Play It Again, Lev

By Lev Grossman

Ever seen that Simpsons episode--the one where Homer goes to his class reunion and Grampa Simpson gets a job writing cartoons? Me neither. As far as I know, it's the only episode in the entire series I haven't seen, and it's driving me nuts. True, The Simpsons is on about every 15 minutes, but there's only so much TV one man can watch. Or is there? The digital video recorder is changing all that.

A digital video recorder is basically a big, fat hard drive like the one in your computer, only it's hooked up to your TV. It's like a VCR, only digital. It automatically records whatever you're watching, all the time, so you can rewind, pause, slo-mo or instant-replay live TV. If you're watching something you've already recorded, you can skip ahead through the commercials. Best of all, the DVR has a built-in channel guide, so you can tell it to record a show, and it will do so without having to be told the when, where and how. That alone is proof to me that God loves couch potatoes.

DVRs are fairly expensive, however, and as I have discovered, they are still a few bloopers short of a director's cut. There are two leading technologies competing for the market: TiVo, which is cheaper but charges a monthly fee, and ReplayTV, which is the one I've been living with for the past three weeks.

I began by ordering a Panasonic ShowStopper ($800), which comes with ReplayTV built in. Despite having an installation diagram that looks like a Jackson Pollock mural, the ShowStopper was surprisingly quick and easy to set up. If your TV doesn't have those red-white-yellow AV inputs (mine doesn't), you'll have to route it through something that does, like a VCR. Once your DVR is up and running, you plug it into a phone jack, so that it can download the week's program listings. (ReplayTV automatically makes a short phone call every morning at around 2; it's like having a weird nocturnal robot roommate.)

My first night of Replay-enhanced TV watching wasn't exactly must-see. For starters, every time I changed the channel there was a three-second delay before the new one kicked in. What's worse, the ShowStopper sometimes got confused about what channel I asked for, which meant that I spent a lot more time watching U.S. Marshals on TNT than I really wanted to. It doesn't help that the onscreen interface is clunky or that handling the humongous remote control is like thumb wrestling Andre the Giant. The other day my wife flopped down on the couch. "I could watch TV," she sighed, "but it's too much work!"

To give credit where credit is due, ReplayTV does deliver what it promises. If someone were gauche enough to call during Buffy, I could simply pause it. If I double-click on The Simpsons in the onscreen Channel Guide, ReplayTV knows to record it every time it's on, any time, any channel. That's a beautiful thing. The latest ShowStopper comes with 60 hours of recording time (at the lowest-quality setting), and that's more than enough for even the most obsessive Homerphile.

Will DVRs radically improve your TV viewing experience? Indisputably. Are they ready for prime time? Hardly. At this point they're like bicycles before somebody made the wheels the same size: great idea, but the execution needs work. When the technology is ready, it's going to be a blast. If only we could fast-forward to then.

For more on ReplayTV and DVRs, check out www.replaytv.com Got a tech question? You can e-mail Lev at lev@timedigital.com