paused a movie the other day (not on a movie channel) to get something to eat, and came back, and watched the rest of it with no commercial interruptions.

And DVArchive, well, will probably make me run out and buy another huge hard drive for my server, so I can archive all my shows onto it.

I honestly have no idea. I've never changed the channel on it in the sense that you're asking about. 80% of the time I'm watching recorded shows, and when I'm watching something live, it's something I actually want to watch. If comericals come on, you pause them and give it a head start while reading the empeg board on your laptop.

It does actually have an interesting chanel surfing alternative, where you can press the up/down keys while watching a show and scroll through the guide to see what else is on in a transparent overlay at the top of your screen. If you want to switch to that show, you press select and it changes.

Matthew

Ok, unfortunatly, I don't have a karma so I don't own the worlds-coolest-stopwatch and am trying to time this with my computer clock, but I'd say chanel changes take 3, maybe 4 secconds at the most. If chanel changes are the only thing holding you back, don't let them.

Matthew

Damn you! Now i must decide between a Donato Tivo (tm) and a Replay! Grrr.

Couldn't pass this one up. Ordered a 5060. Pushes me back a few months for the Karma, but that's probably a good thing, as I always seem to buy things right before they go down in price.

Just to expand on the coolness of DVArchive, and the reason I really like the ReplayTV unit over others. I can keep an archive of all my favorite shows, and play them back on the ReplayTV as if they were on the local hard drive. No fussing with archiving, then deciding how to watch them on the big TV in the living room.

Damn you! Now i must decide between a Donato Tivo (tm) and a Replay! Grrr.

It's really a simple descision in my mind. If you've got directv, you get a directivo. If you don't, you get a replay. If you don't have a home network of any kind, then a tivo would also be acceptable. Being able to dump your favorite shows to your computer, or even stream them to your computer makes it an easy choice*. Any tivo owners care to share a less one sided view?

Matthew

*Streaming isn't perfect yet. It does stream, it does fast forward/rewind, but you can't arbitrarily jump and it doesn't resume where you left off when you switch to your computer. These are of course, being worked on.

Any tivo owners care to share a less one sided view?

I agree with what you just said.

Although, with a bit of hacking, you can extract shows from your TiVo. I am also now under the impression that extraction is working with Series 2 TiVos. I don't know if that's just SA or DirecTiVo also.

Ordered a 5060. Pushes me back a few months for the Karma, but that's probably a good thing, as I always seem to buy things right before they go down in price.

Good choice. You won't regret it. If you do, you can always sell it for close to what you paid for it. Besides, you want to wait for the karma to have that Cool Unannounced Feature that some of us learned about at the dinner with mschrag, which rumor has it might take a few more months to get through quality control.

Matthew

Good choice. You won't regret it. If you do, you can always sell it for close to what you paid for it.

Yeah, maybe more. They're going for around $150 without activation on EBay. $150 + $250 = $400... So seems to me if I don't like it for some reason, I should be able to get my $363 back at least.

Matthew, I couldn't tell, but is that with a sat. input or a cable input? I've never had a lag that long on cable, and actually, I have my Tivo controlling a sat. box via serial and it still doesn't take that long.

When it comes down to it, I say it's subjective. I tried both systems out, I loved the Tivo. Go to Best Buy and try them both out.

Yes, Tivo has video extraction...sort of. It gets better all the time, though. I'm still waiting for the day when I can take it off the unit, easily edit out the commercials, and burn it to DVD, all using one program (maybe not the burning part). Are you able to edit out the ads from Replay after you've extracted them?

In reply to:

---

Any tivo owners care to share a less one sided view?

---

Did I hear someone call for a TiVo zealot?

The most important capability of a PVR is the scheduling engine. Networking capabilities and other such features are gravy, IMO, and are only valuable if the thing records the programs you want it to record.

Replay's scheduling engine has been fundamentally flawed since day one. It's crazy complicated and simply doesn't do what you want it to. Version 5 of the Replay software looks like if finally gets rid of some of the more stupid things like the guaranteed recordings. But it still lags way behind TiVo.Here is a great comparison. Particularly pay attention to sections 13-16.

-Dylan

That's with standard cable. The 5000 series is known for taking too long to change chanels, but as I said it doesn't really matter to me.

I used a tivo once before I bought my replay. Not long enough to really catch the tivo addiction, and when I found a used showstopper for $125, it was an easy choice. Now of course, things have spiraled out of control, and I've had the orginal showstopper stolen, replaced with with ReplayTV 2020(same machine, replay instead of panasonic), and replaced the 2020 with the 5040.

