The other day I received the following question from Oly asking me why I think his TiVo is using more disk space for a 70 minute program then for a 100 minute program. I’ve never experienced this myself however; I’m wondering if others have. Here is his question:
Show Channel Running Time Quality %Disk Usage
Spartan HBO 1:40 Best 7%
Band of Brothers History 1:10 Best 10%
Rome HBO 1:00 Best 5%
Rescue Me FX 1:04 Best 9%
Family Guy TOON 0:30 Best 4%so i have a number of 1/2 hr shows and each seems to take up 4% disk space. I have a 40hr tivo series 2 with 7.2. how is it that a 1:40 (h:m) movie takes up 7%, a 1:10 show takes up 10% and a 1:00 show takes up 5% all at the same time?
Same reason not every 1024×768 photo takes the same amount of space to store, even at the “same” quality level. Different kinds of data are more, or less, compressible, and just as some types of shows look better than others at the same TiVo quality level, some types of shows will compress better than others. Probably depends on how detailed the backgrounds are, how fast the motion is, how much panning there is, etc. Might even depend somewhat on how much data is coming from the content provider (digital cable? satellite?) for each channel.
Mark,
That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me…..
no mark; tivo uses the same space for recordings of the same quality. for example, one hour recorded at high quality ALWAYS take up 1623MB(+-1MB) and one hour recorded at best quality ALWAYS takes up 2610MB.
OLY should try using this: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=232322
to get a better handle of exactly how much space his shows are taking up
i don’t know that all similar length recordings at the same quality would take the same space. my guess is that 1:40 recording was widescreen or letterbox format. the black bar portion would compress more than having changing video in those sections of the screen.
i tried running that nowPlaying.xhtml and couldnt figure it out quickly. i found a widget that will give size though.
rome: 1:00:01 – 1.19gb
band of brothers: 1:20:00 – 3.24gb
rome ISNT letterbox, BoB is so i think that doesnt help the compression theory. im only curious b/c i recently found the % indicator when you click info after selecting a show but before playing it.
Oly,
Did you use FireFox to load nowPlaying.xhtml? I’m pretty sure that it requires FireFox.