VOD on the 622??

[jsanders]

It worries me that the specs for the 622 say that it has a 320GB HD, and it has also been said that it only records 25 hours of HD content. If it was MPEG-2 encoded, it should be around 32 hours of recording, and if it is MPEG-4 encoded, theoretically it should be even more! Given that marketeers love to advetise the limits of use such as the laptop that has a battery life of 5 hours if you don't spin the hard drive and turn the brightness all the way down, I wonder if it wasn't a mistake that they said only 25 hours of HD recording.
Does anyone know if that is verifiable?

If it turns out to be true, I don't think it is because the OS now takes 7+GB of space. I speculate that the space would be used for their Video On Demand, trying to emulate the cable company.

I'm curious what you all think of that. I presonally hate the concept and think it devalues a DVR.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yes it will have video on demand, it will support VOD via Satellite as well as the ViP video on demand offerings in the future.

 

[jsanders]

Yes it will have video on demand, it will support VOD via Satellite as well as the ViP video on demand offerings in the future.

Any idea what this is going to cost us?

 

[Cyclone]

I don't have a problem with Dish increaseing the hard disk capacity, but keeping the User's partition at the same size. I would have rather had a little bit more on the user side, but I can understand that they need a VOD solution PDQ!

Using a separate partition to keep VOD is a wise idea to keep these separate.

 

[BFG]

If their is HD Vod and some free Vod available like on cable, then sure.

 

[jsanders]

I see this as just the first step to something more devious. Maybe they will start charging us to record individual programs in the future, because I don't think their video on demand will be free to watch individual programs.

The series 3 Hd Tivo is looking better and better when it comes out!

Personally, I might be willing to pay to reclaim my hard drive.

What is next, are they going to decide to partition any additional storage we plug into the 622?? I guess E* will decide that even though we purchased that extra hard drive, it belongs to them by association with a box that is subscribed to their service.

How much does an HD PPV movie cost? Isn't this more convenient than a PPV movie? That convenience will probably cost you more than a PPV movie.

 

[waltinvt]

The concept is great as long as they give you some choice / control. Like maybe allowing users to configure the % of HDD space within certain parameters.

 

[bytre]

The technical specs on the dish support site indicate 30 hrs HD recording.

 

[jsanders]

A checkbox or something to turn the service on or off would be great, and solve everything for everyone.

The way dish is going, I think they are way to greedy to give you a choice to limit anything that will potentialy make them a profit.

30 hours for a 320GB hard drive? That might be reasonable for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 has to have a better compression rate, and thus more than 30 hours. Why else would they be pressing so hard to switch encoding schemes if they didn't actually work any better?

An MPEG-2 HD stream (not HD Lite) is 19.2MBps. Anyone know what the MPEG-4 equivalent is? We can probably figure out how many hours it should be able to do, and also make an estimate of how much of your drive is being saved for for VOD.