How many hours of recording left?

[ydekmekji]

I thought of this feature where somewhere (perhaps on the Systems Menu), you can say approximately how many hours of recording left on the harddrive(s).

I suppose the way it would calculate it is to take the maximum bitrate under medium setting and divide that number into how much space is left. Perhaps WAF will like this!

[sub]

I had consider doing this in the past, but its virtually impossible to guess with the digital capture devices (DVB and ATSC) used by about half the people here. The bitrate varies widely depending on the channel and broadcaster.

[blader_se]

It's availible, e.g. in the XRecord plugin ...

[Jeff]

The video archive plug-in will also provide an estimate.

Jeff

[sub]

How does it guess for digital channels? It can vary by lot for low bitrate SDTV versus very high bitrate HDTV. I mean a lot.

Using the medium profile bitrate settings from direct.ini would be nowhere near reality if the user has one of these digital devices.

[cas]

One could calculate the time weighted running average bitrate... After, say a month of use, this should provide a very good estimate of the average bit rate ...
I wrote some code so you can see what I mean. Its Delphi code but you get the picture ... This would ofcourse mean storing the duration and bitrate of all recordings in the database, but I don't see why that should be a problem ...

function CalcWeightedAverage(RecordingTimes, RecordingBitRates: array of real): real;
// RecordingTimes is an array holding the length of each recording.
// RecordingBitRates is an array holding the bitrates of each recording.
var
i : integer;
TotalRecordingTime : real;
Sum : real;
begin
TotalRecordingTime := 0;
Sum := 0;
for i:=0 to Length(RecordingTimes)-1 do
begin
TotalRecordingTime := TotalRecordingTime + RecordingTimes[i];
Sum := Sum + RecordingBitRates[i]*RecordingTimes[i];
end;
Result := Sum/TotalRecordingTime;
end;

[ww4397]

How about a table of bitrates (high, med, low, HD, etc) and corresponding time left?

Or, let the user input a bitrate...

[fla]

How does it guess for digital channels?

In XRecord there are three estimates shown in the "free space" screen (one for low, medium and high bit rates). There is no estimate for digital channels.

[sub]

Sorry guys, I'm not going to bother adding a feature like this.

[ww4397]

I generally record at "medium" quality, which is just under 2 GB per hour. I use the "System" button within GBPVR to see how many "gigs" I have available and divide that number by 2 as a quick estimate of how many additional hours of recordings can fit.