The RTV-5504’s on-screen menu guides you through the initial setup with relative ease; setup concludes with the unit calling in to ReplayTV central to acquire channel listing information. Once the information has been acquired, you can run a search through a week or more of the guide (including satellite listings) to look for actors, directors, titles or keywords. The unit calls in regularly to get up dates. But be aware that if you constantly change the input settings like I did, you can temporarily lose your program guide information. There doesn’t seem to be a way to force the unit to call in to get new information without serious hassle; you just have to wait until the next cycle.

Commercials for DVRs talk about how the technology "pauses live TV." This function is made possible by a constant recording buffer that records any channel you’re watching, regardless of whether you programmed it to record or not. ReplayTV’s buffer uses the total available hard-drive space at the high-quality setting. While I rarely pause a "live" program, I did rewind about 20 minutes of The Daily Show after my wife proclaimed I had "missed" the funniest take on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial bid in California’s special recall election (as if the jokes didn’t just write themselves). She forgot that the ReplayTV buffer was recording. I was able to catch the whole bit, then skip the commercials to catch up with the live program using a button that jumps ahead in 30- second increments. Since D&M’s studio acquiescence program omitted the Commercial Advance feature, which skipped over commercials automatically, you can only skip them manually.