What to do with my old ReplayTV 5040

sell ,sell sell

Just ship it to me.

PM me for address

They're pretty much worthless at this point. Sometimes you might get lucky and sell it to someone who has a defective unit. They're not worth the cost of repairing.

The ReplayTV community is rapidly disappearing. Requests for shows on Poopli usually don't get responses. Accounts at DVArchive.org are being canceled and the site admin is unreachable. Even posts here get few substantive responses. It's sad.

ridiculous- Poopli is active and every request I have made, is responded within a day. I have made about 50 requests this year. I do make a point of NOT asking for shows that don't exist.

Try Tivo - maybe not so sad. Be careful about posting misinformation in Tivo forums (and even accurate info if you find any). Everybody is happy there. Good luck.

I typically use Poopli this season for three shows each week just by requesting on the front page. I Poopli Sarah Connor, 30 Rock and Supernatural because my 2 Replays are not just not quite enough.

Twice last week, I had duplicates of the same show appear on my machine ready to accept because two people had tried to send at the same time. Most of my requests are answered in a couple of hours at most and frequently in just a few minutes!

Poopli is wonderful for those of us who do not have enough Replays to satify our voracious TV appetite!!

Good folks there, just like here! In fact, I see a lot of the same names.

Doug

I just posted that the tuner in my 5080 pooped...If anyone has instructions for replacing the tuner, I'd be happy to do $50 for yours!!! Ecstatic, even

Lifetime is $299.

I'm embarrassed to say that I have FOUR (4) working ReplayTV 5040s (all modded to have 200gb or larger drives) *and* a FIFTH one in a box that has never been used (or activated) that I hold just in case one of the four should fail beyond repair. Yes, I know that RpTV is going the way of the dinosaurs, but who can live without automatic commercial advance?

I own 5 lifetime 5000's and 2 lifetime showstoppers - all are working great and receive daily usage.

Well... I paid for 3 out of 4, so that's $900.... still embarassing. I talked my dad into buying one, which he used for a year or so, then gave back because he replaced his Dish tuner with a Dish tuner/dvr STB.


I had three modded xboxes, all running xbmc from a central file server (Buffalo Linkstation 1tb), but I replaced them all with Popcorn Hour Network Media Tank, A-100 media streamers, because they can handle much higher rates and are smaller and quieter than the xboxes.


I suspect (based on a few cryptic comments in this and other fora) that some folks have figured out how to hack them to the point that no activation or guide service is needed, but they don't talk about it here (at least not openly).

I have automatic commercial advance on my Vista Media Center using the DVRMSToolbox plugin. It includes commskip which is an Open Source commercial detector.

Robert

Are EXISTING accounts being CANCELLED? Or are just NEW account requests being IGNORED??

IME, Gerry has been "unreachable" for the past several months... [i.e. a FEW (i.e. *ALL*) unanswered PMs, over the course of a FEW months, on his forum ]

Hopefully, nothing BAD has occurred in his "Personal Life"...

But, *IF* Gerry does decide to ABANDON DVArchive, is anyone else able to MIRROR the existing forum (ala Copy of Todd Larson's Twiki) even if it's READ-ONLY? I'd hate to see all those YEARS of knowledge just "disappear"... [since Gerry previously disabled 'bots' from scanning his 'pages' into web.archive.org ]

So sad...

Over the past few years, *MANY* ReplayTV fans have bought:

• Lifetime 5040s NEW at RadioShack for ~$149
• Lifetime 5516s REFURBISHED at ReplayTV for ~$180
• Monthly 5504s REFURBISHED at ReplayTV for ~$10

...so, IMHO, your MONTHLY 5XXX is going to be a 'hard sell' UNLESS someone needs the parts to...
Also, IMHO, 'resellable / transferable' LIFETIME is no longer worth $299 at this point in time.

Yes, I still *LOVE* my 3 LIFETIME 5XXXs and use them 24x7. But, I worry as to *WHEN* they (i.e the GUIDE) will be DISABLED...

And I also have a '$9.95 REFURBISHED' monthly 5504 (relatively unused / tested for 1 month) just for SPARE PARTS!

BTW: On your "200gb or larger" 5040s:

1. What DEFAULT recording speed are you using?
2. How many shows do you have on each 5040?
3. Are you having any PROBLEMS? (i.e. lockups, reboots, short-shows, etc...)
4. Do you use DVArchive and/or WiRNS?
   - If YES, which versions?

Thanks!

I can't answer the original question as I have no idea what the real value of a 5040 is. I can however chime in to say that I'm still happy as a clam with my 4 year old 5040 and can't imagine life without it.

