OTA DVR Storage Calculator

Why an OTA DVR still needs a storage plan

Cutting the cord saves money, but every episode your antenna DVR records lands on a hard drive — and broadcast TV is surprisingly heavy. Unlike streaming services that store everything in the cloud, an over-the-air DVR keeps every recording locally on your own disk. Record a few shows a night in full HD and a "big" 1 TB drive can quietly fill up in a couple of months, at which point the DVR starts deleting your oldest recordings to make room. A little planning up front keeps your favourite shows safe.

How the estimate works

The calculator uses broadcast bitrates. A full HD 1080i broadcast runs about 8 Mbps, which works out to 3.6 GB per hour of recording (8 x 3600 / 8 / 1000). Multiply by the hours you record each week and you get weekly storage; divide by seven for the daily burn rate. Comparing that daily rate against your drive size tells you how many days until the drive is full and how many total hours of TV it can hold.

A worked example

Dan records 10 hours a week in HD on a DVR with a 1 TB (1000 GB) drive. Each hour needs 3.6 GB, so his weekly recordings take 36.0 GB — about 5.14 GB a day, or 155.9 GB a month. His drive holds about 277.8 hours of recordings, and at his pace it lasts about 194.4 days before filling up. Verdict: plenty of room — he could double his recording habit and still be comfortable.

Practical tips to stretch your DVR storage

Switch the DVR to its transcoded recording mode (around 4 Mbps) and each hour drops from 3.6 GB to 1.8 GB with barely visible quality loss on most TVs. Turn on auto-delete for watched episodes and news you will never rewatch. Use commercial-skip detection — it does not save space directly, but shorter viewing sessions mean you delete recordings sooner. And remember that external USB drives are cheap: doubling from 1 TB to 2 TB usually costs less than a month of the cable bundle you cancelled.