Digital Replacements for Fried TVs and VCR

[trader4]

works mostly,

That's quite a deal you got on Ebay! I would not have thought it possible. Tivo was selling the Premier for $300 a year ago. I got $100 off, because I already owned one Tivo, but the whole thing still wound up costing me about $500 with lifetime service.

I just looked at the Tivo website and they are now selling the Premier for $99, which is a great price.

So, for $400 the OP could have a Tivo with lifetime service, which could start to compare favorably with other options for his use. Remaining things to watch out for would be:

A - I've heard the newer ones require a subscription to work even as a dumb recorder. Not sure about that.

B - The Premier requires an ethernet connection which it uses to get the schedules, software updates, etc.

[mike]

True, they're boat-anchors. When I find 'em at garage sales for a buck, I buy 'em for the hard drive and scrap the rest.

[mike]

My experience has been that you need more than a hyperthreaded 2.8GHZ P4 to run that resource hog. Way too much eye-candy and not enough svelt tv recording. Support for TV cards is also limited. But I do get a nice bunch of expanding graphics menus on the way to, "No TV card Installed".

M$'s idea of plugandplay hardware support is minimum functionality at the lowest-common-denominator of features and no way to access the good stuff...on a limited subset of existing hardware.

I never got MythTV to work properly either with any of my TV cards.

People using payware solutions on specific cards report better results.