Girlfriend and I decided we needed a new toy... Well, actually, I knew I needed one and I convinced her that she needed it too:). The toy I chose to try to market was the ReplayTV.
I told her about all the great features. We can record shows whenever we want, and not have to worry about missing any of your favorite shows (read sex and the city, friends reruns). We can replay live TV if something cool happens on TV. I can even transfer files to my computer for later viewing.
I really just wanted to have one for football season and for some shows that I always forget about, but always love watching. Girlfriend is the same way (minus the football season stuff). We always sit down to watch some tv, but there's nothing on. So, we figured that we'd get this, and build a collection of our fav shows, and we'd never have nothing to watch.
Anyways, we got it last week, and I think it's great. The only thing that it lacks is a second TV tuner so you can watch one show while recording another. That would make it the ultimate TV companion... though it's still pretty close as is. Katie was pretty upset about the fact that it couldn't record one show while another was playing... and that we had to pay $13.00/month to get any functionality from it. I warned her before hand of everything I thought she wouldn't like, but I guess I wasn't clear about those two points. We're still enjoying it though... or at least I am for now... Katie's in NY City being a tourist. ...While she's gone I'll fill the hard drive up with sportscenter and MXC episodes.
Last thing about the replayTV... We had problems getting everything set up initially. It was supposed to just work out of the box, but we couldn't get the IR Blaster that was provided with the ReplayTV 5504 to work with our Motorola Digital Cable Box from Cox Cable. If we entered channel 14, it would change the channel to 111 444. I found that the code for the IR blaster was wrong... it was supposed to be 0476 (I think) instead of the default 4476. It worked like a charm after that.
Now I'm trying to find out how to convert the replaytv files for burning to DVD... it's not as simple as I thought it would be.