As we all know, the fast forwarding and other DVR features will be severely modified next year.
ReplayTV has come out with a 5500 series ReplayTV with the new deficiencies built-in, but they continue to offer their older 5000 series that the company claims will retain Fast Forwarding as it is now - rapid and commercial free. They also say the 5000 series retains Commercial Advance, which I understand skips the ads while recording one’s TV programs.
I would like to find a DVR that does all this but without the horror stories I’ve heard about the ReplayTV mfr, such as
Manufacture is so shoddy that machines arrive already broken or go to thell soon after they’re installed.
The company is deaf to user complaints and gives people the runaround.
Tech Support is handled in India by people who people who read from scripted pages and who know zilch. What’s more their heavy accent makes them virtually incomprehensible to the American ear.
So, the question: Is there a DVR out there that does what ReplayTV does, but without the headaches?
I you are somewhat proficient at working with computer software you could build one yourself with a computer. I had a computer in good working condition and installed SageTV. This is the software needed to schedule and record television. You would also need a large hard drive,a capture card,video card with TV out in the computer. There are no monthly fees for recieving the schedule and it can be customized if you want. You can download it and get a 15 day trial for evaluation purposes. I have been using it for about a month and have had some minor glitches but overall I have been satisfied. SageTV
You could get a Series 1 TiVo unit (off of eBay) and use a backdoor code to enable 30 second skip.
TiVo will be “updating” their software in the spring to put a company logo on the screen during fast forwarding, but I don’t think that will be for Series 1 units…just the Series 2 (I could be wrong, but that was my impression from tivocmmunity.com where you could also research codes).
What sort of bad results?
Computer is a home made Athlon 1.13 Ghz. It is a dedicated computer for this purpose.
I use the Hauppage 250 MCE with an ATI 9200 Video card. I purchased the bundle set from Sage. It also available from pcAlchemy
Incorrect. Commercial Advance skips what it thinks are commercials during replay. If it makes a mistake and skips through part of the program, you can press one button on the remote to turn off the Commercial Advance, and rewind (or hop back in 7 sec increments) so that you can see what you missed. I estimate that it screws up around 10-15% of the time. Certain programs just seem to throw it off.
I don’t know how typical it was, but ours went south after a couple months. The replacement unit has functioned just fine for almost a year.
Not our experience. Our unit was replaced after 1 call to tech support.
Abolutely. It was clear that the tech support person never seen or used a ReplayTV, and was completely incapable of going off-script.
Our unit had an obvious problem (crashed repeatedly, occasionally refused to reboot) that didn’t fit well into the scripts, so we spent a couple of hours jumping through hoops until they decided it was borked and that they should send us a new one. (I guess you could consider that a runaround, but we did get a replacement after just one call.)
“Your unit is now displaying Screen X.” “No, we have a blank screen.” “Select Button Y on Screen X.” “We can’t. We have a blank screen.” “You have a blank screen?” “Yes.” “[long pause] You should have Screen X.” “We don’t.” “[long pause] You saw the Welcome Screen.” “Yes.” “And it was replaced by Screen X.” “No, it wasn’t. It was replaced by a blank screen.” “[long pause] You need to select the Y Button by using the arrow pad to highlight it, and pressing select.” “We can’t. We don’t have Screen X. We have a blank screen.” "[long pause] First, unplug the cables . . . " “Look, it’s clearly not a cable problem because a) We saw the Welcome Screen and b) The first thing you had us do was unplug all the cables and plug them back in. Why would it help to do that a second time???”
My husband and I had no trouble understanding the lady we talked to, but then we are friends with with several people with Indian accents.