Hmmm... automatic save-to-VCR is cool, but I don't own a Sony VCR, so it wouldn't have made a difference to me. My Panasonic VCR does automatic commercial zapping and can be easily convinced to record for exactly an hour than stop (it takes about three button presses to do it), so it's not like it's a big deal either way.

The cheapest DirecTiVo boxes are the Hughes and Phillips, with the Sony costing a good bit more. I got the Hughes box, mostly because of some grumbling about the Phillips I found on the TivoCommunity boards. Apparently, many Phillips DirecTiVos come, out of the box, with a broken remote control, and also have two hard drives already inside them, making upgrades a pain; the Hughes boxes have none of these problems.

Having a Macrovision-disabling switch would let you back up movies, not just normal TV shows. If the DirecTiVo is like a normal DirecTV receiver, then it has a Macrovision chip inside that is turned on or off based on whether the show requests it.

Anyway, one day later, and everything seems to be working great. I had to go through and manually set up the "channels I receive" to remove all the pay sports channels, non-local local channels, etc., and now everything seems to be working properly. Heaven only knows why the system can't figure out that I haven't paid for whatever channels and remove them from the "channels I receive."

Big summary: DirecTiVo rocks, and it rocks seriously harder than what you can get from Time Warner Cable of Houston. Yeah, you can get lots more HDTV from Time Warner (they carry HDTV for all the local channels), but until there's an HDTV TiVo box, I'm happy where I am.