Getting the shows out of your ReplayTV

We blogged about Replay's new digital video recorder, the 5504, but CNET caught one special feature about it that we hadn't been aware of: that with a program called DVArchive it's easy to pull the saved TV shows off the 5504's hard drive and store them on your hard drive or burn them to DVD for archiving or watching on a laptop while traveling
(we're not exactly sure if this is legal or not). Not being able to easily extract the video files trapped on its hard drive has been one of the biggest complaints about TiVo. TiVo is supposed to introduce something called TiVo To Go later this year that would you let you transfer shows to a PC, but there are going to be all sorts of restrictions on what you can and cannot do with the files.