Like earlier Sonicblue ReplayTV PVRs, the 5000 will skip commercials and share content with other Sonicblue PVRs over the Internet up to 15 times or stream throughout a house or corporate network. However, support for file sharing with 4000/4500 units won't come until later this year.

The 5000 series also includes features and lets you perform many functions that TiVo can't. Some of these include:

• Skip commercials
• Upload photos from a PC
• Remotely control scheduling over the Web up to a day in advance
• Component 480-line progressive output for digital TVs
• Integrated Ethernet port

Unfortunately, the commercial advance feature can be hit or miss. It worked about 85 percent of the time for us and frequently cut off a couple of seconds re-entering regular programming, which can be annoying. In fact, ReplayTV claims that it will only work well about 70 percent of the time. Still, ReplayTV smartly moved the commercial advance on/off option from a buried menu option to a quicker-to-access button on the remote for those who want to disable it.