TiVo is awesome and changed my life. I highly recommend it. And I also recommend that you get the subscription, because I think you /think/ you won't record much, but tivo might convince you otherwise

However, if you do want to drop the subscription, then TiVo doesn't get you /too/ much over the player/recorder. w/o subscription you lose guide data, so you can only setup manual records. I think you still get pause/rewind/etc of live tv, but i almost never /watch/ live tv, so I don't know for sure.

Anyway, as with almost any TiVo user, I'm completely passionate about the product but I find it impossible to easily convince people to get it other than to say you won't regret it and two months from now you'll wonder how you survived without it

ms