942 to Mpeg 4--More recording time?

[bookwalk]

IF we had our 942 swapped out for Mpeg-4, would the entire unit be swapped, or just a module or something?

In any case, would Mpeg-4 give us more than the 20 hours of HD recording time we now have? That's if the harddrive stays the same at 250 gig?

Pat

:hi: If you will be a new subscriber to Dish, before you sign up--get a Club Dish Referral Number and save $50 on the activation (in addition to the $49.99 credit on your first bill).
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[SimpleSimon]

IF we had our 942 swapped out for Mpeg-4, would the entire unit be swapped, or just a module or something?

In any case, would Mpeg-4 give us more than the 20 hours of HD recording time we now have? That's if the harddrive stays the same at 250 gig?

Pat

:hi: If you will be a new subscriber to Dish, before you sign up--get a Club Dish Referral Number and save $50 on the activation (in addition to the $49.99 credit on your first bill).
PM (click on my username) me for a Referral number.
Entire unit - the 942 is NOT upgradeable.

Yes, MPEG4 should take less disk space per minute than MPEG2.

[Jacob S]

How much less space would MPEG-4 take up compared to MPEG-2?

[Ron Barry]

That all depends on compression settings used to deliver the MPEG-4 stream. I have always been rather skeptical on the promise of delivering the same PQ as a much reduced rate.

Well I would say if you were able to put 4 channels where 2 was before, the conclusion would be 2x on the drive. So you could go from 20 to 40. If you were to go for 2 channels per trans to 6 then that would be a 3x improvement. In any case it should be a step up on HD recording space.

The 64 dollar question will PQ be the same, less, or better. THat is the one I am very curious about.

[StevenD]

Also, hard drive prices drop every day. They may start putting larger hard drives in the newer models as well.

[gijohn]

Any guesstimates with an MPEG4 DVR/HD box?? Are we talking about 6 months? 18 months?

[normang]

i say 18 months

[Jacob S]

By the time the reciever swap would occur the hard drive space will have increased by probably 50-100% plus if we get 2-3 times as many channels with the new compression then we could see 3-4 times as much space in which Dish Network may use for multiple tuners sharing that one hard drive and/or additional interactivity and games stored on the hard drive and more movies on demand. They could have a four room setup with a fifth tuner dedicated to downloading movies and information to the hard drive for each room to access when they want. Could software be downloaded from the satellite as a file in order to get a movie or game a bit quicker than what you could recieve it by recording it live as it would do now?