| By :
Xavier Barnett
Connecting a DVR box to your TV means you have to deal with the limitations of the hard drive space that is in your DVR. The capacity affects how many hours of television you can have recorded at once, after which point you need to delete some of your recordings to make room for more. If you want to keep a lot of the shows and movies you record on your DVR, you'll definitely realize pretty quickly that capacity certainly does matter. Having a very large storage capacity on your DVR is beneficial if you like to store everything you have recorded for long periods of time. It is also useful if you have cycles when you can't watch TV followed by times when you catch up on everything you missed. This allows you to record television during your busy times and watch it when you have a chance. A large-capacity DVR is especially useful for these types of people: • Teachers who record television during the school year and watch it during winter break, spring break, and summer vacation. • Those who travel extensively for a living and record a lot of shows while away to watch later. • Students who have a DVR at home but live in the dorms and want to have programming available during breaks. To calculate your needed DVR storage capacity, count the number of hours of television that you want to record per day or week and the number of days or weeks it will be before you can start watching what you recorded. One solution if you would prefer a DVR box with a smaller capacity but still want to store a lot of video files is to transfer them to another hard drive. Many systems allow you to plug the DVR into your computer or an external hard drive, and from there, you can either store the files or burn them onto other media for long-term storage. This solution is ideal if the cost to increase your DVR's capacity is too high for your budget. Quality can make a huge difference when it comes to how many shows you can record on a DVR before you run out of space. The space they take on the DVR depends not only on the length of the program, but the quality of the recording. Because of the quality of HDTV, these shows take up at least twice as much space as a standard definition program so if HDTV is your thing, you'll definitely need a DVR with a large storage capacity. On the other hand, if you care more about the content of your programming than the quality, you can record at a lower quality to fit more hours of television on your DVR. Regardless of what your needs are there is a DVR that will have the storage capacity you need to record what you want. Maybe start with a smaller one and try some of these ideas, then upgrade if you find that to be the best solution for you.
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