Not really believing the 75HD hours thing...

[samsgood]

Alright, so I have had my premiere for close to a week now and I decided to test out the space by basically keeping all recording even though I want to delete them. I just want to see how much space I actually have.

Currently, I have 15 things recorded. They are all HD and all of them have an extra 2 minutes on them because I record everything 1 minute before and 1 minute after the scheduled time of a show. It is all one hour shows so including the extra time, that's 15 hours and 30 minutes of recordings. The space bar at the top says 47%.

Now unless I am mistaken, if this thing can hold 75 hours of HD programming, shouldn't 15 or so hours be less than 47% of the available space? :/

[btwyx]

My Premier XL currently has 112hours 47minutes and 19 seconds of HD content. And probably a bit of SD as well. Most of that is Olympic coverage. Of course it should hold 150 hours.

[CoxInPHX]

The rough average of all my HD recordings is 5GB/Hr.

Low being 3.35GB/Hr to a High of 6.64GB/Hr.

So 5GB x 75Hrs on my system is roughly 375GB of the 500GB HDD (must account space for TiVo software partitions)

My 2TB Elite has 206Hrs - 885GB Used, and the Meter shows 49% used. (There are several Hours SD on this TiVo)

My 2TB Premiere has 284Hrs - 1367GB used and the Meter shows 75% used.

[Ed_Hunt]

It all depends on the shows themselves. I have some one hour shows that take as much as 6 gigs and some that take as little as 300 megs. Thats what you have to go by, not the number of shows but how much space each takes up.

[compnurd]

If any of that is OTA, you will be on the high end of storage amount per show. OTA is basically uncompressed MPEG-2 and will eat up a huge amount of space(good though because of quality) The rest just depends on how much your cable company compresses the video.

[samsgood]

Is there at all a way to see how many gigs/megs a specific show takes up or is that something you don't get to see?

[Larry in TN]

Originally Posted by samsgood

Is there at all a way to see how many gigs/megs a specific show takes up or is that something you don't get to see?

Highlight the show in Now Playing > Press [Select] > Press [Info]

[jrtroo]

OP- you are looking at these as if they have an amount of precision that they do not have.

1- You are talking hours, and comparing it to disk space. How much of you disk space is take in GB?

2- Your 47% used is an approximation on its own- you are treating the value as if its some exact measure. It is not. It does not include things in your suggestions or deleted folder. I'm not sure how it accounts for reserving capacity for upcoming shows, if it were me I would include items scheduled to record in the block but I did not create the bar. I see no need for it.

3- The 75 hours is "up to"- each content provider uses differently sized shows due to compression.

If you are so concerned about size- upgrade the drive. Its relatively easy. One of my first steps with a new TiVo.

[samsgood]

Originally Posted by Larry in TN

Highlight the show in Now Playing > Press [Select] > Press [Info]

TY.

Originally Posted by jrtroo

OP- you are looking at these as if they have an amount of precision that they do not have.

1- You are talking hours, and comparing it to disk space. How much of you disk space is take in GB?

2- Your 47% used is an approximation on its own- you are treating the value as if its some exact measure. It is not. It does not include things in your suggestions or deleted folder. I'm not sure how it accounts for reserving capacity for upcoming shows, if it were me I would include items scheduled to record in the block but I did not create the bar. I see no need for it.

3- The 75 hours is "up to"- each content provider uses differently sized shows due to compression.

If you are so concerned about size- upgrade the drive. Its relatively easy. One of my first steps with a new TiVo.

TY. I didn't take all the things into account that you said and it all makes sense. And yes, if push does come to shove, I will just upgrade the drive. I have read about doing that and it seems simple enough.

[Aero 1]

Originally Posted by samsgood

Is there at all a way to see how many gigs/megs a specific show takes up or is that something you don't get to see?

http://code.google.com/p/kmttg/

[aaronwt]

Originally Posted by jrtroo

OP- you are looking at these as if they have an amount of precision that they do not have.

