Friday, February 11, 2005

ReplayTV Digital Video Recorder

The ReplayTV 5504 is the essential piece in my home's video life. We use it to record television programming (including Pay-per-view) from our cable company, and can play them back at our convenience. It also allows you to pause live programming, and to skip ahead over commercials.

Features:
  • 40-hour capacity
  • Intuitive user interface
  • Program to record shows by name, actor, new episode only, etc.
  • Connect to ReplayTV's service via ethernet broadband
  • Networkable to other ReplayTV units via ethernet (record on one, watch on another)
  • Much better than TiVo (OK, I'm a partisan. All you TiVo owners settle down-- I'm sure your unit is delightful!)
  • The ReplayTV service is required to make the thing work, and is $12.95/mo or $299/life
"How is this a Mac gadget?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. I have an extra Mac which functions as a server on my home network. On that Mac, I run DVArchive, an open source program which makes your Mac act like another ReplayTV. I can move recorded programs from the ReplayTV onto the enormous firewire hard drive on the server, and then stream them back to the ReplayTV whenever we want to watch them.

DVArchive also allows me to watch the programs I've downoaded on any Mac (they're MPEG-2 fiels). Very cool! I watched two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica on my recent flight to Kansas City.

TiVo just announced TiVo to Go, a service that sounds a lot like the capabilities my ReplayTV and DVArchive have given me for over a year, but it turns out it is very slow and has a lot of restrictions on what can be downloaded to your computer. Oh-- and it only works on Windows machines.

You can get a ReplayTV 5504 at Amazon right now for only $50 after rebate.

You can get DVArchive for free here.


posted by Paul Wren at 5:58 AM | perma link

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