The third party app to remove comericals just came out. At the moment, it's just a command line utility that chops out anything comercial advance said was a comercial. CA is known for being great but not perfect, so what would be nice is a program that played the 10 secconds surounding a transition and let you decide and/or move the boundries.

Matthew

CA is known for being great but not perfect,

I agree, I generally leave it on when I'm watching shows but definately turn it off when I'm watching a movie recorded on HBO. Sometimes it'll skip part of the movie thinking there is a commercial when obviously there wasn't. No big deal though; just mash the "autoskip" button to toggle it on or off..

... you want to wait for the karma to have that Cool Unannounced Feature that some of us learned about at the dinner with mschrag

I take it this CUF is an NDA kinda thing?

Actualy, one of the empeg guys mentioned it on slashdot. I just didn't want to be the first. Mschrag is writing the java applet that comes up when you go to the web interface, and it's all based on the Jemplode code.

Matthew

Ordered a 5060.
I understand that these units really contain 80GB drives, and so are a match for the 5080's. I've read that, originally, these were sold by Costco, and they simply had a 60GB partition set up on the drive. So, if you've no qualms about voiding any warranty that you may have, you can crack it open and reimage the drive to use that extra space.

Check out AVSForum's ReplayTV section and The ReplayTV FAQ for more information.

*Streaming isn't perfect yet. It does stream, it does fast forward/rewind, but you can't arbitrarily jump and it doesn't resume where you left off when you switch to your computer. These are of course, being worked on.

I haven't had a problem using any of these functions while streaming a show from my computer to my 5040 using DVArchive. I can say nothing of streaming from one ReplayTV to another, though, because I only have one at the moment.

I've got a series 1 UK TiVo and I can extract stuff off it easily. You just need to install the TurboNet card into the Tivo and then the tyStudio software on your PC and Tivo. It's all point and click after that. You select the show you want from your PC and it'll download it, reencode if you require it and that's it.

I've got a single 120GB drive in there at the moment and I'm considering uploading a new kernel with the LBA48 (I believe it's actually using Mark Lord's patch to get LBA48 on 2.2.x kernels actually) so I can get a 250GB or 300GB drive. I've expanded the RAM on the Tivo as well but I've not noticed much difference...

Are you able to edit out the ads from Replay after you've extracted them?

Many people have done so with many different utilities, and burned the results to VCD or DVD. I'm not certain if there is a certain method that is the easiest or the cheapest (i.e., free utilities), because it's not an ability that I'm very interested in. For more information, you can ask questions here or search the ReplayTV FAQ.

...and then the tyStudio software on your PC and Tivo.

Have you used TyTool? That is what I have been using until I allowed my SAT-T60 upgrade to Ver.3. Since then, I haven't relaoded any hacks (or checked if they survived the upgrade).

Can you compare TyStudio to TyTool?

I haven't had a problem using any of these functions while streaming a show from my computer to my 5040 using DVArchive.

Quite right. I should have clarified, that's with streaming from the replay to the computer. If you want to watch shows off of your DVArchive server on your replay, it works perfectly. Streaming shows from the replay to watch on a computer is the part DVArchive doesn't have down perfectly, but improvements are in the pipeline.

Matthew

I've only used an early version of TyTool but I think they're pretty similar in installation and operation. You have to install a server on the Tivo to do the indexing and streaming of the MFS streams and you get a utility to run on your PC that does the rest. Actually using the utility on the PC is similar according to the forums.

To be honest, I usually don't extract stuff off the Tivo. Most of the stuff I record isn't particularly important and if I run out of space then I just delete older stuff even if I haven't watched it.

Cool. I dunno, I'll wait until I *need* the space... I think I'd be happy dealing with 60gb and archiving everything else. At least until my 90 day refurb warranty runs out. After that I'll probably give it a shot, though. Thanks for the tip!

Rob, I believe that the two are basically the same. Actually, I think that TyStudio incorporates TyTool into it somewhat. Isn't TyTool just used for the extraction of the video?

From what I can tell, TyStudio is a somewhat buggy step in the right direction towards the world of video extraction. The basic use of the program is the go from video on the Tivo to fully mux'd file of varying formats on your PC. To do this it simply creates an interface which controls a variety of common command line tools that people have been using for Tivo extraction, one of which I believe is TyTool.

So, you open TyStudio, you refresh the list of programs on your Tivo, and choose one to extract. Then you either remove the commercials with the file on the Tivo or extract it first. Once the file is cut, the program calls the muxing tool and automatically passes the offset numbers to it.

