hehe, that's happened to me once or twice, Tony. My girlfriend and I will delay the start of the Redskins game, and we'll turn on the TV without remembering to press the Tivo button first. Then we see that our team is losing (this isn't a hypothetical situation, merely the way of it). But we still go back to the beginning. You know why? Because anything is better than commercials

So why is the loss of digital cable one less thing in the way of you getting a Replay? It should also be one less thing in the way of the Tivo, since you won't need an IR blaster. I hated digital cable.

You asked about video extraction. Well, it's tough. I think it is very much in the infancy stages for both products. At the moment you cannot go from video on your Tivo to a DVD in one, two, three, or even four steps. It's a trying process that doesn't yeild completely positive results. Very frustrating. However, I can tell you that there are things you can do with Tivo to make it a little easier.

For instance, Tivo uses some funky resolutions when it records. The "Best" quality on my box records at 352x480. Well, that's funky and DVD creation software and DVD players don't like it. So, you can go into Tivo's settings and tell it that when you record something on "Basic" quality, you want it to record at 720x480. This made it a little easier to get something that would play on a standalone DVD player. I'm still working to get it to the point where I don't have to alter the video in any way.