DVR quality versus live TV quality

[DishSubLA]

Furthermore, Dish SD DVR's have greater hours of capacity on the same size HDD compared to a Tivo because the files from the Dish stream are already highly compressed. A similarly highly compressed file using Tivo (similar bit rate) will result in an inferior PQ from the Tivo compared to Dish PQ. Dish downloads firmware to the STB's that can take advantage of ever changing sprocessing and encoding Dish does prior to uplink that allows for a somewhat decent picture from a pretty low bit rate. These kinds of hardware and transmission schemes (at the broadcast end) and software updates (at the Tivo end--analog models) are not possible.

Regarding Tivo digital recordings from broadcast HD, they will take up far more room on the HDD than the same HD broadcast received and recorded from the Dish satellite because broadcast digital HD is MPEG 2 and Dish HD is MPEG 4.

 

[Cold Irons]

That's not quite what caam1 said! Just to clarify a little more, the DVR does not record the "complete digital stream from the satellite", nor even the complete stream from a single transponder. Rather, it records the transport stream from a single channel (demultiplexed and usually decrypted from the complete stream from a single transponder), and adds a few more bytes from the previously-stored program guide in ancillary files associated with that program. I imagine that's what Cold Irons meant to say.

Yes....precise description of my shorthand. And as you say, much preferable to multiple conversions with varying recording quality.