# Should I sent the Bolt back



## jerrykur (Jun 23, 2009)

Hi,

I just got a Bolt and am concerned about the storage space. I currently have a Premier XL 4 and it is constantly full. But, the system hangs occasionally and is slow as molasses some time. 

The Bolt is still in the box from Amazon. Should I sent this back? And if so, what are my upgrade options?


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

I put a 4TB drive in each of my Bolts. Some people have even used an external enclosure to use a 3.5" drive with the Bolt. Instead of using an internal 2.5" drive.


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## pwlcheng (Dec 6, 2007)

I have a 6TB red drive for my Bolt, intend to get a 8TB in the coming weeks to get up to 1,200+ HD hours capacity.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

jerrykur said:


> Hi,
> 
> I just got a Bolt and am concerned about the storage space. I currently have a Premier XL 4 and it is constantly full. But, the system hangs occasionally and is slow as molasses some time.
> 
> The Bolt is still in the box from Amazon. Should I sent this back? And if so, what are my upgrade options?


The Bolt is never slow no matter how full the hard drive is so that isn't an issue. If you want more storage space then you can easily upgrade the drive.


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## jerrykur (Jun 23, 2009)

Guys. Thanks for the ideas. 

One other thought. Can I dump recordings on the Bolt off to my old Premier XL 4, and still watch them from the Bolt? All of my AV gear sits in a rack in a closet, so I can wire the two together with Gigabit ethernet. The Premier would no longer have a cable card or Tivo service.


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## jccfin (Aug 28, 2008)

LOL, some of you people are watching way too much TV!


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

jerrykur said:


> Guys. Thanks for the ideas.
> 
> One other thought. Can I dump recordings on the Bolt off to my old Premier XL 4, and still watch them from the Bolt? All of my AV gear sits in a rack in a closet, so I can wire the two together with Gigabit ethernet. The Premier would no longer have a cable card or Tivo service.


That should work. However the transfer rate will be about 60Mbps. The Premiere just doesn't have the horsepower to go faster. But you can still watch (stream) the content on the Bolt without problems. Any SM will be lost.

Correction. Without TiVo service it's a brick that consumes electricity.


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## lujan (May 24, 2010)

jccfin said:


> LOL, some of you people are watching way too much TV!


I know, I read these threads and I don't think I've ever reached 20% on my premiere and people are installing bigger hard drives.


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

lujan said:


> I know, I read these threads and I don't think I've ever reached 20% on my premiere and people are installing bigger hard drives.


It is simple hoarding.


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## pwlcheng (Dec 6, 2007)

TonyD79 said:


> It is simple hoarding.


Thanks for the attack while I tried to help the others.


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## pwlcheng (Dec 6, 2007)

Please understand that the HD recording file size is over 6x more than the SD recording file size. The Bolt is a 4K machine and if the 4K file size is 4x more than the HD file size, that means the 8TB dirive is only behave like a 2TB drive capacity for 4K recordings.
What I am saying is if you have a 2TB TiVo and feel you don't have enough space, then you will not have enough space with a 8TB Bolt for 4K recordings in the future.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

pwlcheng said:


> Please understand that the HD recording file size is over 6x more than the SD recording file size. The Bolt is a 4K machine and if the 4K file size is 4x more than the HD file size, that means the 8TB dirive is only behave like a 2TB drive capacity for 4K recordings.


That is not true. First, there are no current 4K channels on cable. But when/if there are, they will not be using mpeg-2 and will be using a much better compression algorithm. Also, Comcast is already switching to MPEG-4 on their systems for HD channels and it is a huge savings over mpeg-2 recordings.


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## pwlcheng (Dec 6, 2007)

rainwater said:


> That is not true. First, there are no current 4K channels on cable.


Of course it is not true FOR NOW, that why I said


pwlcheng said:


> for 4K recordings in the future.





rainwater said:


> But when/if there are, they will not be using mpeg-2 and will be using a much better compression algorithm. Also, Comcast is already switching to MPEG-4 on their systems for HD channels and it is a huge savings over mpeg-2 recordings.


And that is why I said "IF"


pwlcheng said:


> The Bolt is a 4K machine and IF the 4K file size is 4x more than the HD file size,


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

pwlcheng said:


> And that is why I said "IF"


Even though your argument was conditional, the conclusion you drew from it was not.

One of the things I like about having lots of recording space is that I can feel comfortable about letting things sit around for a while before I watch them. There's a lot of satisfaction in deleting a few dozen episodes of a series that turned bad and knowing there now I have that number of hours available to do something with, even if it's just to watch better TV.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

jerrykur said:


> Guys. Thanks for the ideas.
> 
> One other thought. Can I dump recordings on the Bolt off to my old Premier XL 4, and still watch them from the Bolt? All of my AV gear sits in a rack in a closet, so I can wire the two together with Gigabit ethernet. The Premier would no longer have a cable card or Tivo service.


