TiVo Community Forums Archives - what do you do with the space?

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what do you do with the space?
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Posted by: newsposter

Ok I'm thinking about upgrading. But putting aside the technicalities, I'd like to know one thing. If you upgrade to 120 etc gigs, and have all these hours. when do you have time to watch them all? We wind up deleting stuff sometimes or pushing it ahead, and yes, I guess that's the point of upgrading, but we don't have enough hours in the day and it seems we never catch up.

Sooo what are your plans of attack to watch 300 hours of video?

update 3-11 I should have said I have a combo box but I didn't want to post this to the directivo group. So all my recordings are best quality.

Posted by: weaknees

I think the real answer here is that 300 hours of space isn't really 300 hours of recordings - it's just the number we all use to describe the capacity.

In reality, that's 300 hours at basic quality - and if you watch only soap operas, you might get it. But if you have a big screen TV and/or watch sports or movies, you'll record at a higher quality and watch much, much less.

At best quality, that equates to a little over 80 hours. And that's pretty easy for a family of four to use up. For example, my kids love Blue's Clues. So we have probably 60 different episodes of Blue's Clues on the TiVo, at 30 minutes each, in medium quality. Then we have a host of other kids programming, holiday specials, the Thanksgiving day parade, etc. It sure beats digging out a DVD or VHS and dealing with it.

Then, of course, we want things for the adults, and we go on trips so we need space for a week's worth of programming, etc. It's not too hard to use it up.

Michael

Posted by: Worf

Or you can be like me, who find good episodes of shows we like and hit "Save Until I Delete". I probably have 3+ pages of SUID programs on my TiVo (80GB). Plus, it's nice to be able to go back a month or two to rewatch the good episodes again - especially when it's nothing but crap on.

I use Basic quality exclusively. I don't see any quality increase whatsoever (other than TiVo at Basic is very good quality - better than VHS for me).

Posted by: MighTiVo

More variety, more choices.

Instead of 100 channels of who knows what, you can have 100 complete 1 hour programs that you might actually want to watch to choose from.

Posted by: jahf

Plus, once the ability to save programs into folders happens (v4 I think, a couple of months?), I see my wife and I using a LOT more storage.

I hate having a screen full of watched programs (so I delete with a passion right now), but yet would love to save a full season of some shows so I can archive them all or go back to catch forgotten bits.

Posted by: litzdog911

I don't think I could ever go back to 35 hours on my DirecTivo!

Posted by: mrtickle

I have many more "would be nice" programmes that I wasn't really bothered about before, but are good to have recorded.

I record my favourite programmes on Best quality, instead of medium before.

I record more movies that look good, to see what they are like - again on Best, they are there when I want them.

Finally, the recordings I delete are still on the disc for a full week before TiVo overwrites them and re-uses the disc space, so I can undelete far more recordings using TivoWeb than I could before.

HTH!

Posted by: HTH

You can also record an entire season of a 24, retaining them over the course of the season, then watch them all in only 18 hours without commercials rather than watch one hour a week over the course of 0.75 years.

Posted by: pyrite504

61 Episodes of Good Eats at best quality.

Until I am back in a place that I can have a dish, I need 90GB worth of space in my standalone.

Posted by: EricS

I'm into road racing, so my TIVo is programmed to record a lot of that. I also just set up a wish list with the keywords "Oscar Best", so now I get a movie or two a day that won best Oscar in some category. I plan to let these build up on my disk, so I always have an archive of good movies. Sure, I'll end up deleting and not watching half of them, but nice to have the library available when I want to watch a good movie.

The extra space gives me the luxury of not having to worry about something important being deleted in order to make room for something equally as important. Oh, and since I watch everything in Best Quality, my 120gb only gives me 40 hours anyway.

Posted by: pnwradar

quote:
Originally posted by pyrite504
61 Episodes of Good Eats at best quality.

You suck, I've only got 40-something episodes. And that's the only show that never gets deleted -- at least until DVD recorders get cheap enough I don't grab my chest instead of my wallet.

-jon-

Posted by: wumpus

quote:
I use Basic quality exclusively. I don't see any quality increase whatsoever (other than TiVo at Basic is very good quality - better than VHS for me).

