Does 100 hours mean 100 hours?

[sir DISHalot]

I was wondering from those of you who have a 510 what is the capacity for recording. Is it really 95-100 hours or is signifigantly lower such as 60 hours.

[scooper]

Depends on what programming you watch and what bit-rate E* sends it out. A 2 hour movie on HBO will take more than 2 hours on your locals, 2 hours on PPV should take more than the HBO. Football will take more than CNN. The music channels take very little.

[Bob Haller]

I would say for our family its around 10% less than 100 hours, to be on the safe side. In any case most folks probably will not fill it up and always archive to videotape anything you cant loose.

[Cyclone]

The trouble is that a DVR records to a hard disk and not to a tape like a VCR. The VCR moves the tape and a constant speed, so they know that a certain length of tape is needed for a 6hr VHS tape cassette. And that no matter what the material is, the 6hr VCR tape will run out at exactly 6hrs.

Now with a DVR, it records directly from the satellites digital signal directly to the hard disk. Using compression, the amount of data needed to be recorded onto a hard disk varies based on what the material is.

If you record the "Congratulations, you have a Dish500" channel for an hour, The video on that channel never changes, so it will compress easily and highly efficiently. Only the music changes. So recording an hour of that Channel might only take 50MB.

Now on the other extreme, take an action packed movie, where the screen is always changing. Reduce the compression if its on a premium or PPV channel. Now an hour of this channel might actually take 1GB or more.

So you can see its really how much Diskspace is available instead of actual hours. So your mileage may vary.

I record a lot of Futurama shows. Since they are cartoons (same colors over wide areas and repeated frames) they compress nicely. So I don't use up nearly the amount of "available" hours as I would by recording others shows.

[Bob Haller]

Wonder how many hours of music or talking heads the box could hold. I am too lazy to try it

[TomCat]

Real world figures do not really support the spin supplied by DISH, and parroted back within this thread. No one I ever knew or heard of ever reached the 35 hour mark on a 501. The two times I actually filled mine up it held about 27-28 hours.

DISH may have created these arbitrary "capacity" figures from realistic useage, but my guess is that they are more likely pulled directly out of someone's ass. Maybe under strict laboratory conditions recording just the easy listening audio channel you might reach 35 hours on a 501, but in the real world? Not very likely. This means that "100 hours" is probably more equivalent to "82-84 hours". Of course that's still better than a standalone, where the rated capacity is about 3 times what you might expect at the useable/best quality settings.

[zman977]

Real world figures do not really support the spin supplied by DISH, and parroted back within this thread. No one I ever knew or heard of ever reached the 35 hour mark on a 501. The two times I actually filled mine up it held about 27-28 hours.

DISH may have created these arbitrary "capacity" figures from realistic useage, but my guess is that they are more likely pulled directly out of someone's ass. Maybe under strict laboratory conditions recording just the easy listening audio channel you might reach 35 hours on a 501, but in the real world? Not very likely. This means that "100 hours" is probably more equivalent to "82-84 hours". Of course that's still better than a standalone, where the rated capacity is about 3 times what you might expect at the useable/best quality settings.

We actually reached thirty four and a half hours on our 501. We were on vacation back in July and recorded a bunch of tech tv, Screen savers, x play, a few movies and a nascarr race and the sitcom re runs my wife insists on watching.

[TomCat]

Very interesting. This is not that different from what I record. Maybe it has something to do with fragmented space. IOW, if you record and randomly watch and remove individual shows in a jumbled order, maybe that affects the total, where if you just leave the house and record for 35 hours of programs in a row (assuming an empty HD) which would be similar to recording one 35-hour program, more stuff fits. That actually makes more sense than the difference in bit rates from channel to channel. Curious.

[DarrellP]

My locals have gotten so bad that I am getting about an hour of recorded program to an hour of PVR time where I used to get about 1/2-3/4 hr program to an hour of PVR space. I would much rather be getting 20 hours on my 501 than 30, the quality is totally lacking at the moment, but Dish could care less.