Hah--well, I"m definitely hoping my TiVo (a Woot special--it's not the Premiere, it's whatever they had that was HD before that? I used to have the DVD-burning one, and before that the initial basic one) will last several more years! It's only...uh...crap. Three years old now?

Yeah, the TWC dvr is what led to my canceling cable altogether. The set-top box was too often unable to record my program. Super unhelpful for live sporting events. Or anything, really. Plus it had to be reset at least weekly and only seemed to reset itself when I was actively watching tv.

only seemed to reset itself when I was actively watching tv

this is so funny and really true to my experience. fucking annoying.

Part of my thought process is that most of the TV I watch is available online, eventually--maybe not the same night, and possibly I"d occasionally have to pay for it, but...I don't often watch live TV, and I'm often watching it a few days late anyway (since I travel and may be in the air when it is on)

Part of my thought process is that most of the TV I watch is available online, eventually--maybe not the same night, and possibly I"d occasionally have to pay for it, but...I don't often watch live TV, and I'm often watching it a few days late anyway (since I travel and may be in the air when it is on)

Barring live sports (and some, not all, of those are available legally), yes. I stayed with cable because I love Formula One and there's no way to get it otherwise but eventually I realized it was just too much. I'm happy to pay for the tv I do watch.

this is so funny and really true to my experience. fucking annoying.

Right?

Their tv app was really good for mobile devices. Their internet has been great. Never used the phone service I had but I assume it was fine. The actual cable box was awful. And they never offered to even swap the damn thing for a functional one. Until I was actually canceling. I guess they assume inertia. It worked for a while.

meara,

please know I am not discouraging you. I think you have good reasons for going this direction and I hope it works out for you. a lot of others did not have any problems.

that said, any opportunity I have to commiserate with Cass, I will take.

For the record, FiOS and U-Verse DVR's have been pretty damn good, in my opinion. I've never have had TiVo, so, can't give comparison. But Charter DVR was horrid. I swear, it's graphics/colors/type face looked like Windows 3.1.

The last Cablevision DVR I had was a Scientific Atlanta model, and it was crap. But they've since upgraded to Samsung boxes, which other than the laggy remote response, are quite nice.

I'm looking at the Android NAS apps, and WHOA. The QNAP one came with the Note, and it's nice--you can share to it, and it's a simple quick way, even without RTFM, to save to a network share. The Black Armor one is laughable--half an hour and forum searching, and I don't even know what's *supposed* to happen, but I think it relies on an external agent, because they don't run apps modularly. I don't actually want to expose that NAS to the Internet, so it's just as well nothing works (don't put a link from your registration page to the wikipedia page about strong passwords and then turn out to have a problem with passwords with anything other than lowercase letters--all sorts of fail right there, including NO PASSWORD GUIDELINES OF YOUR OWN).

Lenovo/Iomega has two apps--one of which autodiscovered the relevant NAS, but can't browse to folders with spaces in the names, and one which had to be spoon fed the IP address, but can go wherever it wants. Neither app can be shared to, and I can't easily work out how to copy files from device to NAS with either anyway.

FAIL.

Of course the app that connects to my least used storage device would be the handiest. Does make sense that the NAS with the most flexible platform (the open source nerd at work recommended it strongly but in the end the Lenovo implementation of Twonky is better (and Plex/Web just doesn't make *sense*), so most of the media is there. the QNAP has two drive bays open, though, so it's where the future lives.

I've been very happy with my Synology NAS and it's various apps, including the nifty new Roku video streaming app. I've heard really good things about QNAP too, but I've never had one. I'd really like to see audio streaming and photos in the Roku app as well, though.