So how does storage on a cablebox work?

Cafe Society
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This might be a better fit for “General Questions,” but since not everyone’s cablebox is necessarily going to work the same way, and this may become a thread about people discussing how their boxes work, and the pluses and minuses of different types and different services, I decided to start here. If mods move it, I won’t squeak, though.

To start with, I have Comcast with Xfinity. The router and cablebox are separate units.

Here’s my question. My cablebox has hit 100% full storage a few times, causing me to have to delete things if I want to record new stuff, so yes, I’ve had to admit that as much as I love the movie Dinner at Eight, no, I’m probably not going to watch it again soon.

However, the cable company has the power to give me additional storage, which I always suspected, because the box updates every day, unless I choose to skip updates, which I can do, but no more than two days in a row, and occasionally, after an update, I will have more storage space-- it will go from being 97% full to 92% full, but nothing will have been deleted.

I was not sure though, whether I actually had more space, or it was just using a different encryption method.

Because, here’s the thing, when my nisht-so-graceful son knocked the box off the TV stand a few months ago, the top popped open, and I could see that it had a hard drive inside which looked exactly like the kind in a desktop computer.

So I was leaning toward “more efficient encryption,” but then, last week, I got an on screen message that for $9.95/month, I could have another n megs of space-- I don’t remember the exact number, but I decided to accept, and the DVR went from being 89% full to being 37% full.

So clearly whole shows are not stored on the cablebox hard drive. What is stored? URLs or “bookmarks” that link to the shows? Is this why it claims it will erase things after 1 year, but doesn’t? Does it actually mean it makes no promises to keep anything longer than a year, but maybe it will? it just depends on the space on the main storage? I don’t think it’s ever erased anything on its own-- I have stuff on it I’ve had for 3 years.

So does anyone know generally how cablebox storage works? Does anyone happen to know how it works with Comcast?

It’s mostly just idle curiosity, but it’s a little bit about practical knowledge. I can tear down a desktop, and put it back together, or build one from scratch-- or more to the point, from scrap. Is a cablebox more or less a desktop computer? does it have RAM? sound card? video card? It’s nice to know these things if it ever goes on the fritz. I have a couple of desktop computers no one is using right now (one has a corrupt OS, and maybe a bad sound card, but is otherwise OK; the other one is fine, but when the monitor to it went out, the boychik asked if he could have a laptop instead of a new monitor), so if the cablebox ever goes out, maybe it’s just had a part go bad that I can replace, rather than turn it in to the office, and lose all my recordings.

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I don’t think that’s clear. My assumption would be that the hard drive had space the whole time, but they deliberately disabled part of it so they could sell you on a fee for the extra space, in the same way that some cable companies will charge extra to turn on the wifi antennas on their rented modem/router combos.

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Hmm. That never occurred to me. I suppose if I opened the box up, I could just look at the drive and see how many megs or gigs it has.

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I think I assumed more deviousness than is actually involved This sounds like “X1 Cloud DVR” service which does involve the box storing some of your recordings on their end rather than in the box:

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Your recordings definitely stored on the internal hard drive. When they “Upgrade” you to more hours of recording, they probably reduced the file size by changing the file format to one that has better compression and/or lowering the quality of your videos.

If you could transfer the videos as is (you can’t, it’s encrypted to only work in your “cablebox” (it’s really a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) you could check the video recording of your videos, old and new).Hard drive space is so cheap, <$15/TB at retail and even less for the box manufacturers, there’s little incentive to block off part of the drive space as hard drives generally get cheaper by the TB the larger they are. If they did, it’s easy to expand an existing partition to use unallocated space.

As for what’s inside and how a DVR works. Yes, it’s a computer dedicated to video recording. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder

When you build your own, it may be called a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) or HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer. Recording the HDMI output from a cablebox however probably requires a HDMI stripper box because most HDMI output from cable boxes are encrypted, allowing playback only, not recording.

Also, it’s not “So I was leaning toward “more efficient encryption,””, it’s more efficient compression. Encryption is to prevent, in the case of cable, unauthorized recording of the digital signal by anything but the provide DVR. This is why newer cableboxes and DVRs don’t have analog outputs.

Never heard of additional Cloud Storage, but that’s a more likely scenario than leaving unused space on a hard drive.

Finally, if you look up the model of your DVR, you’ll likely find how to enter Service Mode which will have info about the recording settings and drive space. It usually requires a special sequence of button pushing/holding on the box itself. If you watched then the box was initially installed, you’d have seen the installer in that special menu.

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Reading more about the service, there are two components to this.

There’s Cloud only service and DVR + Cloud service.

"You have 150 hours of X1 Cloud DVR storage for each X1 DVR TV Box on your account. If you exceed your limit, your most recent recordings will replace older recordings unless the older recordings are marked as Save for 1 Year .

  • Because your X1 DVR TV Box has approximately 150 hours of local storage, not all recordings available on your TV Box will be accessible from your X1 Cloud DVR"
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In case it isn’t clear, what it sounds like is happening is that they decided to offer the ability to “record” shows to people who didn’t have a DVR at all. Then they let those who do have one get double storage by “storing” some of the recordings online. So now you have 150 hours of local storage, and an additional 150 hours of online “storage”, which they probably treat like a combined chunk in the UI (though there may be a way to see which shows are located where.)

Now, why am I using quotes? Because it would seem very inefficient to actually store and record shows separately for each customer. It would make more sense to just record it once and keep the copy until no one has it in their “storage.” It might make sense to store each users individual clips, but not whole shows. The only reason I could think not to would be privacy concerns, but I suspect they want to be able to keep track of what shows you’ve watched and/or recorded for ratings purposes.

I do suspect the locally stored videos are encrypted. The media companies would probably insist, not wanting you to be able to take out the hard drive and access the files on your computer. However, it would not surprise me if ways to get around that also existed.