Eventually you end up with an MPG file or some other format. At least, this is how I think it worked. It's been about 3 months since I last fooled with it, mainly due to the fact that getting a DVD burnable file from a non-DirecTivo seems to be harder.

So is this how TyTools works, Rob? I may have not been remembering how that one worked correctly.

Many people have done so with many different utilities, and burned the results to VCD or DVD

Hmmm, that's interesting. The process on Tivo is essentially the same. Perhaps it's merely the results that differ, though I've heard that people don't have much of a problem.

Actualy, one of the empeg guys mentioned it on slashdot. I just didn't want to be the first. Mschrag is writing the java applet that comes up when you go to the web interface, and it's all based on the Jemplode code.

I deduced that a couple of months ago. Rob and Mike between them dropped a subtle hint. I can't believe that no-one else here picked up on it, especially since we've previously suggested to Mike that making JEmplode a java applet would be very useful for the empeg. Collaborating evidence came when Roger mentioned that the 'rid' tag that had been implemented in the v3a3 schema was for Rio Music Manager and JEmplodes use - JEmplode doesn't yet support it in any publicly released version, even though Roger stated that JEmplode did support it. I figured that there was a non-released version being actively worked on to compliment the Rio Music Manager software, which had already been acknowledged as being part of the Karma package.

We now return to your regular programming (cheap ReplayTVs). This BBS software needs an "Off-Topic Skip" button.

uploading a new kernel with the LBA48 (I believe it's actually using Mark Lord's patch to get LBA48 on 2.2.x kernels actually) so I can get a 250GB or 300GB drive

Yes, I believe someone there emailed me for that a while back..

Cheers

That sounds like TyTool although now there seems to be a "DVD version." Possibly it outputs a DVD compliant MPEG2 straight away? I really don't have anything to extract at the moment, so I will wait to find out.

Streaming shows from the replay to watch on a computer is the part DVArchive doesn't have down perfectly, but improvements are in the pipeline.

Oh, I see now. This is a feature of DVArchive that I haven't played with much. And now that you mention it, I'm sure it behaved as you say when I was streaming to my computer. But since the computer and the Replay are in the same room, I don't have much use for it.

Even so, it's nice to know that Gerry, and anyone who may be helping, are so dedicated to making improvements to an already awesome third party tool for the Replay.

now there seems to be a "DVD version."

Ooooo! My interest has been piqued!

Refresh my memory, can you edit out commercials with TyTool?

From Dealdatabase forum:

TyTool is a program designed by jdiner, for extracting video from the Tivo, removing commercials, and either playing the extracted video on a computer, or burning directly to CD or DVD media. IT'S ALL FREE, IT'S ALL EASY, and IT'S ALL HERE! Furthermore, regular improvements are constantly being made to make it even easier and better than it already is.

Thread:
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25648

Rob, on my stand alone, I just changed the bitrates to encode my video at 720x480 natively, then I extract, cut the comercials, multiplex the video, and its ready for DVD. Really quick now actually. Much easier than converting a 1 hour show for 10 hours from 480x480 to 720x480. I'm using Tytool7r8.

Does anyone know a good way to convert mpg files. I really like TMPGEnc, but with mpg files it crashes every time. I can create Divx files easily. The reason for this is I do hate the way tytool makes cuts in the video. You cannot make cuts at every frame. It's every 4 or so frames. It slows down the process, but makes for better cuts.

Ah, that's the reason I quit. I didn't like how the available utilities worked, and I also wanted to use TMPGEnc. I also changed the native res but it didn't work too easly for me. What DVD burning program are you using? Do you have DirecTivo?

That's interesting, Rob. Has TyTool always been able to do that?

Has TyTool always been able to do that?

The version I last used couldn't

Excellent. When I get back on a wired networrk I'll try extraction again

I just burned it using Nero 6 (This was coincidently my very first DVD, and worked flawlessly). I imported the mpg into Ulead DVD Movie Factory, which created my video_ts folder with the vob, ifo, etc files.

Wow, glad I jumped on this when I did, the 5060s and 5080's are gone. New 5040's are now available, but $449.99 is kinda steep, even minus the 10% coupon. Looks like I finally bought a gadget at the best possible time.

Mine is scheduled for delivery tomorrow... The suspense is killing me!

Well, I received my 5060 this evening. Setting it up was a breeze... The activation was painless, though the "My ReplayTV" service claims I'm not activated yet, but they say "try again tomorrow" so I guess there's a nightly batch cycle or a 24 hour waiting period or something.

