ReplayTV vs. TiVo Comparison Chart - The quality/space tradeoff

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PTV units are digital; they record shows on hard drives that can read and write simultaneously. Some of this hard drive space is used to store program guide information, some for live TV buffering, and the rest for recording shows. The amount of space used by a recording depends on its compression rate: the number of bits it writes to the hard drive per second. The higher the rate, the better the recording quality, but the more the drive space is used up. Some of the recording rates and lengths are (bad) guesses on my part.

Feature ReplayTV TiVo VCR

Change recording quality Globally or per-recording Globally or per-recording Usually both globally and per-recording

Recording rates
(Mb/sec, low-to-high quality) Audio/Video:
2 (Standard)
4 (Medium)
6 (High) Video (Estimated):
1.9 (Basic)
3.2 (Medium)
4.1 (High)
6.2 (Best)

Audio:
Always at highest quality LP, EP, SP
(most are analog)

Recording lengths
(hours, low-to-high quality) 40-hour model:
40/20/10

80-hour model:
80/40/20

160-hour model:
160/80/40

320-hour model:
320/160/80 30-hour models:
30/18.3/14/9.3

40-hour models:
40/24.4/18.6/12.4

60-hour models:
60/36.6/28/18.6

80-hour models:
80/48.8/37.2/24.8 6, 4, 2 for standard tape; 10-hour tapes not unheard of