Tivo thinks it's full but it's not!

[DrZ]

My DTivo says that it can't record anything because it full. However, it has less than 20 hours of programming saved and Nothing on the "To Do" list. Is there a way to remind it that it still has about 20 hrs left?

[litzdog911]

Are your Season Passes set for "Keep Until I Delete"? If so, your Tivo is calculating the future space required for those recordings, and will limit your current recordings if it thinks there's not enough space. You can upgrade your Tivo hard drive (see the resources in the Tivo Upgrade Center Forum here), or limit using the "Keep Until I Delete" option.

[tbeckner]

In addition to litzdog911's post, a standard 35 hour DirecTiVo will only hold between 24 and 28 hours of DirecTV programming, depending upon the compression and/or content, just like a cars gas mileage, YOUR MILEAGE MIGHT VARY. :)

And the DirecTiVo will start complaining about storage when scheduling new programs long before it reaches 28 hours if you have a number of recordings set to "Keep Until I Delete", like litzdog911 said in his post.

Yes, they fudged alittle about the DirecTiVo recording storage, just like the hard drive manufacturers fudge alittle, and FYI Western Digital just lost a lawsuit over the issue of storage size definition. :D

[Phantom Gremlin]

Sometimes the TiVos seem to store *WAY* less than advertised. My nominally 70 hour R-10 stores about 37 hours of programming. Here's a thread I started about that a few months ago:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4059022&&#post4059022

There are some interesting ideas in that thread. For example, turning on suggestions to see if there is free space, or buying a 300 GB hard disk and forgetting about running out of storage.

TiVo, in it paternalistic arrogrance, has decided not to give us any hooks to help us with figuring out what is wrong. They could have done a few simple things. For example, they could have given us a way to display how many Megabyes each show is taking and how many Megabytes of free space are on the disk. But no, that would have made it too easy to debug problems like this.

[DrZ]

I had thought of that but I know that I've had much more of the tivo than the 20 hrs I have now.....I once had 17 episodes of "Lost" and never had any problems. Maybe these "Tour d' France" shows I was recording for my father in law take up way more space than a typical program.

[rminsk]

In addition to litzdog911's post, a standard 35 hour DirecTiVo will only hold between 24 and 28 hours of DirecTV programming, depending upon the compression and/or content, just like a cars gas mileage, YOUR MILEAGE MIGHT VARY. :)I've had a 35 hour DirecTiVo (a long time ago) that had about 45 hours. I would say the range is closer to 24-45 hours of recording.

[DrZ]

Would a sudden reduction in the amount of drive space indicate a hard drive issue? Could the drive be fragmented? Can you defrag the drive?

[litzdog911]

Would a sudden reduction in the amount of drive space indicate a hard drive issue? Could the drive be fragmented? Can you defrag the drive?

No. Tivo's file system is optimized for large video files and does not need or provide for defragmenting. It's not a hard drive problem. If your recordings are not set for "Keep Until I Delete", then you simply need a larger hard drive.

[Rkkeller]

Glad none of this is the case with my R-10. I have screens and screens and screens full of recordings.

Tips: Dont use KUID and Dont use KAM = all. These will eat your HD space quickly.

[jaydro]

Maybe these "Tour d' France" shows I was recording for my father in law take up way more space than a typical program.Cycling on OLN at times seems to take up way more space than anything I have ever recorded. Most times it comes out as typical sports programming, which itself takes up more space than most recordings, but occasionally it will go way beyond the normal and I will notice a lot of expired "save until space needed" recordings suddenly disappearing during an OLN Cycling recording or, worse yet, if I'm really cutting it close on space the Cycling recording may quit before finishing (I have a lot of KUID recordings, too) or even stranger, it can complete, then after the live buffers fill up again it will change from KUID green dot to a yellow dot!

What's obvious is that there are times when the DTiVo for some reason seriously underestimates the amount of space needed for these recordings, which is very unusual since it usually overestimates. The only other instance of this I've seen is when my local UPN station had a wavy pattern in its reception of UPN shows (the interference would go away during local ad breaks), and this would cause those recordings to take up more space than expected. I'm not sure what's the reason for the OLN Cycling underestimation.

The variable bit rate of DirecTV's encoding can make for more of a headache if you've come from an SA TiVo using fixed bit rate encodings so that you always know how much space a recording is going to consume....

