DVR vs Broadcast Bitrate

[enricong]

I have an HR-22 DVR. It is advertised as having a 500Gb drive capable of recording 100hrs of HD. If all 500GB are used, that comes out to around 11MBit/sec bitrate.

I've read that DirecTV broadcast bitrate is around 6-12 MBit/sec, varying by PQ as it should.

Does the HR-22, save the stream directly to the HD? If so, shouldn't the capacity vary depending on programming?
Otherwise, does it re-encode the stream to around 11MBit/Sec?

 

[JohnL]

The actual bitstream is saved as it is received. So the amount of hours you can record will vary depending on the actual bitrate of the content you record. Generally sports, and Premiums have the highest Bitrate.

 

[dfergie]

OTA content depending on sub channels would take even more room up, higher bitrate.

 

[enricong]

The actual bitstream is saved as it is received. So the amount of hours you can record will vary depending on the actual bitrate of the content you record. Generally sports, and Premiums have the highest Bitrate.

Thanks, that's what I thought.
However, for every hour HD show that records, it looks like I lose 1% of free space. Maybe the bitrate just generally averages out to 10MB/s. I'll have to try comparing my recorded SD shows (recorded in HD) with my HD shows.

 

[Broe67]

The bit rate is a Variable bit rate. Also keep in mind that with mpeg-4, you can compress the stream, without loosing any of the quality in return. So really your numbers are off as to what the bit rate may be at any given time. I really do not worry, due to since we have 2TB of space, there is plenty of room for storing programming on there, until we watch everything that we want, or delete it later, if we decide that we do not want to watch, or only was recorded, so that we could skip commercials during live broadcast.