I've been using a ReplayTV since Christmas, and occasionally DVArchive to download shows from it for reprocessing to DVD-compatible MPEG2. I never really got into it full-bore, though; it was just too much bother to get the shows onto DVD to take with me in my travels. The main reason is the number of manual steps it seemed to require to get the shows in a compatible format for my DVD burning software.

This weekend, I added a Hauppage PVR-150 Tuner card that includes a hardware MPEG2 encoder to one of my desktop systems, and installed a free application called GBPVR. This, along with a subscription to Zap2It! (apparently also free, at least at the moment), makes my ReplayTV almost superfluous. The PC becomes a highly customizable media center, with a single point of control for watching and recording live TV, viewing DVDs, listening to MP3s and other music formats, listening to Net radio stations, viewing pictures, and even fetching your favorite comic strips from their respective web sites. The IR remote included with the PVR-150 can control all features of GBPVR.

Setting up post-processing of your recordings (automatic commercial skip, recoding to an alternate format, etc.) takes a little effort, but the source material is already DVD-compatible MPEG2 . . . this eliminates a lot of the effort previously required when dealing with the almost-MPEG2-compatible files produced by the ReplayTV.

If there are shows you're afraid of missing while traveling, this may be the solution for you. My investment so far is the $75 I paid for the PVR-150 card.