Yes, I believe in Magic

I found someone created freeware called IVSMagic. IVS is the Internet sharing mechanism used by ReplayTV users to share shows (among other ReplayTV owners). Someone had already created freeware called DVArchive which allows your PC to look like a ReplayTV unit and allows you to easily download from your ReplayTV unit to your PC. But once downloaded onto your PC*, then you cannot use IVS to send the show to another ReplayTV owner. (By downloading, I do mean downloading and removing the original copy from your ReplayTV unit. Downloading to your PC is a way to free up space on your ReplayTV unit but still have a copy of the show available to view.)

IVSMagic allows you to send the show even though you have already downloaded it to your PC. Now I can send my mom "Teahouse of the August Moon" which is a very good movie starring Marlon Brando in post-war Okinawa.

Update:I did install IVSMagic and it is truly magical.

Joys of ReplayTV

Unfortunately when I tried to record Walker, Texas Ranger Trial by Fire, I found that football ran long, so I did not record the entire movie. However, I was easily able to find a fellow ReplayTV owner who was able to send me the movie over the Internet, and we were able to watch it last night.

Of course, the movie itself could have been better, but at least we were able to watch it and not have to wait until the possibility of it being re-broadcasted at some time in the future.

I have noticed that other people on the Internet have commented that they were not able to record the entire movie. They should have ReplayTV!

More ReplayTV

OK, I have not bought any more ReplayTV machines (yet). I guess 6 is enough for one household, although I plan to give one to my mom.

However, we did experience a second hard drive failure from one of the Western Digital drives. This makes two hardware failures for WD. I think I am going to have to go to Seagate with their 5-year warranties.

Anyway, so I transferred one of the hard drives to the ReplayTV unit in the Media Room. It was the one which had the HD failure. In addition, the tuner had stopped working when we had an electrical storm.

I then put in a 400 GB hard drive in the other unit, which previously had the HD which was moved to replace the failed HD.

ReplayTV and storms

This past Tuesday night, we had a very severe storm in our area. It was rather brief but very intense.

The next day or so, I noticed one of the ReplayTVs not working properly. It seems the tuner is no longer working. ReplayTV would show recorded things just fine, but not anything live. In addition, when the unit is off, the TV still could not show anything.

So now I am only down to 5 working ReplayTVs!!!!

Anyway, since I had put a 400GB hard drive in one of the other ReplayTV units, I went ahead and installed that ReplayTV and moved the non-working tuner ReplayTV into the media room.

On Friday (today), we found the bedroom ReplayTV was also not showing anything live. This seemed very funny, though, considering it was working properly up through Friday morning when it recorded Fujisankei News ok. Anyway, I noticed it had not rebooted for a couple of days, so I unplugged the machine for several minutes. When I plugged it back in, it was working ok. Whew!

So here is the current set up:

Bedroom

250 hours

Family Room

160 hours

Upstairs

400 hours

Media

250 hours

Media 2

160 hours

Media 3

200 hours

Uopdate: Tuner is now working on the ReplayTV. Yay!