1- You are talking hours, and comparing it to disk space. How much of you disk space is take in GB?

2- Your 47% used is an approximation on its own- you are treating the value as if its some exact measure. It is not. It does not include things in your suggestions or deleted folder. I'm not sure how it accounts for reserving capacity for upcoming shows, if it were me I would include items scheduled to record in the block but I did not create the bar. I see no need for it.

3- The 75 hours is "up to"- each content provider uses differently sized shows due to compression.

If you are so concerned about size- upgrade the drive. Its relatively easy. One of my first steps with a new TiVo.

The hours are also based on MPEG2 content. So if MPEG4 content is being recorded that will use even less space providing even more hours.

[lillevig]

As a previous poster said, use kmttg (or even the free Tivo Desktop) to see the disk space used in GB. I prefer kmttg.

[steve614]

I think the disk space meter was just put in to appease all the people who have been asking for it all these years.
IMO it's no more accurate than the old method of keeping track of available space: the Recently Deleted and/or Suggestions folders.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by steve614

I think the disk space meter was just put in to appease all the people who have been asking for it all these years.
IMO it's no more accurate than the old method of keeping track of available space: the Recently Deleted and/or Suggestions folders.

So it's like the fuel gauge in my mom's Buick.

More for entertainment value than actual information.

[scandia101]

Originally Posted by jrtroo

2- Your 47% used is an approximation on its own- you are treating the value as if its some exact measure. It is not.

It's not difficult for any computer to determine how many GB are available and how many of those GB have been used and determine a percentage. The To Do List, Suggestions, and the Recently deleted Folder have nothing to do with the available space.

[aaronwt]

Originally Posted by unitron

So it's like the fuel gauge in my mom's Buick.

More for entertainment value than actual information.

Since every car fuel gauge is non linear, they have never been accurate.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by aaronwt

Since every car fuel gauge is non linear, they have never been accurate.

If you want to get picky, the problem is, and likely always has been, with the sender and not the gauge, but in the case of mom's Buick we're talking about turn the corner and it leaps from near empty to trying to peg the needle on full.

It's like not only does the tank have no anti-slosh baffles, it somehow has pro-slosh baffles.

[theraven146]

Why don't you check the space using you PC. The size of your file varies and its not just the time period. A High Definition video of just five or seven minutes can sometimes occupy more space than an ordinary video of 2 hrs or 3 hrs. Again high definition video size varies clips to clips. So check out on the size of the video instead of the time.

[ltxi]

Originally Posted by steve614

I think the disk space meter was just put in to appease all the people who have been asking for it all these years.
IMO it's no more accurate than the old method of keeping track of available space: the Recently Deleted and/or Suggestions folders.

Personally....relative though it may be, I find it quite usefull.

[ScottP461]

Originally Posted by compnurd

OTA is basically uncompressed MPEG-2.

I really wish people would stop calling OTA digital TV uncompressed! MPEG-2 IS a compression scheme! Uncompressed digital video uses MASSIVE amounts of space!

Yes, OTA is the least compressed signal that you can receive, since cable and satellite providers compress it even more, but ALL digital video at the consumer level is compressed!

Now, on to the actual subject of this thread. I've been recording the Olympics and have also noticed that my reported available capacity (in System Information) seems to be off by about the difference between the space used by MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 for the same recording. I haven't calculated the exact difference, but that seems about right. I'm set up OTA only on my XL's and have DirecTV DVR's (ALL HD is MPEG-4) for everything else. So I don't know if digital cable/FIOS is MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. That might account for the difference (if the available capacity is based on MPEG-4, not MPEG-2).

[compnurd]

99% of cable companies use MPEG 2. Fios and some others have a select amount of channels starting to use MPEG 4

[aaronwt]

FiOS is using MPEG2 for the Olympic channels since all their boxes are MPEG2 capable. While a minority of them are MPEG4 capable. And for the Olympics coverage they need to make sure all their subscribers have access.

Their most recent HD additions(The recent HD Spanish channels and the baseball channels) have been in MPEG4.