Dean

ok, I'm in.

I liked the pop-ups last night - it was done in a tongue-in-cheek manner that didn't take the show too seriously - after all, it is just a TV show. But I can't wait for tonight either!

I just tried it out - looks great!

I find the 360, and DirecTV's HR20, so difficult to use for playing music, or viewing photos, from my computer, that I'm definitely interested in Apple TV. Now that I can rent HD movies with it, I may finally buy one.

I have a plasma (EDTV, actually), an LCD, and a DLP in my house. I think the plasma has a fantastic picture, and it's nearly 4 years old now. The bulb on the DLP just burned out after just a couple years, now I need to spend over $150 on a new bulb. I wouldn't hesitate to get another plasma, if I needed another HDTV.

It has dual live inputs, to record two shows at once, but it doesn't maintain two live buffers, so if you switch channels on live tv you lose the buffer. You can get around by recording two shows and switching back and forth, but definitely not quite as convenient.

Yes, you can do 30 second slip. Currently in beta are improvements to the "jumpback" when you jump back out of fast forward, to be more like Tivo.

Regarding the quality of the HR-20 - it's a GREAT DVR. Except for not having dual live buffers (yet, anyway), it's a great replacement for the HR10-250. And DirecTV continues to make improvements, with the feedback of actual users, which makes it a better DVR all the time.

The list is here, by the way:

http://www.dbstalk.com/hr20/html/DIRECTV_lil_list.html

They'll all be MPEG-4 for sure. And I just bought my second HR20, and sold my HR10-250 on ebay. I have to say, the Tivo interface actually looks somewhat primitive compared to the HR20 interface. True you can't combine/split OTA, but there are a lot of cities now covered. And I love watching my local sports in HD on the new receiver, which you can only do with an MPEG4-capable receiver.