ReplayNT started out as program to download shows from a ReplayTV 4080. I bought one of the first Replay 4080s (I already had a Replay 3060 that I had bought 1 year earlier) and spent nearly $1000 for the privilege. The concept of a networked DVR was not lost on me. I anticipated a long and happy relationship with ReplayTV and for the most part, that is what I have had. However, technology is bypassing this rather ancient platform. Hence the complete rework of ReplayNT. I will continue supporting ReplayTV devices and this next section of the document is dedicated to ReplayTV. However, my main interest is now in Home Theater Control and any future enhancements to ReplayNT will not involve changes to the ReplayTV functionality I am providing in this release.
A little more history. Back in the days when this program was started, there were only a couple of programs capable of downloading shows from a ReplayTV 40xx. DVArchive was in it’s infancy. ReplayPC and Guide Parser were open source programs written in C with a command line interface (DOS Prompt) and was the basis for other programs including ReplayNT. WINReplay was written as a Windows wrapper around the command line interfaces. QVision was a somewhat a later development that would not only download programs but also promised streaming capability (never materialized). DVArchive at that time had a significant advantage over all these programs in that it could not only download but could also stream back to a ReplayTV 40xx and to this date is still the only program that can stream back to a ReplayTV. There was an active developer community with many programs being developed to extend the capabilities of the ReplayTV platform.
ReplayNT had its beginning in these “heady” days. It really was an inspiration from WINReplay (thanks Rich A.!). I wanted to make a better download program that did not require calls to a shell command to perform ReplayPC commands as others have done. Instead I took the source code for ReplayPC and Guider Parser and used portions of them to create a single DLL that I could then tightly integrate with ReplayNT. Thankfully, the OpenSource source code was kept up to date and was modified to support both 4xxx and 5xxx ReplayTV devices. I took advantage of this and modified my DLL so that it could interface correctly with both platforms.
I have not elected to take advantage of any of the new features available (scheduling in particular) in the 5xxx devices. Since I own both a 4080 and a 5060 I wanted any software I would write to have the same feature set between the two platforms. This current version of ReplayNT was written in the spirit of this objective.
ReplayNT has the ability to get guide information from an unlimited number of ReplayTVs, download shows from same both manually and automatically, output the files to different directories for each ReplayTV or group of ReplayTVs, and remote control ReplayTVs.