After I turned my ReplayTV into a coaster last May (hard disk upgrade gone bad, somehow fried the modem, cost $199 plus postage to ReplayTV to have it fixed), I needed an immediate solution for PVR duties; since I have DirecTV, and don't much like Microsoft, I chose DirecTiVo. After using it for a few months, and upgrading it to have a ridiculous amount of recording time (about 150 hours), I can wholeheartedly recommend it - especially given the prices of the units at this point. The only downside is that my area (Los Angeles) doesn't have a UPN on DirecTV yet, so I still use my ReplayTV to record "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Enterprise". :)

I haven't played with the UltimateTV, so I don't know how it compares; but from what I've heard, it takes a somewhat different approach to the problem. Certainly its software is far less mature, and there have been several serious bugs over the past few months as they've been doing upgrades. I do know that, like the DirecTiVo, it cannot record any input other than DirecTV's satellite signal - neither UltimateTV nor DirecTiVo has an MPEG encoder built in.

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Daniel M. Zimmerman, Caltech Computer Science
Mk.2 #060000058, 36GB
Mk.1 #00101, 10GB