Rating: 
Summary: 5 NEGATIVE stars! ReplayTV is the worse product ever!
Review: Not only was the unit defective, but it has been over 2 months since I contacted their "knowledgeable" tech support/customer service staff to get a replacement. Today, 02/27/03, they tell it will take another 5 to 7 business days to receive a replacement. That is what they said last week! I would never recommend this product! The people who claim it's GREAT are either very lucky or on the SonicBlue payroll! Don't be a fool, take my advice and don't throw your money away.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Even after reading through all the bad reviews here, I still opted to buy this unit. After a week, we've had no technical problems with it at all. There was some trouble with the activation of the unit; for some reason it didn't couldn't figure out that the activation fee had been paid. I called Technical support, and got to talk to somebody immediately (no hold time). I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Tech Support going back and forth trying to figure out what was going on. They updated something in their database, and shortly after, my grace period was extended (so I could keep using the unit), and then few hours later, the issue was resolved. Although it did take some time (and the unit didn't record "The Daily Show" that morning), I'd still say that's pretty good. If you have cable-TV and a cablebox, I recommend that you don't connect the unit to the cablebox, but rather get a splitter, and have one cable go to the cablebox and one to the RTV unit. That way, the RTV doesn't have to change the channel on the cablebox, and you can record something while watching something else. You can't record premium content though... Works good with my broadband connection as well; it gets all the networking info from my firewall, and goes out on the internet to download the program guide and updates. However, sending shows to other users on the internet might not be a feature that'll be used a lot, and here's why: This unit records up to 40 hours on a 40GB drive. That means that a 1 hour show is about 1GB. That is a huge file to transmit over the internet, even if you do have broadband. My connection is capped at 300kbsp outbound, meaning it would take over 9 hours to transmit this file! And that's at "standard" recording quality. File size increases fast if you record at a higher recording quality. Recording at standard quality is ok for most shows, but it can get a bit pixelated in high-speed scenes. For sport events, you should definately record at a higher quality setting, or that tennis ball will be one big square blur flying across the screen. Commercial skip works fairly well, but it's not perfect. It misses some commercials, and sometimes it skips a little too far, so you may have to rewind a few seconds of the show to catch the beginning of the section. Overall, a very good experience for us. The ability to search for shows, and easily record every episode without having to look for VCR+ codes and swapping out worn-out video tapes certainly makes it more enjoyable to watch TV.
Rating:
Summary: The worst products, support and service ever!
Review: run away, and fast. when it finally breaks down, you are stuck with it, and will end up buying a tivo since no one at sonic blue (or... replay ... diamond .. or whatever their name is today) will never answer the phone. and if they do answer the phone after fathering your third child during the hold time, they will somehow tell you that the best way to "fix" it is to buy a new one. I'm not kidding. There's a reason that over half the reviews of this thing are one stars... and trust me, that's generous. i'm out a lot of money. go tivo and be happy.
Rating:
Summary: The rates go up as SONICblue's stock goes down
Review: I tried a replay rtv5080 for about A week. The biggest problem was with signal dropouts on any scrambled cable channel. They don't have a fix for this problem so I decided to go with Tivo. By the way Replay's big claim to fame was no charge for subscribing to their service. I see they have started charging, I hope the subscribers don't get burned because Sonic Blue is in big financial trouble and could bail out of the dvr market anytime.
Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: I read all the negative reviews on this product and thought I would just come in with an open mind. It did not work, customer service told me serveral things to try and it still does not work. i returned it and then they would not refund my money for the service that never worked. buy a tivo. DMD
Rating:
Summary: Worst DVR on the market
Review: I've used now three different brands of DVR's, the first being the Dishplayer from Dishnetwork which worked pretty good. My second DVR was the Replay TV 5040 model. After troubles with set up it worked fine for less than 2 weeks. After hours with tech support and on hold they decided it was defective. I had to pay to send the unit back, a unit that was less than 2 weeks old! And then wait almost 2 weeks for another one. The second one didn't work at all, and I was given the run around by tech support, and by their customer care. I sent several e-mails and received only form letters back not helping me. I finally decided to return the unit and was given the run around again with several more hours on the phone, then I had to pay again to ship the defective unit back which never worked and had numerous problems. Quite honestly, this product has potential but is plagued with problems, and the customer support and tech help is the worst I've seen anywhere for any product! I bought a TiVo next, it installed easily, and has much better features, it's had no problems and I would recommend TiVo as the best DVR on the market, and ReplayTV should be avoided at all costs. Don't waste your time or money, you'll regret it in the long run.
Rating:
Summary: Red Byer's review incorrect on many fronts
Review: Red Byer doesn't know what he/she is talking about, and I doubt he/she has ever used or seen the ReplayTV. Here are his/her errors:
1. Season Passes - while ReplayTV does not have this same name for this feature, it is capable of recording an entire season of a show. You are able to record a given show at a given time on whatever day(s) of the week you want to record. Or, you can program it to record a certain number of episodes (or hours) of your favorite show, regardless of when it is on. 2. Prioritize your season passes - again, wrong Mr./Ms. Byer. ReplayTV does allow you to prioritize ANY recording, whether it is a season pass or not. Simply choose whether or not the recording is guaranteed or not. If it is, it will record the show no matter what. If it is not, it will record the other show. If two guaranteed shows are scheduled to record at the same time, ReplayTV will warn you and give you the option of choosing which show will be recorded.
