Here it is days later and I found out that they never forwarded my trouble ticket to any video folks. I had them re-read the trouble ticket (it is now a script) and the rep talked to his supervisor. They had no other reports of my trouble (STB maxing out at less than 50 hours of SD recording) so the only solution was to send another (third replacement) box. I have replaced it a third time and reprogrammed it again (third times the charm) and we'll see what happens as I begin recording the programs and compare the actual times and the percentage of usage calculated.
I can't believe I am the only one having this problem. Is anybody else maxing out their capacity at less than the 80 (SD) or 20 (HD) hours that FIOS claims? I am maxing out at 48 hours (SD). Way less than the box is supposed to.
@hicole wrote:They had no other reports of my trouble (STB maxing out at less than 50 hours of SD recording) so the only solution was to send another (third replacement) box. I have replaced it a third time and reprogrammed it again (third times the charm) and we'll see what happens as I begin recording the programs and compare the actual times and the percentage of usage calculated.
I can't believe I am the only one having this problem. Is anybody else maxing out their capacity at less than the 80 (SD) or 20 (HD) hours that FIOS claims? I am maxing out at 48 hours (SD). Way less than the box is supposed to.
Did you try unplugging the DVR? The DVR will periodically misreport capacity, and you must unplug the DVR to fix it.
You should also keep in mind that the claimed capacity is only an estimate based on typical use. Actual usable capacity will depend on what you record. Different HD and SD channels vary in the amount of bandwidth they use, and thus the storage required per recording. The DVR's 160GB drive can store 30+ hours from some HD channels, but only 20 hours or less from other HD channels. Likewise, the DVR may store as little as 50-60 hours from some SD channels, but 100+ hours from other SD channels. It all depends on what channels you record.
Recordings from sports channels (ex: ESPN, RSNs) require as much as three times the space as recordings from news and history/documentary channels. If you keep a lot of sports recordings on your DVR, then you may have significantly less than 80 hours available.
I have a problem with Vz saying their DVRs will record "at least 80 hours of SD" That should be changed to "up to80 hours". I am on my fourth STB and today I went through a complete re-format of the disk with an engineer in NJ and it looks like I'm back to 54 hours max.
hello, I can appreciate the frustration you must have, 4 boxes later and still having problems. I have done a little homework since we first started talking and found that Ken is right. I spoke with a rep named kevin once and he put it like this
The DVR does not have any set rate for the duration of content it can store, as any such value is based entirely on the bitrate of the content being written (which is variable).
As such, marketing saying that the 160GB DVR can hold about 85 hours of SD content is only an estimate, one based on the average bitrate of the SD content being written as 3.3mbps.
The actual calculation is more like :
160GB Drive (as marketed from the manuf).
156.25GB Drive (actual available space, 1024kb vs 1000)
134.64GB (actual size of the content volume)
3.3mbps for SD, or 3,419,796.41 bits per sec = 1.433GB/hr = 94.19 hours into 134.64GB - the one hour LOD buffer = 85.8 hours of SD storage.
Same data for HD @ 13.7mbps, or 14,338,900.55bps comes out to 20.5 hours of HD storage.
Obviously, re-running the numbers with different bitrates yields different amount of capacity in hours
so basically not all things are created equal, and you can see that visually when you go between certain stations that have low quality SD And some that have pretty high quality SD. you can see the bit rate styled difference between the two.
what someone needs to do with you if you believe you still have a problem and want to pursue it further is to do what kevin mentioned and "manually clear the drive and checked the bytes available listed in On screen display
Recorded one hour of SD content, then check the available bytes in OSD afterwards, to see what the used amount of bytes is for that hour, and back calculated the rate for the content. "
That will give you a more realistic impression of what is going on and then keep in mind that the 80 hr claim is at 3.3 mbs for SD. Some content is higher quality (even though it's still considered SD) and may be a higher bit rate show.
best of luck. hope that helps.
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