I hear that with this new TiVo sytem/product (?) you can pause live TV… I don’t understand… What happens if you pause a live program for 5 minutes… are you constantly being 5 minutes behind every programs after that?? Can somebody explain this to me?
You can stay behind 5 minutes forever if you want. You can also instantly jump to live. You can also fast forward to live.
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SO you can smartly skip commercials?!
Thanks for your help!
You can also record programs for playback later. When playing back these programs you can freeze, slo-mo or fast forward. Having two or three minutes of commercials fly by in a few seconds on fast forward is worth every cent I spent on the unit. 
I have a ReplayTV unit, which is technically very similar to a TiVo. Basically the same thing, from a different company and with some minor differences in operation.
I’d like to note that these devices aren’t that new. They’ve been around for some time, but they haven’t really caught on with the general public all that well.
They use a hard drive to record TV rather than a video tape. They are always ‘recording’ the signal, so you pause at any time. You can indeed skip commercials. The Replay units have a 30 second instant skip, and the TiVo have a fast-forward, I think.
So, you pause the TV while you answer the phone or get a snack or whatever. Then, when the commercial break comes along, you can skip ahead until you are back in sync with the live signal. Or, what I like to do sometimes, pause the tv at the beginning of a series of shows you want to watch on one channel (such as Thursday-night lineup on NBC, just as a common example). Than, start watching after a while, skipping each commercial break. By the end of the series of shows, you are back in sync with live, but you haven’t had to see any of the commercials.
You can also record shows by their name or category, rather than just by the time they are on. You can even search for shows with a particular actor in them.
I really like these things. You can always have a few episodes of a favorite show on disc. So, for me, it’s meant that I only watch higher-quality shows. Contrary to what you might think, we watch less tv since we got our Replay.
Yes, I have had a TiVo for about a year now, and it works very well. It records everything to a hard disk, and that way you can pause or back up while it keeps on recording. It will keep a half-hour of any program you are watching, but loses it all as soon as you change channels. You can also tell it to record the whole program, and then it will keep it all as long as it has disk space. You can buy models with different amounts of disk space. Mine is a 30-hour unit, but that is at the lowest quality setting. If you want better quality, it can only hold 1/2 to 1/3 of that. You can also copy off what it has saved to a VCR.
If you do pause it for 5 minutes, it will continue to be 5 minutes behind until you catch up, or change channels. You can do fast forward or jump to current time to catch up, for instance during a commercial.
Because it is recording everything and then playing it back, it runs about a second later. This can be sort of annoying if you have another set in an adjacent room playing the same channel, without a TiVo.
<slight hijack> Is there an output from the Tivo or Replay hard drive. Can I upload data from the Tivo or Replay to my hard drive on my computer? Is it a format that could be played back on a computer, such as MPEG or AVI?
</slight hijack>
Nope. Not at all. It is MPEG encoding, though.
I’m pretty sure you CAN set this up, as I have seen instructions on how to get the thing to talk to your computer. These instructions are mostly for manually upgrading your hard drive. I don’t think it can be done without breaking the warranty, though.
I know there is a discussion group that you can find at Tivo.com. It’s for all the Linux geeks to talk about hot-rodding their machines. Of course, the most popular thing is to install a bigger drive, rather than buying the latest model of Tivo in the case. I’m sure they discuss things like outputting the signal, etc.