32 Hours of HD? for S3 How...

[keithaxis]

does Tivo get the figures or guestimates for that? I am curious because I can find no way to track my use of the hard drive in the Tivo that is supposedly 250Gb. Is there any way to view the properties of that drive that someone with PC experience can do to see that? or can you somehow find that through Tivo desktop as it links up to my Tivo via the network?

Basically the above subject comes from me knowing that a station like HBO transmits 12 - 14 Mbps for their programming and some 720p stations put out a little less and 1080i stations that do not multicast a lot put out 16-19Mbps which of course would eat up a lot more disk on the drive than one that puts out much lesser bandwidth.

Thanks for any info on reading the HD in the Tivo,

Keith
Comcast Pierce County

[pauldy]

16Mb/s = 2MB/s = 120MB/m = 7.2GB/h
250GB/s/7.2GB/h = 34.72h

19Mbp/s = 2.375MB/s = 142.5MB/m = 8.55GB/h
250GB/8.55GB/h = 29.23h

(34.72h+29.23h)/2=31.95h

Looking at this it appears to me a good educated guess is that they may have used the average worse case as the baseline and you can assume the amount of free space on your unit will fluctuate based off the recorded streams source bit rate. I just got my s3 last night to hack with but given some of the shenanigans I've seen with this platform it may be back at the store by next weekend.

[hookbill]

16Mb/s = 2MB/s = 120MB/m = 7.2GB/h
250GB/s/7.2GB/h = 34.72h

19Mbp/s = 2.375MB/s = 142.5MB/m = 8.55GB/h
250GB/8.55GB/h = 29.23h

(34.72h+29.23h)/2=31.95h

Looking at this it appears to me a good educated guess is that they may have used the average worse case as the baseline and you can assume the amount of free space on your unit will fluctuate based off the recorded streams source bit rate. I just got my s3 last night to hack with but given some of the shenanigans I've seen with this platform it may be back at the store by next weekend.


Wow. pauldy, you should work for the FBI. That's amazing math. I don't understand it really but it looks impressive. :up:

[abadan]

Wow. pauldy, you should work for the FBI. That's amazing math. I don't understand it really but it looks impressive. :up:


Yep it goes to show people who by HD Tivos are smart. I was wondering also about the 32 hours and you explained it perfectly.

Now only if you could get the ASPECT button on S3 to work on the digital channels not the analog channels!!

[acvthree]

The aspect button works with digital channels in my setup. I use it on the SciFi channel all the time. It has to be 480i, but digital or analog isn't an issue.

Does that qualify as smart? :-)

Al

[synch22]

32 hours makes me a bit nervous. As someone with a 160gb series 2 with lifetime i cna just pack on the recordings with no worries. Would i feel cheated if i went series 3? I knowyou can upgrade but i already would be $800 in with the cost of the box and lifetime transfer so that would not be an immediate option.

[morac]

That's supposed to be where the external SATA port comes in. Whenever it gets enabled it will make upgrading the storage very easy.
Plug in a Terabyte drive and get another 128 hours of HD recording :)

[aaronwt]

But also won't that external drive become married to the internal one, or will we be able to disconnect the external drive whenever we want?

[pl1]

32 hours makes me a bit nervous. As someone with a 160gb series 2 with lifetime i cna just pack on the recordings with no worries. Would i feel cheated if i went series 3? I knowyou can upgrade but i already would be $800 in with the cost of the box and lifetime transfer so that would not be an immediate option

You can get a 500GB drive for $150 and double your storage youself, if you are at all handy with computers. These directions worked great for me. It was easy.

http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php (http://)

[kjmcdonald]

But also won't that external drive become married to the internal one, or will we be able to disconnect the external drive whenever we want?

That has been theorized as a possibility but nothing has been set in stone I think.

Where would you want to move it to? even if you can disconnect it, I doubt you'd be able to get anything meaningful off of it connected to your PC or even another Tivo.

Note that even if it is married to the tivo, nothing stops you from removing it from the tivo, formating it on a PC and using it for some not-tivo purpose. IOW it's not like it becomes useless.

-Kyle

[pl1]

Where would you want to move it to?

You might want to archive shows or movies. And, that is one of the concerns TiVo is dealing with so I hear.

[SullyND]

Note that even if it is married to the tivo, nothing stops you from removing it from the tivo, formating it on a PC and using it for some not-tivo purpose. IOW it's not like it becomes useless.

If EATA works like the dual drive TiVos however, while you may be able to remove the external drive and reformat it for other uses, you'll be toasting your internal drive as well (and the nature of relying on two drives increases the likelihood of a fatal failure)

[DeathRider]

If EATA works like the dual drive TiVos however, while you may be able to remove the external drive and reformat it for other uses, you'll be toasting your internal drive as well (and the nature of relying on two drives increases the likelihood of a fatal failure)

I would hope it doesn't work in that fashion.

Dual drive Tivos, don't they stripe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_striping) the info like in raid 0?

I would hope, when an esata drive is plugged in, the S3 would just give you an option of which drive you want to record the program. that way, you can swap external drives as space needed, like an USB drive on a computer.

[pauldy]

Wow. pauldy, you should work for the FBI. That's amazing math. I don't understand it really but it looks impressive. :up:

The only thing about their assumptions on this is that a 250GB HD != 250GB of data storage. Hard drive makers use base 1000 (10^3) for Kilo, Mega, Giga... Data storage however is base 1024 (2^10) this means that when a hard drive manufacturer says 250GB there is only ~238GB of actual data storage.

