Hi. I own an HD212 upgraded to 80 hrs. I bought the TiVo for many reasons, 1 in particular was to archive all my favorite TV shows to SVCD and VCD. Last week I recorded the season finale of Alias. After nitpicking each frame during the opening sequence I noticed some blockiness during some of the high motion frames (the car exploding). I was going to change the bitrates TiVo uses to record in Best Quality, but wanted to throw this out there first.

What are the maximum bitrates my TiVo can encode (record) without burning out either the encoder or decoder chip or both? Or, I thought if the bitrates were set too high, TiVo may not be able to keep up. I figured if I recorded with higher bitrates, the blockiness should go away, or become much less noticeable. Space really isn’t an issue; I can always add another drive.

Anyone have any comments? Has anyone tested this?