Typical size of 1hr HD program?

I think those numbers may be a tad high, but not by much. However, it also depends on what the content is. Sports and other fast moving action takes up more space than C-SPAN or a news channel would.

DirecTV limits their VOD speeds to about 7-8 mbps per subscriber so that, or commonly your ISP, is the bottleneck in that situation.

Kevin

JerryMeeker said:

I am trying to estimate the time it will take to download a 1-hour HD VOD program (for viewing later). I know my network connection speed, of course, but am having some difficulty estimating the size of a typical one hour of HD content (normal programming, not sports).

In the past, I have estimated approximately 150 hours of HD capacity for a 1TB drive, which calculates to between 6GB/Hr and 7GB/Hr for HD content. Is this number high?

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Kevin F said:

I think those numbers may be a tad high, but not by much. However, it also depends on what the content is. Sports and other fast moving action takes up more space than C-SPAN or a news channel would.

DirecTV limits their VOD speeds to about 7-8 mbps per subscriber so that, or commonly your ISP, is the bottleneck in that situation.

Kevin

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By "a tad" high, I'd put them closer to 2x as much. Somewhere around 3.6 GB/hour seems closer.
As for VOD, some HD movies can be as low as 6 Mb/s, as I've downloaded a series off of Starz, where 10 shows came in 10 hours over a 6 Mb/s connection.

Moving to a 12 Mb/s connection has had HD come through at about 1:1, but the DirecTV side does limit their end to 7-8 Mb/s

Or u can be like me and have a 2 hour VOD movie take 16 hours to download..I have high speed comcast and the PS3 right next to it gets 10mps download speed.. I was told on these boards that some ISP's do this...Even after the VOD downloaded it was unwatchable....several stops and such...good luck if u have comcast ..

Thanks for the feedback. I always have trouble with the math when I try and make sense of hard drive sizes on a DVR.

Take, for example, my HR24-500, which has a 500GB drive. It is currently at 88%, or 12% used. I look at the recorded HD programs, and I count 17 hours of content. Assuming some reserved capacity (say 50GB), this translates to 54GB in use, which in turn translates to 3.2GB per hour of HD content.

At 3.2GB per hour, this would mean a 1TB drive could hold over 300 hours of HD content which, according to what I have been led to believe, is twice as much HD content as a 1TB drive can hold.

Where is my math error?

Also, with a 5MBit/sec download bandwidth for my DSL connection, a 3.2GB VOD would take approximately 85 minutes to download, assuming the download uses 100% of my DSL bandwidth. This seems pretty close to what I am seeing, so the 3.2GB/Hr for HD content seems like a closer estimate than 7GB/Hr.

There is 100GB reserved by DirecTV, so you have only 400GB available space. That typically gives you about 200 hours of mpeg4 HD recording. If you have an OTA receiver (AM21) as part of your system, that is mpeg2 and uses roughly twice as much space for HD.

carl6 said:

There is 100GB reserved by DirecTV, so you have only 400GB available space. That typically gives you about 200 hours of mpeg4 HD recording. If you have an OTA receiver (AM21) as part of your system, that is mpeg2 and uses roughly twice as much space for HD.

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Might want to check your math this morning.
The HR20 has 50 hours.
The HR24 has 100 hours
The HR34 should have just over 200 hours.

JerryMeeker said:

Thanks for the feedback. I always have trouble with the math when I try and make sense of hard drive sizes on a DVR.

Where is my math error?

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First off every program will have a different file size, so we need to talk in generalities.

A 500 GB drive, when formatted [on my PC] ends up with about 450 GB storage.

With the older HR20, and a 300 GB drive, for every 1 hour of MPEG-4 HD, it would show it used 2% of the space.
With a HR24, it's 1%.
These are very gross measurements, so as more programs are recorded/deleted, this varies slightly.

veryoldschool said:

Might want to check your math this morning.
The HR20 has 50 hours.
The HR24 has 100 hours
The HR34 should have just over 200 hours.

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My extensive calculations for a few weeks/months after installing a 2 TB drive confirms your estimates (at least for the HR34). I let the drive fill up 10% and then did the calculations, over and over again with different programs making up the 10%, as I deleted old stuff and added new.

What I came up with was approximately 450 hours of MPEG-4 HD recording time.

What I also discovered is that I am an unrepentant data cleaner, and rarely, if ever see my drive with less than 80% free, even though I do a lot of recording.

"carl6" said:

There is 100GB reserved by DirecTV, so you have only 400GB available space. That typically gives you about 200 hours of mpeg4 HD recording. If you have an OTA receiver (AM21) as part of your system, that is mpeg2 and uses roughly twice as much space for HD.

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Wow, so OTA HD is double in size! Good to know when I need space, to take locals of the SAT to save space. Won't do it though during rainy season though for he most important stuff. Thanks for he information.

gio12 said:

Wow, so OTA HD is double in size! Good to know when I need space, to take locals of the SAT to save space. Won't do it though during rainy season though for he most important stuff. Thanks for he information.

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OTA varies so it might not be twice, but it's not that far off [to be safe].

veryoldschool said:

OTA varies so it might not be twice, but it's not that far off [to be safe].

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Correct, it's MPEG2 so it takes up more space, and its OTA which typically will have the highest data rate, so it takes even more space. But it is the best broadcast quality you can receive in your home.