[mythtv-users] What hardware do I need to be able to dual record using Comcast cable?

[David Madsen]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:08 AM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Only 5GB / hr?
> My football games are 40GB for 4hrs. Now this I would like to
> transcode if possible.

Well thats really 5GB per ~40min since that size was the post
commercial cut.  My HD recordings average around 14-16Mb bitrate so
the full hour recordings are closer to 7GB each.


On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:18 AM,  <robbinsck1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Great analogy, but you need to consider also if your just going
>to throw away the hard drive you have or are you going to ad it to the
>system. Adding more power usage, I don't think many people will
>buy a 1 TB hard drive and remove there 500 gig.
>
>Transcoding is for certain the way to go. It doesn't matter if you
>have 100 gig or 100 TB. Before I started transcoding I could only
>hold about 900 hours of recordings on 2 TB now I'm up to a
>potential 1800 hours with no loss in veiwable quality. Do I need
>that many hours of programming? No, but now I have the same
>amount of programming and room for a plethora of other things
>like music and documents.

Exactly. I did consider this, but failed to explicitly mention this
case and ended up lumping it into the 'other variables' category just
to keep things simple.  Adding an extra drive will increase idle usage
and will skew the cost even further toward transcoding.


On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Preston Crow
<pc-mythtv08a at crowcastle.net> wrote:
> But if you watch the show, delete it, and re-record something in the
> same space, then do the transcoding again, the cost of the space is
> amortized over all the recordings that live in the same space, so with
> your cheap power, you have to churn through your disk 20 times until
> buying a larger disk is no more expensive than transcoding.  With my
> power costs, it's less than 10.
>
> Taking that into account, it seems that it's cheaper for me to buy a
> larger disk than to transcode.

True, but if you're in the process of record->watch->delete then there
really isn't much point or use to transcoding at all.  The max
capacity of your storage doesn't really matter as long as you have
enough capacity to buffer up recordings for when you decide to watch
them.  If the rate you record at is much higher than the rate you
watch at then you're looking at more of a record->archive->watch flow
which would benefit from the space savings gained by transcoding.

--Dave