HD DVR box picture quality?

[summerfun]

I am a TWC customer and am currently using their SA 3100 DVR box for my SD channels and the Pioneer 3510 HD box for the HD channels. I am anxiously waiting for the HD DVR box to be released in this area. I think it is going to be the SA 8100, but I am not sure.

My question is about quality. Will the recorded program be the same quality as the original broadcast? It seems like they would need to compress the files to store on a hard drive and we would be watching a lower quality picture.

I know when I copy files from my digital camcorder to an uncompressed format like AVI the files are huge, but the quality looks good. But if I put them into mpeg to burn to a DVD, they lose a lot of the quality. I can't imagine how large HD files would be uncompressed.

[Snard]

I would assume that a HD DVR would just record the already compressed stream (remember that HD material is MPEG2 compressed). So assuming that there weren't any dropped bits during the broadcast, you should have identical quality to the original broadcast.

[Paul S.]

Originally posted by summerfun
I am anxiously waiting for the HD DVR box to be released in this area. I think it is going to be the SA 8100, but I am not sure.

Coming soon, I hear!

[mhz40]

Max data rate on an HD feed is just over 19.2 mb/s.  Average is around 15 or 16.  So recording a 16 mb/s stream for 60 minutes should produce a file size of about 7.2 gig.  On a 72 gig drive, that's 10 hours; or  just over 16.5 hours on a 120 gig drive (minus the space needed for time-warping live programming).