I surmise that the various forums seem dead because Replays users pretty much have figured out how to use their units and the various software hacks, and there are no new Replay users to speak of. Every now and then I still run into problems, but can usually find a solution through a search.

I did finally buy a Vista PC which runs Vista Media Center. Compared to the features that my Replay offers, Media Center isn't bad, but it's nowhere near what I'm used to. Worse yet, I have not been able to make a single plug-in work on my Media Center, which makes the software even more underwhelming.

The searches are awful, which is what I like BEST about Replay. With Replay I love how it lets me track down some of the most obscure shows and movies. I can't imagine how I would find these shows otherwise.

I know that I will eventually have to find a replacement for my Replay, but I will be hanging on to it until the very bitter end of its usefulness. I have been contemplating what I might try as my next DVR, which is why I went and got the Vista machine, but I haven't come across anything as good as Replay yet.

ReplayTV isn't dead...I only check in on here every few months, but I can always search and find a solution if I run into a problem. I currently have two units in service and third in a box that will be in service soon. They are all networked and hooked up to digital (HD) tuners for recording source. I may eventually go HD DVR, but Automatic Commercial Skip and the HD source are a very usable combination.

OK, I had to replace a 160 GB Hitachi IDE drive that has shown signs of failure in way of recording new shows after 6+ years of service. Existing shows -- OK. New shows -- maybe. Live TV -- maybe. I want to say there is a mucked sector in the mpeg partition that cause the unit to halt and reboot when the unit tries to write to it.

In a nutshell, I can watch all the recorded content on this unit's drive, but am wary on having it record anything. So, I pulled the drive and replaced it with a 250 GB Seagate 7200.3 drive. Finished that procedure last night. All is well.

What I really want to do is make use of an unsubbed 5040 I have sitting around. I know that it won't do anything except stream shows, but that is fine. I want to put the 160 GB soon-to-die drive in the unsubbed RTV and use DVA to pull shows off. I know swapping drives has no effect on subscriptions, but I wonder if the non-numbers matching issue will even take away the un-streaming capability.

So, has anyone ever put a drive into an unsubbed RTV, and just left it headless as a server?

(I know I can use RTVextract... I can also probably put the drive back in the LT box and extract all the content I want... But I am looking for another solution, and put an unused box to work.

Thoughts?

Cheers!
-Doug

I haven't done it myself, but I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work. I'm thinking that you could do something simple, like when you first boot it go into the network settings and set the gateway to something else so that it can't even net connect. However, even if you do let it net connect, I don't think that anything bad would happen. I suspect that it will decide that it's not subscribed right away because the serial number will change and all of the signature checks will fail, rendering it unsubscribed...

Just a point, using extract_rtv5 would get you to the same point as using DVA to download your shows and would be a whole, whole bunch faster. Even better, extract_rtv5 leaves your shows in their original channels and in their original categories, so they look more in DVA as you see them on your RTV itself...

Henry

I used to do just that. It was basically an old expired monthly unit I put a drive from my subbed unit into (it was 75% full).

Worked fine in DVA and as a video server only type unit.

I used extract_rtv5 last night. It was effortless. I was just unsure if I had enough space on the PC to store all the shows. All is well.

The only difference I noticed when I launched DVA, was that it put the whole bucket of shows into an "Extracted Shows" channel.....

Cheers!
-Doug

That's 'cause when you created the XML files, you used the -dx option instead of the -dsx option. The -dx option doesn't have the extra information about the shows, so it has to lump them all together in one channel. However, if you use the -dsx option, that has access to the extra information to retain the show categories and channels...

So, if you want to, you could just run extract_rtv5 again with the -dsx to regenerate the XML files with the correct channel information...

Henry

Sounds like a plan. Thanks!

I haven't used my unit in years, but had personal videos I wanted to take off hard drive. The idea was to just get external cases, pull hard drives and throw box away. Never got around to it, and it just sat in storage.

Until I came across a Replaytv option on Xmbc after I jail broke apple tv 2.

Googled replaytv xbmc and I was so out of loop, never knew Replaytv shut down. learned you can stream content from Replaytv to Xbmc on apple tv 2.

But even better, learned about Winrns. The Free software that brought back to life channel guides and recordings, etc.

So now box is alive again years after it was forgotten and is being used to record shows, and as a streaming video source.

LOL. I use XMBC on my (jailbroke) appletv everyday for years, I didn't even know it had a replaytv plugin. Thanks!

Xmbc?