My 508 is only getting about 35-45 hours of recording time...why?

[Turbohawk]

The box says that it's a 508 and that it has "up to" 60 hours of recording capacity. I have yet to see more than 40. Did they put the wrong HD in my unit? Or do some shows use more HD space than others?

Thanks.

[Steve Mehs]

When you have no programming on the hard drive does it say 60 hours and 12 minutes? Do you record a lot of programming from premiums and/or PPV? The premium movie channels and PPV channels are less compressed and are at a higher resolution then regular programming.

[cse42]

I've noticed that about HBO and Showtime recordings especially if the broadcast was done in Dolby Digitial. I guess mpeg 2 compression simply is not as good as mpeg 3 or 4. Maybe one day E* will start using the better compression formats.

cse

[scooper]

CSE42 - no way no how - at the bit rates DBS is using, MPEG2 is as good as whatever, besides, the HARDWARE CHIPSETS in the receivers only do MPEG2. Making a jump to DIVX would mean replacing all receivers - NOT an econmically sound decision. MPEG2 was chosen because it can be decoded in then available dedicated hardware, with minimal impact on the slow CPU's available at the time.

[sampatterson]

Do we know how much E* has reserved as "their" space, to download the advertising videos etc that they sometimes download?

[cse42]

Originally posted by scooper
MPEG2 is as good as whatever, besides,

Don't think I would agree with it being as good as whatever...Ogg Vorbis (for audio compression)  for example... free, better, patent-free, better, less cpu, better compression, better period, loss-less, better, faster, cheaper, open source, better.... what can I say? There are and were better choices- even for video compression. But I do agree that mpeg2 does work just fine with the technology that E* is currently using. But I wonder with HD in the future technology path, if mpeg2 will become dated? It might be interesting to keep an eye on it :shrug:

:cool:

cse 

[Mark Holtz]

IIRC correctly, COMPRESSING the signal is more CPU intensive than DECOMPRESSING the signal. Plus, Dish has to compress the signal in real time.

Eventually, Dish and DirecTV will have to bite the bullet and have their receivers upgraded to better codecs for better video quality and being able to compress more channels.

I don't know where Dish or DirecTV will get additional orbital slots that is close to 101/110/119. Ka-band is still experimental. (Sigh)

[P Smith]

Originally posted by sampatterson
Do we know how much E* has reserved as "their" space, to download the advertising videos etc that they sometimes download?

As was point here before - Yahoo Group dishrip have a tool for make a list of your recordings and show a size of each one.

[Wedgecon]

MPEG2 is a standard for broadcast Video which also includes video and audio. The audio alone is not increasing the size of the storage on the drive that much. MP3, Ogg Vorbis and whatever would be completely useless for broadcast video and using one codec for video and one for audio would be hard to implement and keep in sync. The replacement for MPEG2 is MPEG4 which only really adds stuff for streaming media over the internet , for broadcast video MGEG4 does not add very much and it is very expensive to license so everybody has been staying away from it.

I think in a few years they are going to combine a different modulation and compression scheme to improve bandwidth utilization.

[Jacob S]

I think that when they have a receiver swap out they will also try to combine satellites and technology to bring down the price in hardware and satellite launching, so they can share everything, have more channels at less cost, and compete better. If everyone had the same type of receiver the production cost would be MUCH MUCH less than if there several different ones, bc of bulk production. It would also be cheaper to replace as well if one would go bad. This would be the best way of going about this. By the time this would happen some of the satellites would have to be replaced anyways.