Great googly moogly.. well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ;) It probably also depends on the size of your television, but I can barely watch "Basic" quality with all the artifacts and blockiness! One of the big reasons to upgrade capacity, for me, is to be able to record most shows at "Best" quality. I can definitely see the difference on my 32" Sony. I might dip down one level below Best, but no lower unless the show is one that I hate. :P

Posted by: old7

I have three DirecTiVos (2 w/225 hours and 1 w/149 hours) and I know that I will never be able to watch even half of what is on any of my TiVos. I record a lot of movies and have fair number of SPs. I hate, no REALLY HATE, turning on the TV and not being able to find something to watch. With TiVo I never channel surf and there is never a time that there is nothing to watch.

Occasionally, I will have to search the now playing list for something that I saw on the list yesterday and want to watch now. I probably watch less TV now than I did before TiVo, but I enjoy it so much more.

Old7

Posted by: jtown

As has been mentioned, space and time are not the same. Having more storage capacity gives you the option of recording things at higher quality. I think my system has 70something hours at best quality and nearly 250 at basic. There's a big difference between the two. 70 hours is a lot but I've seen that get eaten up fast when the holiday marathons hit.

An SP/WL show set to best quality and SUID will throw a standard Tivo for a loop if a long marathon hits the schedule. A tivo with a couple hundred gigs can generally absorb these anomolies without missing other scheduled recordings. It'd suck to come home from vacation to find you missed the Survivor finale because the Tivo filled up on Twilight Zone episodes. The more space you have, the less likely this will be. :)

It also helps with scheduling. If you want to schedule a recording a week or so in advance, a low-capacity Tivo will drive you up the wall because of the way it calculates free space. Having a couple hundred gigs of storage almost eliminates this problem. I did still run into it a couple of times during the holidays, tho. Darn marathons.

And it's nice to always have something good to watch. I probably only watch 20% of what my Tivo grabs. Lots of suggestions cycle off, some I delete, some I archive. If i had less space, I'd have to watch my list a lot more closely. With all the extra space, I just weed it out every couple of weeks.

Posted by: newsposter

quote:
Originally posted by old7
I have three DirecTiVos (2 w/225 hours and 1 w/149 hours) and I know that I will never be able to watch even half of what is on any of my TiVos.

Old7

What size HD do you have for the 225 hours? and for the 149hours?

I have a sony t60 and want to just add, not replace the drive.

Posted by: LinOz

I am a movie lover. My favorite genre is suspense. My wife prefers comedy and romance. So we record all these we can with Wishlists. The best part is when a movie is a stinker, instead of getting up and leaving the theater, we just hit delete!

In addition to lots of movies, we still have a wide range of alternates, like science programs, etc. So larger capacity actually gives us much broader choices, and lots more of what we like to watch. Woohoo.

Posted by: Worf

quote:
Originally posted by wumpus
Great googly moogly.. well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ;) It probably also depends on the size of your television, but I can barely watch "Basic" quality with all the artifacts and blockiness! One of the big reasons to upgrade capacity, for me, is to be able to record most shows at "Best" quality. I can definitely see the difference on my 32" Sony. I might dip down one level below Best, but no lower unless the show is one that I hate. :P

Heh. Well, my TV is a 22" Asian Sony model (I brought it back withme when I moved back to North America - it can handle PAL and NTSC natively). Quality is decent (back when Sony actually meant quality), and it works if you use the VCR as a tuner. Interestingly enough, I don't get too much blockiness or artifacts - I notice them from time to time, but it's quite rare.

Then again, I also tend to have a fairly noisy cable connection - it's shared with a cablemodem. So higher quality encoding just records the line noise better :). (Then again, the random noise potentially helps the encoding process... )

I've just never noticed the quality difference, honestly enough. Artifacting and blockiness from time to time, but I don't record sports, and I stopped recording the news these days.

Posted by: cojonesdetoro

I got a DVD player connected to the Tivo and a netflix subscription. I have many recordings called "manual: information channel" but it's a nice way to store movies for later viewing.

Posted by: pyrite504

62, adding last nights. My wife is going to beat me down.

Actually, she's not a technophone, but she's tired of scannign through all the Good Easts titles, so she wants to get a DVD burner to get them off her TiVo. :) I have a friend that works at Best Buy who's coming to town in May, with the employee discount, I'll have a solution.

quote:
Originally posted by pnwradar
You suck, I've only got 40-something episodes. And that's the only show that never gets deleted -- at least until DVD recorders get cheap enough I don't grab my chest instead of my wallet.

-jon-

Posted by: Brad Bishop

quote:
Originally posted by newsposter

Sooo what are your plans of attack to watch 300 hours of video?

I think the idea isn't:
"I've got to watch everything that has ever been recorded."
but instead:
"I always have something to watch that I like."

Brad