[mhalver]

TiVo, in it paternalistic arrogrance, has decided not to give us any hooks to help us with figuring out what is wrong. They could have done a few simple things. For example, they could have given us a way to display how many Megabyes each show is taking and how many Megabytes of free space are on the disk. But no, that would have made it too easy to debug problems like this.

Under 7.3, it does show how much is taken by each show. Under the show info where it used to give the percentage.

[Dkerr24]

Under 7.3, it does show how much is taken by each show. Under the show info where it used to give the percentage.

That's great for a standalone Tivo owner, but not for us that have Directivo units. We don't have anything that displays that info. There may be a hack that does this, but I haven't seen one.

The easiest solution is to install a cheap large capacity drive. 160gb drives usually on sale for less than $50. That will net you 144 hours of recording time on a Series2 DTivo unit.

[john-duncan-yoyo]

Cycling on OLN at times seems to take up way more space than anything I have ever recorded. Most times it comes out as typical sports programming, which itself takes up more space than most recordings, but occasionally it will go way beyond the normal and I will notice a lot of expired "save until space needed" recordings suddenly disappearing during an OLN Cycling recording or, worse yet, if I'm really cutting it close on space the Cycling recording may quit before finishing (I have a lot of KUID recordings, too) or even stranger, it can complete, then after the live buffers fill up again it will change from KUID green dot to a yellow dot!

FWIW the Tour recordings ending early may be OLN underestimating the running time for the stage that day. TiVo records what OLN told it to expect but they frequently slop over into an extra half hour or so. Tomorrow's stage 15 may well go over by an hour. This is the biggest mountain stage and has often determined the outcome of the race.

I generally pad by 15 or 30 or minutes for the Tour.

[jaydro]

FWIW the Tour recordings ending early may be OLN underestimating the running time for the stage that day.Not worth much, since that wasn't what I was talking about.

[john-duncan-yoyo]

Not worth much, since that wasn't what I was talking about.

Eh I've never seen it stop recording something because it ran out of space, but I have big hardrives in mine. :D It seems more likely it just ran out of time.

[jaydro]

I'm regularly hitting "full" on mine (especially since I was away during the first week of the Tour de France and I just can't seem to catch up) because I keep way too many seasons of various shows as KUID. Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't do that, but I run into other problems with shepherding expire dates of programs if I don't, so.... And I could transfer them to DVD (well, maybe not those HBO shows), but I actually like my TiVo play interface better than my DVD player's....

Sorry if I seemed a little too curt with you there, John Duncan Yoyo.

And to clarify, the times I've seen TiVo stop the recording were with the two-hour taped highlights of cycling that OLN was running before Le Tour started. I've been extra sure to have plenty of space for those disk-gobbling five-plus hour Le Tour shows on OLN. OLN's Cycling shows do seem to take up more space than other sports recordings as if perhaps there's some interference in the picture that the MPEG encoding is struggling with, but which we can't see.

[john-duncan-yoyo]

I'm regularly hitting "full" on mine (especially since I was away during the first week of the Tour de France and I just can't seem to catch up) because I keep way too many seasons of various shows as KUID. Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't do that, but I run into other problems with shepherding expire dates of programs if I don't, so.... And I could transfer them to DVD (well, maybe not those HBO shows), but I actually like my TiVo play interface better than my DVD player's....

Sorry if I seemed a little too curt with you there, John Duncan Yoyo.

And to clarify, the times I've seen TiVo stop the recording were with the two-hour taped highlights of cycling that OLN was running before Le Tour started. I've been extra sure to have plenty of space for those disk-gobbling five-plus hour Le Tour shows on OLN. OLN's Cycling shows do seem to take up more space than other sports recordings as if perhaps there's some interference in the picture that the MPEG encoding is struggling with, but which we can't see.

The only KUID i have right now is Doctor Who and I'll delete that when I get the box set. But I've been there.

Lots of detail + lots of colors + lots of motion. = lots of bytes. Throw in a possible conversion between the French TV standard (SECAM?) to the US TV standard and how many artifacts that could add to complicate the data. I almost put in a second 320 GB drive for the tour. US football has a pretty limited pallet compared to cycling.

[jaydro]

I don't record US football. I do record Formula One Racing which has at least as much detail/colors/motion as Le Tour while also usually having TV format conversion, and with that my DTiVo never has a problem with its usual overestimation of the space requirements. Same goes for the Tour highlights show on CBS. There is something up (sometimes) with Cycling on OLN. And as the OP mentioned recording Le Tour (and I presumed it was from OLN), I thought I'd throw in that observation rather than trying to explain away everything.