Series 3 Recording Quality

[SAMisik]

Now that my CableCards have been installed, the record quality settings are disabled. I understand that this pertains to the digital signal, but only 10 of my channels are actually HD. Does this mean that regardless of SD or HD broadcast, I'm limited to 100 hours of total recording on my top tier upgraded unit or does the TIVO determine the quality based on the signal? If so, how do I estimate how many hours of recording time I actually have? What what quality are the SD broadcasts being recorded?

-SAM

[WK-Michael]

You should not have a quality setting for HD broadcasts, but any non-digital SD broadcasts should still have the option. As far as we know, no cable company yet broadcasts all SD channels digitally, but we could have old news on that.

The SD capacity of your unit at the lowest setting is about 900 hours, so it's about 300 at the highest setting, and if the broadcasts are truly digital, then it should be in the 300 to 500 range.

[SAMisik]

Thanks for the info Michael, but what a let down. The quality settings on every channel vanished as soon as my cards were installed. My cable provider is Cox Communications and I'm in FL, so there will likely be many disappointed buyers this holiday season. This makes non-upgraded S3s virtually useless in terms of recording time. I paid nearly double for my TIVO S3 in order to expand recording time and certainly didn't intend to fill up the box with cruddy SD broadcasts in "Best" just because they are piped in digitally.

[Whynot]

Also lost recording quality

I have experienced the same thing. On Regular non HD channels I could control the recording quality. Once the cable cards (Comcast in Chicago suburbs) were installed I lost this ability to change the recording quality on all channels. Anybody got any thoughts?