One more nail in the coffin...

Yea OK, but can you send a show to another user?
Until thats gone, Replaytv will always have a home with me.
I send shows back and forth from NY to PA almost every day with family.

LONG LIVE REPLAYTV

Could not agree more...

Just the other night I had an issue with Greys Anatomy and requested it from another user and received it to watch the next day...

This feature is a Life/Marriage Saver.

Yup, while I have a TiVoHD - I still LOVE my ReplayTVs for this reason and they get used on a fairly regular basis.

Can you download programs for archiving or is this restricted to other D* DVRs?

Yeah, Replay had some great features- unfortunately, some of them are considered "illegal" today and simply can't be included with new DVR's. TiVo even had to hide the 30 second skip from it's published feature set just to make the lawyers happy.

Could you imagine the legal battle that would ensue if TiVo, SA, Motorola, DTV or DishNet enabled content sharing via the net on one of their current DVR's? I would love to have that ability on my TiVoHD, but it's not really such a big deal as it was in the past. A half hour hi-def program takes 12 min to download via usenet with a broadband connection. If you're motivated enough- you can pretty much always find what you're looking for nowadays even if your DVR won't cooperate

When DirecTV allows downloading to a laptop for viewing offline, I'll shelve the Replay. Until then, no dice.

I probably wouldn't sell the Replay, though. I'll set it in a display case so that it can be honored for all of its dutiful service through the years.

Recently had my primary recording disk fail in a SageTV box. I found EVERYTHING I cared to watch on usenet.

Between usenet and Hulu, and even the network web sites, the IVS feature is less and less of an issue for those times when a an unexpected event causes a missed show.

I recently sold my 3 ReplayTVs, do not miss them so far. Thanks to SageTV.

Slack,

I've never done the usenet thing. How do you find what you're looking for, and is it a straight download, or do you need a torrent client?

Thanks,

A

I use newsleecher....

you have a pm.

My10 year old can send a show, or receive one on replay. He can toggle to the DVA boxes and watch old shows we saved..

Sage is "more technical". I doubt that I could send a sage enabled PC to my dad in Florida and expect it to be set up in 90 minutes or less... but the Replay works. It just does.

And that's the difference, isn't it?

If there was a 'breakdown' of parts to get a sage box up and running, slaving a DishHD unit, I'd be interested in looking at it..

Sage (and others) are not going to be 'main stream' until someone builds a 'cable box' or 'satellite box' on a PCI card that you can slap into it.

If DISH had a 2 tuner HD satellite card, in fact, I'd probably have 3 sage units running with them inside today.

What is your point? a good UI is a good UI. If sage had IVS I'm sure your 10 year old could send a show.


No argument there recording TV on a PC is not for the plug-n-play crowd. But then again, XP doesn't have a designed in weekly maintenance reboot. RTV had some issues. Oh, yeah no duoble select bug on the web remote either. all in good fun do not want a flame war with last remaining hold outs.


The difference for me. Was/is HD. If RTV had made the jump to HD I am sure I would have at least two of them in my house. As for ease of use, yeah sure setting up a RTV is easier that setting up Sage for the first time. However, throw in DVA, plus WiRNS to the mix and it gets a little beyond plug and play for even RTVs.


the whole usenet / hulu thing has convince me - I will never deal with a satellite or cable company again (as long as these are available) I get plenty via dual OTA tuners as it stands now - I can barely keep up with it. I cancelled my analog cable as soon as the RTVs were shipped out. I cannot see myself signing up for Satellite (and shelling out for an HD-PVR to get it into Sage) when I can goto hulu and watch what I want. (Hopefully hulu support will be native to the Sage HD200 extender as they showed at CES, and I wont have to fiddle with PlayOn).



Sage will never be mainstream until they bling out the GUI. That is my opinion. But with the HD200 and it's standalone mode they have a chance to gain share (It's a good piece of equipment in my experience) As for slapping a satellite / cable card. The analog whole will suffice....as currently the HD-PVR is supported, it's USB not PCI. But it records HD to H.264 on the fly with minimal CPU requirements, and no DRM, and from what I have seen via downloaded clips I watched on my HD-200 it looks pretty damn goo... analog holes and all. Toss in Blue-ray streaming and Sage brings a lot to the table. Albeit a learning curve is along for the ride.


Keep your current tuners...add 6 HD-PVRs to a server box, and put a HD200 at every location you wish to view content. (You will miss 'categories' with 6 tuners I am sure, as that is my main beef with my setup ATM, although I am probably being lazy as there are filters for recorded content).

I have to agree that IVS is somewhat irrelevant if you have a fast internet connection. I can download a pristine HD copy of a show in less time than it would take for someone to respond to a Poopli request. Pretty much anything you want is available these days if you know where to look. Personally, I find bitorrent to be more convenient than usenet when it comes to finding TV shows, but either method works well.

Interesting, I'm almost at that tipping point now too.
My cable co keeps raising rates and continues moving unscrambled analog channels to encrypted digital only channels.
Eventually each TV (7 of them) would require a $7/month rental cable box to view any channel other than channel 2-21. Once this "all digital" requirement goes into effect- I would need to pay an additional $35/month for five more cable boxes. With the amount of cable only content we watch, it's not worth paying $100+ per month. I'll drop to basic service and use my usenet account to DL anything we care to view from a cable only channel.


PS- as for my kids (age 12 + 13) they pretty much never watch conventional TV any longer. They find it more convenient to get what they want via youtube on their computers.

Slack -
You ought to write up a whitepaper on "how to" move from Replay heaven to HD...

That's pretty cool. I didn't realize yiou could do that with the D* boxes. Is the HR20 fully DLNA compliant?

THANKS! Can I comment?

Yeah, no. That ain't happening. Besides the price of service being roughly 15% higher for the same service I have with dish, well, the picture quality is inferior IMcO (in my considered opinion). I've watched HD on DTV, and on DISH and in many cases it looks better from DISH through REPLAY than it does on Direct.

again, nice idea. I can plug a laptop into any of my tv's and watch all the internet TV I want already... it's just not ubber user friendly...

well that is not exactly a 'step' is it... it's the results statement...

Isn't the new DirecTiVo supposed to be coming out later this year?

It looks you don't have a choice



There I finally got that stard back

I thought I did...


Seriously though Sage is not for everybody. I settled on it solely because of what was available at the time to audition (Beyond, MediaPortal, MCE, something by Nero). It laid down two HD streams while playing back a third without pegging the CPU. I couldn't get the others to that point. Luckily my Sage setup has morphed into a server-client setup and has relieved the main pc of CPU, and playback (filtergraph flashbacks still occasionaly gimme night mares) duties. All while adding other stuff.

I didn't think the UI of consumer electronics could suck as bad as the Dish DVR.
On the upside, it records in full HD.

One Replay isn't recording anything at all right now.
The other two are just OTA HD downconverted.
I dumped the 2nd Dish box that I was using to feed one of the Replay boxes. It seemed about the only satellite it recorded was for the "Final Frontier" Replay zone and "Gilmore Girls" for my wife.

Sigh. Is it really time to just let go?