> Which is fine for me because my set will only do 1080, not 720.
Which is why they did it the way they did. You CAN disable an output, so for you Tony, you'd disable 720 so that when you manually switched (up arrow), you won't try to output 720.
Answers:
> 1. Are the digital satellite streams direct-to-hard-disk-with-no-recompression like the current DirecTivo units? Including the high def streams?
Yes - no recompression.
> 2. How much more data are the HD streams than the SD streams? In other words, if I have a one-hour standard def show and a one-hour highdef show on the thing, what's the difference in file size?
The HD that comes with the box is a 250 GB. That's 30 hours of HD content or 200 hours of SD. Of course, these may be slightly different based on the data stream. These numbers are approximate.
> 3. How's the menu/guide responsiveness speed?
Same. They wouldn't comment on chips that they used, but speed wise, it looks identical to my series 1 and the series 2's I've seen (I personally can't see much difference between series 1 or 2 either). Yes, I believe the HD box will suffer the same problem when you have a long wishlist and/or list of season passes.
> 4. Will it Tivo the OTA high def signals too?
Yes, absolutely.
> 5. Disk size?
The one I saw had a 250 GB HD, and they implied that that would be the only one offered. It's a max of 30 hours of HD content or 200 hours of SD content - but you can mix, of course.
A few other misc things:
It has HDMI, component, s-video, and composite video outputs.
Sidebars can be selected to be gray or black.
IR remote, no RF.
Since the HD TiVo is basically an DirecTivo with HD, and it is part of DirecTV, it won't have HMO, the USB ports won't be active, and there's no easy way to off load shows digitally.
The box I saw was branded "Hughes."
The HDMI and component outs are mutually exclusive...you choose one or the other, but not both.
- Jon