My first impressions are that this thing is going to be really useful and fun. It's hard to get used to not being able to watch something else while it's recording, so I'll probably split the cable signal to my TV's tuner so I can flip around if it's recording something (assuming I don't want to watch that particular show at that moment.) This illustrates how cool having DirecTivo would be, but DirecTV isn't an option for me now.

It's kinda funny having the "SonicBlue" moniker plastered all over, and also very amusing being "welcomed" to my new ReplayTV by a defunct company. Then again, that same defunct company's name is on the back of my car stereo... Wonder if they'll phase in the new company name/logos/etc. in future software updates...

Speaking of software updates, I did find a way to force it to update the program guide and check for software updates (243 Zones, option 6), and it turns out I'm on a pretty old version of the software... So the new software is currently downloading. I'm hoping it addresses the slow menus a little bit. Some of the other little easter eggs are cool, too, the War Games style tic-tac-toe is a hoot.

Got DVarchive running very quickly. Needed to download an MPEG-2 codec, but I can now transfer and watch shows. Streaming is still screwed up, not sure why. This will be VERY cool to have. Just need about 6 or 7 200GB hard drives. Speaking of which, it *is* an 80GB Maxtor drive in there, so when I'm feeling adventurous (after the 90day warranty expires) I might give reformatting it a shot. Very strange they'd hide 20GB of storage from the consumer, but I guess they just needed to sell more cheaper models... And the winner is... me!

Oh well. Gonna go back to playing with my new toy... Maybe my software is done updating now.

Once it's had a few days to record stuff you like, you'll try and avoid reccording live shows because comerical skip doesn't work well on live shows. I've been meaning to split my cable into my TV seperatly for 6 months, but have never gotten around to it.

DVarchive is great. The page you don't even know you're looking for yet is http://users.rcn.com/mmacdonald31/xinedvarch/xinedvarch.html which will help you get streaming to your computer working right. I wish it'd work on windows media player, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Matthew

Does anyone know how the RePlayTV Program Guide would work in Canada (Toronto area)?

I know they won't ship to Canada, so I plan on using a US address for delivery, then have it forwarded to Toronto.

I am thinking I will purchase one of the 5040 clearance units (I expect I need to act fairly soon), but I don't know enough (yet) about how the RePlayTV Program Guide works to know if there is a dependency on how my cable company (Rogers) maps the station/channel allocations.

If I had one already, I am sure I would know this, but I am new to this type of unit, so I know I don't know enough...

Thanks in advance.

There may be something about this in the ReplayTV FAQ. But as far as I know, ReplayTV units channel listings and guide data are provided by Tribune Media Services, and either they don't have listings for Canada based cable companies, or don't provide them to ReplayTV units. There has been talk in the ReplayTV section of AVSForum from some Canada residents (perhaps just one) who did get their units working fine. So my advice would be to hop over to AVSForum and ask, if you haven't already done so.

Glad to hear you got yours up and running. I finally got my 5060 working last night as well (since the night before, Adelphia's internet went down due to the worm). One word of warning. Don't let the unit get too warm. Mine did, and locked up twice during playback. I moved some things around, and it seems to be fine now.

And yeah, the new update gets rid of the SonicBlue tags, and also adds a manual connect to the setup menu.

Don't let the unit get too warm.

I put a laptop cooler under my TiVo to keep it cool. Mine had a wall plug though. It worked well until the third month of being on 24/7. The (assumingly) cheap fans started making noise.

Glad to hear you got yours up and running.

Not without some flakiness, though. Channel 4 comes in with a lot of staticky sound and picture. It looks fine with cable going directly into my TV, but crappy through the replay. At least it was that way last night. Luckily it's a channel I won't record often, but it'd be nice to be able to at least *watch* that channel on the Replay... Waiting to find out if this is an intermittent problem or not. AVSForum chronicles some other problems people have been having with flaky ReplayTV tuners, but it doesn't seem *that* widespread.

Otherwise things have been pretty cool. I've been playing with DVArchive and the other various programs people have written.. Fun stuff. Everything I've asked it to record so far has been recorded, and it's very good about letting you know if there are conflicts. So far so good, save the flaky channe 4, and the fact that you can't assign padding to "theme channels," which forces me to record sporting events individually.

Hey, thanks for that link to the laptop cooler. That looks like just what I need to cool my DishPVR 721 unit, which gets pretty hot (121 degrees F) in my not-air-conditioned house these days.

Beware the unit I linked to is USB powered. Unless your PVR has a powered USB port, you may want to find one that comes with a wall plug.

Yep. I need to check if its powered, as it was intended for keyboards/mice only.