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Standalone tivo And dtivo

I have a sony 30 hr standalone tivo and a 35 hr hughes htivo. I plan to upgrade both,but I want to ask a question, how is it that the sony with a 30g hard dr can only get 9 hr at high quality and the dtivo with a 40g hard drive get 35 hrs of high quality? And if I replace the sony's hard drive with a 80 or 100g will I get the same type of hrs per gigb as the dtivo.
Thank BRP

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Hinsdale, IL, US
Posts: 75

The difference between the SA and DTiVo compression/quality is the MPEG2 encoders. The SA has a ~$40 MPEG2 encoder while the DTiVo uses DTV's $50,000 MPEG2 encoders (because it has no encoder itself and simply dumps the DTV stream directly onto the hard drive). As you have noticed the compression/quality level is much better with the high end DTV encoders. The only drawback is that the DTiVos can not record anything but the pre-encoded DTV programming.

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: Champaign, IL
Posts: 337

DirecTV uses much better hardware to compress the signal than your standalone TiVo. Since the combo box simply stores the DirecTV data stream to the hard drive, it can take advantage of the superior compression (including better picture quality).

So, no, swapping hard drives won't change the hours/GB ratio on either unit.

Rob

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Thanks Fellows for the info, I now understand the differance in the two. So if I put in a 100g in my SA I would get about 25 hrs of high quality recording. This may not be many hrs, but I can't retire it because I've had it when tivo first came out and its never felled me.

Thanks Again

BRP

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