PVR Disk Storage

[Karl Foster]

Here's a dumb question for you experts out there:

A Dish Network PVR 501 has a 80GB hard drive and will store up to 60 hours.

An Ultimatetv PVR has a 80GB hard drive and will store up to 70 hours.

A Dish Network PVR 721 has a 120GB hard drive and will store up to 90 hours.

An Ultimatetv PVR has a 120GB hard drive and will store up to 105 hours.

Are the bitstreams that are being stored that different? Why the difference?

[James_F]

How big is the OS on a Dish PVR compared to a UTV? Are UTV specs overestimated and Dish PVR underestimated? Isn't there a disclaimer that says that actual hours may vary?

[Karl Foster]

Both say "up to" for the hours. I hadn't taken into account the operating system, though. See, I told you I wan't a technical expert! :D

[Scott Greczkowski]

On the Dish PVR's there is space put asside for Dish Network use.

Chances are good that this space will be used to store PPV movies on your Hard Drive for Video on Demand service.

[HarryD]

I don't think we'll ever have a concrete answer> We can all test it on our machines. Start recording and when it bumps one of your recordings, it's full...
I have the Taken series scheduled so we'll see (stock UTV)

[Bill D]

I actually got down to 42 minutes on my 721... I must have been low and probably taped a Giants game sunday (4 hours) plus all the Sunday HBO stuff, followed by all the kids shows in the morning. I think most of the time is and estimate anyone dependign on whether you record stations that have higher or lower bandwidth, I.e. ESPN, compared to PPV preview channel..

[slojim]

I've wondered about this for some time too!
I've been able to get as many as 74 hrs. on my Seagate 80gb for my 7200 for 6 mos.
How come these other HD's get fewer hrs.?...........Jim

[gcutler]

Some PVRs set asside "Reserved Area". TiVo does it for the OS and for those BMW movies and other stuff you don't record but shows up. Supposedly a certain amount of the 721 will be set aside for VOD and other stuff (same might apply to the 50x) Where as the 7x00 dosen't do it at all???

[HarryD]

I have five Taken episdoes recorded on my UTV (along w/ other stuff) Checking my space tells me I'm at 69% full. I watched the first Taken episode, then deleted it. Now I'm at 61% full.
Maybe it's safe to say that a SD non-DD two hour show takes up approximately 8-9% of a 40 gig HD .

[Unthinkable]

Originally posted by karl_f
Here's a dumb question for you experts out there:

A Dish Network PVR 501 has a 80GB hard drive and will store up to 60 hours.


Don't you mean 508 here?

[Jacob S]

Don't the 501 have a 40 GB hard drive with 30 recordable hours and the 508 with a 80 GB hard drive with 60 recordable hours? I think people still call the 508 a 501. Thats just like calling a 7200 a 7100 when they doubled the hard drive size.

I wonder if they are going to double the hard drive size or at least increase it again or just come out with a new receiver when new larger hard drives come out again, or maybe they will lower the price. Maybe they should offer an upgrade on the previous 501 receivers like they did on the 7100's. I suppose this may not happen because there is not as much of a need for more hard drive space now like there was with the dishplayer when it only had 5 hours (I had one and boy did that suck).

[DarrellP]

Dish OS must be extremely small, what with the lack of error checking and features in their OS. That or it is totally bloated (emulating MS programming that gives you nothing for much code).