[mythtv-users] seagate giving refunds out

[Michael T. Dean]

On 12/07/2007 06:35 PM, Brian Wood wrote:
> Steve Peters - Priority Electronics wrote:
>> Looks like 500 true blue gigabytes to me.

It is!

>>  I got one and was not too happy to
>> see only 466GB.

It's 466GiB.  If you use df -h, you'll see GiB.  If you use df -H,
you'll see GB.  If you use Windows, it lies and says 466GB.

>>  That's 12 mpeg-2 hours of recordings on my mythbox that I
>> was shorted. 
>>
>> Not the end of the world, but one might buy the seagate 500GB drive cause
>> it's $5 cheaper than a western digital one, when in fact the western digital
>> drive may give you 500GB and not 466GB (just an example, I don't know if
>> Western Digital is doing the same thing or not, but that's the idea)
>>     

They all are--because there's a difference between GB and GiB, and the
manufacturers know what it is.  Unfortunately, they're selling to an
uneducated public.

Though, perhaps you should sue Tiger Direct.  They say that the 500GB
HDD can hold 212 two-hour DVD-quality movies.  I don't know how they
figure that, as my DVD movies are about 8GB (though some really old ones
are about 4GB).  Even 212 movies/disk * 4GB/movie = 848GB.  (Yeah, the
disks can hold 4.7GB, but typically, the movies don't fill the disk
completely, and I'm being extra generous here, just to show how
completely wrong it is.)

To get 212 2-hour movies (=414hours) on there, you'd have to fit each
hour in 1.1792GB (=1.1GiB).  To do that at anything near "DVD-quality",
you'd have to use a good MPEG-4 CODEC (and even then, DVD-quality may be
stretching it), which isn't supported by the DVD format, so either
they're inciting the public to break the CSS on DVD's, or they can't do
math, or they're expecting people to create their own DVD-quality
*movies* (they said video for the VHS-quality stuff, so don't tell me
you're creating DVD-quality video with your home camcorder that's not
encrypted--tell me if you're creating actual movies with your home
camcorder), or it's just plain false advertising.  (This time, though,
it really is false--not just a case of uninformed customers who don't
understand the units.)

> Guess we need "unit pricing" as at the supermarkets, with the cost per
> byte listed.
>   

I'll take 3 bytes, please.  What, you're going to round that up to a
penny?  What a rip!  That's a 1,389,004,639 percent markup.

Mike