I have 4TB of storage. I schedule every new series that looks even remotely interesting, and every series from the previous year that I find interesting.glugglug wrote:Bolded two key points to your answer. HD has at least 6x the pixels/sec of SD, and similarly probably 6x the bitrate. In addition to that, you are recording from DirecTV, which like most Satellite or European TV providers uses H.264 exclusively. Most cable companies in the US transmit only using MPEG-2. To get the same quality as an H.264 stream, the MPEG-2 stream would need to have at least double the bitrate. (and that's in the best case that there is practically no action). DivX, which is a subset of H.264 with a few features removed for easier playback, claims it is 11x the compression efficiency of MPEG-2. For fast action scenes this actually seems about right. For a general case instead of just action scenes, I would guess the normal is probably about 5x. So an hour of HD from a normal cable company is going to take 5x the space of an HD recording from DirecTV. I have many 1 hour recordings from FIOS that are around 8GB each.kingwr wrote:As far as expandability of storage being a deciding feature of WMC, I have never understood this. My WMC system had 230 ripped movies and at any given time 100-200 SD TV show recordings, plus all my music, photos, and home videos, and I don't think it ever amounted to 1 TB. My DirecTV HR44 Genie has 1TB of storage and I don't think I have ever seen it more than 40% full. It's like folks that have 20,000+ photos stored on their computer -- when will you ever be able to consume that much content? Are you storing 3TB of TV shows just because you can?
When the "TV season" is over, I still have lots of episodes that I haven't watched yet, and I watch them during the "off-season".
I don't cancel my cable subscription during the "off-season", mostly because there are some cable-only shows that only play new episodes during the off-season.
I also never watch standard definition unless that is the only choice... which is very rare in my channel lineup.