Without Tivo service on the Premiere, its a boat anchor. You will not be able to transfer video to it.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

rainwater said:


> That is not true. First, there are no current 4K channels on cable. But when/if there are, they will not be using mpeg-2 and will be using a much better compression algorithm. Also, Comcast is already switching to MPEG-4 on their systems for HD channels and it is a huge savings over mpeg-2 recordings.


4K recordings are NOT 4x the size of HD. Tivo uses HEVC (h.265) encoding format for 4K ONLY. A 4K video in HEVC format is actually smaller than a 1080i recording in mpeg2.

There is no step up in space requirement for Tivo.

4K in HEVC is somewhat larger than HD in mpeg4 but not hugely so. And most of Tivos hd recordings are not stored in mpeg4 yet.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> 4K recordings are NOT 4x the size of HD. Tivo uses HEVC (h.265) encoding format for 4K ONLY. A 4K video in HEVC format is actually smaller than a 1080i recording in mpeg2.
> 
> There is no step up in space requirement for Tivo.
> 
> 4K in HEVC is somewhat larger than HD in mpeg4 but not hugely so. And most of Tivos hd recordings are not stored in mpeg4 yet.


The TIVo doesn't encode anything. It only records the data stream whether MPEG2, H.264, and at some point HEVC.

Otherwise the UHD content it currently plays back is being streamed.


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

pwlcheng said:


> Thanks for the attack while I tried to help the others.


I am sorry you saw that as an attack. It wasn't meant as one. We all hoard something. Many here hoard programming on tivos.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

pwlcheng said:


> Of course it is not true FOR NOW, that why I said
> 
> And that is why I said "IF"


There will never be MPEG-2 4K recordings on TiVo so there is no "if". There will never be 4K recordings that are 4 times the size of the current mpeg-2 HD recordings.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Until someone starts broadcasting 4K on cable or via OTA we have no idea what the bit rate is going to be. What we do know is that 4K via OTA is going to require moving from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0 and that after overhead ATSC 1.0 has about a 18.3 Mbps max for data which isn't enough for 1080p when broadcast via MPEG 2 and that ATSC 3.0 will increase this 18.3 Mbps of bandwidth to something around 25 Mbps and is going to be enough for full 4K broadcasts using HEVC/h.265. 

Which means for a 1 hour OTA show the maximum file size will go from something less than 7GB for a 720p/1080i broadcast to something less than 10GB for a full 4K one. Of course now and likely in the future some/many broadcasters will not use all of a frequencies bandwidth for one channel so actually file size will likely be less the max possible. Some of my OTA channels are over 6GB per hour and some are less than 3GB per hour so there can be a pretty big difference. 

Cable has more bandwidth per frequency available but it is unlikely they will use anymore than what is needed so again max size of a 1 hr. 4K show should be something less than 10GB. If you have a cable company broadcasting in h.264 instead of MPEG 2 I am not sure how large a 1 hour h.264 recording is but I am guessing it could be 2.5GB and still be better quality than my OTA ones that are under 3GB and still MPEG 2.

In the end we don't know how much more space 4K broadcasts will take than current 720p or 1080i ones. Like now it will depend how high of a bit rate the broadcasters decide to use and if you already have h.264 broadcasts or not. My guess is anywhere from 1.5 times to maybe a high 3-4 times as much space as being used now.


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## jerrykur (Jun 23, 2009)

Thanks for all the information.

Looks like I will just send it back. I don't want to hack the unit and until they have something that can at least hold as much as my current box it is not usable for us.

We are primarily recording cable shows. My TV and AV receiver can stream everything. So maybe a Roamio Pro is a better fit. What do you think? Also, are there any deals available on these?


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## pwlcheng (Dec 6, 2007)

TonyD79 said:


> I am sorry you saw that as an attack. It wasn't meant as one. We all hoard something. Many here hoard programming on tivos.


I am sorry that I might have been too sensitive.


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## DuranPhan (May 12, 2016)

When selling the wife on getting a Bolt over keeping with the Frontier Fios Quantum DVR, she asked if we can still record as much as we do now. 

I said of course. I don't think we have ever gone over 10% storage on the DVR. We record a lot, but we watch it, and delete it a lot, too.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

DuranPhan said:


> When selling the wife on getting a Bolt over keeping with the Frontier Fios Quantum DVR, she asked if we can still record as much as we do now.
> 
> I said of course. I don't think we have ever gone over 10% storage on the DVR. We record a lot, but we watch it, and delete it a lot, too.


Unlike a cable company DVR, I have never found a need to delete anything (especially season pass recordings). I just let my TiVo manage the recordings. Unless you set the keep until I delete option, you can let TiVo handle deleting old recordings and never have to worry about missing a recording because the TiVo is full. For me, one of the reasons I use TiVos is I don't want to have to manage my recordings.


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