My TiVo has a paltry 40 hour recording capacity while my Media Center has a slightly more respectable 160 gig hard drive installed.
Needless to say, I'm pretty much forced to delete shows almost immediately after viewing them to ensure there's enough space for new programs to be recorded.
I get all weak in the knees thinking about the days when I'll be able to utilize a more Gmail like approach to recorded content and "archive instead of delete" - and I'm not talking about archiving by burning to DVD either.
Hard drive powerhouse Seagate recently announced it intends to have 2.5 terabyte (or 2500 gigabyte) hard drives to the mass market as early as 2009 thanks to increasing hard disk densities via perpendicular recording.
Seagate equates this to about 4,000 hours of recorded content for a PVR which is an absolutely insane amount of programming.
How they came up with this figure is more math than I care to contemplate this early in the morning. I'm also not sure whether they're talking standard definition programming or HD (which they should be using since HD will probably be standard by 2009).
Despite all that, there are some ginormous hard drive capacities in many a PVRs future, and this should have us all pretty excited.
With that much space available, I'm guessing TiVo will need to add a "Keep Until I'm Deceased" selection to their auto-delete options...
1. It has to be SD, and fairly compressed SD (or maybe MPEG-4). The TiVo Series3 fits just over 300 hours in 250GB - but that's at the max compression, lowest quality. So 2500GB would be about 3,000 hours, you'd think. To get 4,000 hours they'd either have to compress it even more, or be using a more efficicent codec than MPEG-2. And it'd still be a lower quality, definitely not HD.
The TiVo can get 25-35 hours of HD in the same 250GB - and HD is recorded *as-is*, whatever the bitstream is delivered as. So 10x the space you'd expect 250-350 hours of HD. Which is still pretty good.
Posted at 1:35PM on Sep 18th 2006 by MegaZone