Need some Tivo advice

[chainmaile]

I'm looking to get a PVR, Tivo or some other system, and need some advice. I don't want to have to pay the monthly fee to Tivo, so I'm planning on manaully setting recording times, unless there in some other legal way (alternate servers, etc

Comments

[inmostlight]

I have a ReplayTV PVR and I love it. While it sadly doesn't record HD, otherwise it's great and cheaper than tivo ($9.95/mo). It does have SP-DIF out for audio, but doesn't actually record in 5.1 or have SP-DIF in. I also got one of the pre-lawsuit versions that'll automatically skip commercials, share files over the internet, etc.

So far as I can tell, it's not as bright and cheery as a tivo, but that's fine by me, I kinda hate the forced happiness theme in technology. And you have to tell it what shows you like, it won't "guess", though you can set up some fairly broad filters like record everything with a certain actor or whatever.

Frankly, it's worth the $9.95 a month just so I don't have to use Comcast's interface. And when I do want to watch something in HD, it still records a shrunken version of that for me. (I pass the composite cables directly to tv, and s-video to the PVR, and just change the input on the tv and audio on the receiver so it's not out of synch.)

I've thought about upgrading the pc to record HD, but am not yet at that point. And I think the pure tv signal looks better on the tv than the pc connected with the VGA input.