[mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Windows Media Center

[jedi]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 09:06:12PM -0600, Reynolds, Brian wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org]
> > On Behalf Of jedi
> > Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 9:36 PM
> > To: Discussion about MythTV
> > Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Windows Media Center
> > 
> >    Actually 2 TB of MPEG2 in HD is pretty small. The amount of space
> an HD
> > MEPG2 takes up on disk is comparable to the same show or movie on
> BluRay.
> > 
> >    That's one advantage of the HD-PVR. It compresses everything in
> h264 which
> > considerably increases your effective storage space. Also makes it so
> your
> > recordings require more CPU/GPU horsepower to play back.
> 
> Windows MCE stores everything in wtv format.  2TB should give me
> approximately 300 hours of HD content.  I think that's plenty.  I only

     What MCE "stores things as" is probably entirely irrelevant except for
making things unecessarily hard to use in other programs. Unless MCE is
transcoding things (which is bloody unlikely given the processing requirements),
then it's just storing the raw streams from whatever tuner it's recording 
from.

     That means just storing whatever the cable company or the broadcast
station sent out.

     THAT can be quite large.

     Dealing with cable probably buys you a bit since your cable provider
is probably trying to save on their own internal bandwidth. Although this
will also mean some degredation in the quality of shows.

> get about 20 hours on my current DVR.  That's nowhere near enough, but I
> think 300 is good.
> 
> How many hours would this get me in Myth?

     This is not a question of "Myth vs. MCE". It's purely a question of
what your tuner/capture card is saving. For most digital tuners, this is
going to be what was "broadcast".

[deletia]

     In terms of effective recording time, an HD-PVR is going to yield
you the exact same thing in MCE or EyeTV as it would MythTV. The same
goes for any cable card tuner or QAM USB tuner.

     For the same show, I can see a 4:1 difference between my HDHR and
my HD-PVRs.