Has anyone here tried on of the PC based PVRs ?
All I want is a VCR replacement, without all of that subscription rubbish.

Any and all bright ideas appreciated.
Thanks!

When I first got my ATI All in Wonder, I tried the crappy service it came with. It was so useless that within a week or two, the company (not ATI) changed servers, but didn't tell their uers that they had done so, and had not made provisions in their software for such an occurance. It took hours of searching on the internet for someone who knew what was going on. I sure hope this isn't the situation with what's out there these days.

All I know is that after a couple weeks of that crappy solution, I stopped using it all together. Tivo came along and filled the void.

All I want is a VCR replacement, without all of that subscription rubbish.

In that case, why bother?

It is the "subscription rubbish" that makes PVR's like TiVo and RePlay worth having.

If television is even a little bit important to you, I absolutely guaran-damn-tee that if you spend one month with a TiVo, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

It's like the empeg: until you get hands-on experience, it is difficult to "get it", but once you do, there is no going back.

tanstaafl.

While I agree, there is something to be said simply for having a VCR with dozens of hours of capacity and for which you needn't change tapes.

my point exactly.
I already have to manually set the cable box as well as the VCR now, so how will Tivo/Replay help me.
Unless they connect to the cable box and set it for me.
This pause live tv deal is great IF you watch live tv. I don't, I am a timeshifter, so apart from football games I never watch live TV.

All I want to do is save to my hard disk to watch, burn stuff to DVD if I want to save it (after removing the commercials).

Do any of the current PVRs (standalone or otherwise) let you burn to DVD?

Unless they connect to the cable box and set it for me.

They will. Even if your cable box doesn't have some sort of out-of-band communications port, the TiVos (and, I assume, ReplayTV) come with IR transmitters to send signals to your cable box as if you had punched in the channel yourself.

It does set the cable box channel... if not through a direct connection then with the supplied "remote IR thingy."

and there was just an announcement that one company (panasonic? pioneer?) have a PVR/DVD Recorder on the way.

actually I just checked with Time Warner, the do a PVR/Cable box unit that gets is subscription based, but without the phone line. It uses the existing cable line.
It costs nothing to pick up and 9.95 a month.
Hmmm, maybe I will try it, at least I can just give it back if it doesn't work out.

I have a co-worker with one of these TW-PVRs. He loves it. Its worlds better than live tv, and it has the capability to record 2 things at once!

BUT - it has some big down sides. It is very immature UI and feature set compared to TIVO or REPLAYTV. An example - There is no way to see how much free space there is and it will just stops recording when it runs out (no warning when you setup the record or when it tried to record). You might sit down to watch your fav show and only get 10 minutes!

It still beats live TV!

I already have to manually set the cable box as well as the VCR now, so how will Tivo/Replay help me.

You can instruct Tivo to always get a specified program using a Season Pass. That way, you don't have to remember to set a recording or check for schedule changes. Also, say you had a SP for Frasier and they reached the end of the series, you can simply leave the SP in place and when the next season broadcasts Tivo will start recording it again without you having to remember.
SP's are also prioritised, this dictates how conflicts are resolved. E.g. Assuming you had an SP for Frasier and Friends: If Frasier was a higher priority than Friends and they were both broadcast at the same time then only Frasier would be recorded. The bonus is that if the missed episode was repeated at another time (even on another channel) it would record it for you.
A lot of this relies heavily on the accuracy of the guide data that Tivo downloads daily which is subject to errors. Personally I haven't had too many problems with this but I did miss an episode of 24 which was a real pisser. That said, I probably would have missed much more if it was down to me to set manual/repeat recordings on the VCR.

This pause live tv deal is great IF you watch live tv. I don't, I am a timeshifter, so apart from football games I never watch live TV.

Not watching real live TV is one of the things that makes PVRs great. One example of this was when I wanted to watch a programme 'live' but got held up on the 'phone for 25 mins. After the call I started watching the programme from the beginning while TiVo was still recording. Because TiVo had already buffered 25mins of the broadcast, I was able to skip through every advert break in the 2 hour programme and had caught up with 'real time' for the last 15 mins.

All I want to do is save to my hard disk to watch, burn stuff to DVD if I want to save it (after removing the commercials).

You can break the seal and add a network adapter to TiVo, I believe you can then grab mpeg's from the HDD with this installed. It's an unsupported hack which may not appeal though. If you're interested further check www.9thtee.com

I believe you can then grab mpeg's from the HDD with this installed.

You can (ethernet isn't strictly necessary, you could use serial if you're not doing anything for the next few months).. If you're a Windows person then there's a neat GUI that gives you a list of what's on your TiVo and you just hit extract; For Mac/Linux (as of a month or two ago, haven't been keeping up lately) there's more complicated CLI tools or a plugin for TiVoWeb to transfer over HTTP ("save this link as..").

I have just found out that the Explorer 8000 comes with an 80G hard disk in it!
Given that it will only cost the subscription I will give it a try. The ethernet is supposed to be available next year.

In reply to:

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The ethernet is supposed to be available next year

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I doubt timewarner would enable this feature. Its has USB and firewire ports. Some one will probably figure a way to interface an Ethernet port to one of these...

Take a look at mythtv.org. That's a pretty sweet software based PVR that I'm going to install as soon as I can figure out how to control my DishNetwork receiver with an IR transmitter (just like the TiVo does?).

later,
ajay

PS. Look at those screenshots! They just added the 'edit' abilities so you can edit out the commercials before you burn the shows to VCD/DVD/etc...