Question about video quality...

[M Bison]

Ok, I have an old series 1, Phillips TiVo and I recently bought an HDTV. Now, the picture is really awful and I am using the best recording options. I seem to recall seeing that even on the best recording option, the unit still compresses the video. And I also seem to recall a hack to make it not compress video at all.

Is there such an option or am I out of luck?

TIA

[captain_video]

There will always be some compression involved since it is recorded as mpeg2 video. You can hack the unit to install TivoWebPlus and then change the resolution to 720x480 at best quality. You may not necessarily see a drastic change in quality since there will always be some degradation with respect to the original source video, especially if it originated from a digital source like DirecTV or Dish. Your best bet would be to get a newer HDTivo to record and playback all of your HD shows in Hi-Def.

[M Bison]

Well, I am currently using an old, series 1 Phillips TiVo. I plan on getting a new TiVo once the Series 3 hits the shelves. Until then, I'm not buying anything else. Any suggestions on a place to get a FAQ on getting TivoWebPlus up and running on my TiVo?

I have a hacked TiVo series 1 with the TiveNet upgrade and larger hardrives.

[lrhorer]

There will always be some compression involved since it is recorded as mpeg2 video.

'Not just "some". A "broadcast quality" raw SD NTSC Video stream requires a minimum of 120Mbps for an 8 bit digitization depth or 150Mbps for a 10 bit stream. That's 900 / 1125 Megabytes per minute. At that rate, a single two hour movie would require 108G / 135G of disk storage. A 2 hour 1080i HD stream would rquire over 500Gigs of storage. SD MPEG2 streams run 5 - 6 Mbps, or about 2G per hour. I haven't actually looked at any HD MPEG2 streams, but they probably should run around 50 Mbps or so.