Given that the actual worse case for storage is closer to 30.5 hours without taking into account space for the TiVo software itself. To me this is kind of a rookie mistake and having been there since the series one and seeing how they handled the engineering there and how thorough they were I'm a bit nervous about this device and some of the gotchas I've already encountered and I've only owned the device for 2 days.

Also, I doubt anyone out there will ever hit 30h of full bit rate content but I'm comparing these results to the claims of the 30h S1 TiVo which was able to record more than 30h at the rate they claimed. It would have been just as easy for them to market this device as a 30h HD recorder. It disappoints me they did not have the same attention to detail here and now as they did 7+ years ago.

[pauldy]

I would hope it doesn't work in that fashion.

Dual drive Tivos, don't they stripe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_striping) the info like in raid 0?

I would hope, ehen a esata drive is plugged in, the S3 would just give you an option of which drive you want to record the program. that way, you can swap external drives as space needed.

There should be no prompting of which drive to save to as that would make it much less of a TiVo experience. Someone else already mentioned of how it should be simply if the drive has been removed the device should prompt you to remove the recordings that are no longer available and if you choose not to just show the recordings grayed out that are no longer accessible.

Stripping works where the same file is written across multiple drives so that a single file might be spread across multiple drives. This means removing a drive would take away ~half of any given recording in a two drive config. The way I understand the current MFS structure and block sizes there is little reason to stripe the data but it would not surprise me if they did just in case for the original devices and there has been no reason for them to revisit that.

[DeathRider]

I wasn't sure, but going by SullyND's description of a dual drive Tivo (or how you can go from 1 drive to 2, but not vice versa), was thinking tivo striped the drives so they show up as 1 big drive and not 2 smaller ones.

Plugging in a esata drive isn't exactly normal "TiVo Experience" - at least not yet. But it can be relatively seamless/painless.

I don't see why it can't be, you plug the drive in, the Tivo automatically adds the programs to your "Now Playing list, showing up as a seperate folder.

Then the tivo would offer you another option to "transfer to esata" lke they have "save to VCR"

[randywalters]

I don't know if this helps, but a couple of times i had 37 hours of HD programming in my Now Playing list along with a few hours worth of SD (Speedchannel) and i think it had a little room to spare (some shows had yellow dots but no exclamation point).

[morac]

The way dual drive TiVos work currently, if you take out the 2nd drive (or it fails), the TiVo won't even boot. You'd need to wipe the initial drive and reinstall the TiVo software.

Supposedly removing the ESATA drive won't be as drastic and you'll only lose recording that are on the drive (even if only a small portion of the recording is on the drive). I haven't read what happens if you plug the drive back in. Do you get them back or are they gone once the drive is removed? I'm assuming it's the former because it would be very bad if someone lost tons of recording because the external drive's power cut out or someone accidentally removed the ESATA cable.

[David Platt]

Pony said at the TCCON in Vegas that when using an eSATA drive, they will be married. When removing it, you will be prompted that you will lose ALL of your shows if you remove the drive.

[kosherbacon]

Pony said at the TCCON in Vegas that when using an eSATA drive, they will be married. When removing it, you will be prompted that you will lose ALL of your shows if you remove the drive.

MPAA is Darth Vader and DRM is their Death Star.

[SullyND]

MPAA is Darth Vader and DRM is their Death Star.

While that is true, the MPAA likely has no bearing on the issue of external hard drive removal on a TiVo - at least this issue.

[David Platt]

MPAA is Darth Vader and DRM is their Death Star.

I really don't think this has anything to do with DRM or the MPAA. Pony described it as working exactly how two-drive TiVos have worked all along: the drives are married. You can't remove one without wiping the hard drive and starting over.

[morac]

Pony said at the TCCON in Vegas that when using an eSATA drive, they will be married. When removing it, you will be prompted that you will lose ALL of your shows if you remove the drive.
That is kind of dangerous. What if the external drive loses power or someone trips over the connection cord? As long as the ability to plug the drive back in before the TiVo goes ahead and wipes the data, I don't have a problem with the drives being "married".

Also dual drive TiVos are completely "married", as in the TiVo won't even boot if the 2nd drive is removed. It sounds like this isn't the same.

[Leo_N]

Ideally there should be a "Remove External Drive" maintenance option. this would let you transfer any content over to just the internal drive.

Hopefully even if this isn't in there to begin with, it gets added.

[gwsat]

Wow. pauldy, you should work for the FBI. That's amazing math. I don't understand it really but it looks impressive. :up:
Yep, it reminds me of Jessica Simpson’s D* ad, where she says, in her best Southern Bimbo accent: “It’s 1080i. I totally don’t know what that means – but I want it.”

[David Platt]

That is kind of dangerous. What if the external drive loses power or someone trips over the connection cord? As long as the ability to plug the drive back in before the TiVo goes ahead and wipes the data, I don't have a problem with the drives being "married".

Also dual drive TiVos are completely "married", as in the TiVo won't even boot if the 2nd drive is removed. It sounds like this isn't the same.

The "marrying" will be a little different-- if you remove the external drive or boot without it hooked up, the TiVo will prompt you that the second drive is missing and give you the option of either hooking it back up or wiping out all your shows and booting to a 'like new' state. Of course, none of this was finalized when Pony was describing it, so it's subject to change.