3. Recording for a certain amount of time - again, dead wrong. As stated above, you can record a certain number of hours/episodes. If you want to save some episode, just simply mark it to be preserved and it won't be deleted. Otherwise, ReplayTV will delete the oldest episode and replace it with the newest recorded one.
4. Commercial skip - absolutely the best feature on ReplayTV over TiVO.
5. 7 second back button - apparently Mr./Ms. Byer has never even seen a ReplayTV. It does in fact have such a button.
By the way, I am very doubtful that SonicBlue, the creator of ReplayTV and Rio MP3 players, will be filing for chapter 11 anytime soon.
Mr./Ms. Byer - educate yourself before you criticize.
Rating:
Summary: Don't listen to the naysayers!
Review: I have never seen so many 5-star and 1-star reviews of the same product on Amazon.[com.] I guess that if things don't go exactly according to plan during the installation, you can get pretty frustrated in a hurry. Fortunately for me, ReplayTV has worked perfectly since the moment I plugged it in. If I knew how easy it was to set up and use and how well it worked, I would have been willing to pay a lot more for it than I actually did. If you're trying to decide between Tivo and Replay, save yourself some money and buy Replay (I don't know why you would even consider paying more, since from all the reviews I've read, it sounds like both have lousy tech support). I need your help keeping these guys in business so that the magic never ends!
p.s. CommercialAdvance does work.
Rating: 
Summary: My observations
Review: Somebody recently said on a DVR forum that people either have a great experience with Replay TV or an absolutely horrible experience. Fortunately I've had a great experience. Here are a few observations: 1.Pausing and rewinding live TV gets to be addictive. It really does change the way you watch TV. 2.The ability to network your PC to the Replay is great. You can use a free program called Replay PC to retrieve shows. The files are huge, sometimes as much as 3 gigs for an hour. You can then use a program like Windows Media Encoder, also free to shrink it down to between 300 megs and 600 megs.
I guess the files are so big because they have to be high quality enough to fill a TV screen opposed to a monitor. That also explains why people are constantly whining that it takes so long to share shows over the internet with other Replay users. Consider this though, under what circumstances will sending a 3 gig file over the net ever be a swift experience? From Replay to your pc it takes about an 90 minutes though. 4. There's also been lots of whining about the fact that the channels take a couple of seconds to change. Yes, it's true. But after thinking about it I realized that pausing and rewinding live TV is actually impossible. What the Replay does is record everything just a little in advance of showing it to you. The unit is probably taking a few seconds to build up something you can actually rewind to. 3. You can watch a recorded show while you're recording a show 4. The one big complaint that I have is that it sometimes doesn't change the channel to what you want to record. 60 minutes of anything other than what you wanted to record is 60 minutes too many. I've had this occur twice and that comes out to about 3% failure. This is the reason why I give Replay TV 4 stars instead of 5. The purpose of a "DVR" is to "R" what I want. 5. The commercial skip doesn't always work. It's actually looking for the fade to black and fade from black that precede and follow commercial breaks. If the station goes to and from breaks in another way, you're out of luck. Some people try to put a percentage on it but it depends on what you watch. I love Discovery Channel and it seems to work just about 100% on that channel. On CBS it's about 40%. The "Quickskip" on the remote makes that a lot more bearable. It skips ahead 30 seconds at a time, press it a couple times and you're in business. 6. It's true, the blue power light is like a blue halogen headlight in the dark. In a bedroom this ..., but common sense will allow you to find a solution to that. I've found that the Replay will actually record a scheduled show when the power is off. You'll just see a red record light turn on. Is the Replay TV perfect? No it isn't. It has quirks and oddities much like Windows. Sometimes you just have to reboot the unit to get it to act right. However, I've found that I can live with it because the pros far outweigh the cons.
Rating:
Summary: Great Player, but go for the 160 hour version if you can
Review: There are absoultely some bugs to work out in this critter, but hard disk recorders are still in their infancy if you ask me. Remember that the 80 hour version is 80 at the lowest quality about 60 at med and roughly 27 hours at the highest quality. I found it easy to use and set up. You can program it from the web if you like (nice feature). Yes the channel changing is slow because it is getting ready to record (it always records in a buffer every time you change channels). Great picture quality, by the way the USB connection for future wireless implementation is inactive now, but you can get a linksys wireless ethernet bridge from amazon for [a price]that will let you plug the replayTV right into your wireless system now with no special drivers! The search features are fantastic, making it very easy to find what you want in programming. I suggest you go to the replaytv.com website and download the manual in .pdf format so you can see what it does...I have the 80 hour version and find that it holds plenty of shows even at the highest resolution. If there is a show you really like you can "offload" it to video tape for long term storage. Hopefully they will eventually make an outboard drive that will let you transfer shows you like back and forth. Of course you can do this now by getting two units and hooking them up to your home network. Oh yeah, cool feature YOU CAN VIEW A PREVIOUSLY RECORDED SHOW AND RECORD A NEW SHOW AT THE SAME TIME!!! This is because the unit can read and write on the hard disk simultaneously. Is it pefect? No. Is it foolproof? NO. In that regard i've heard Tivo is more like a Mac and Replay more like Windows....But the features [are awesome] and they work the way they are supposed to for the most part (commercial skip is about 80% accurate and if it isn't a couple of presses of the jump button get you past the commercial. I will say this though, their tag line rings true..."There's always something on"
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