according to them its suppose to give me 50 hours of recording time but recently itll stop recording things saying it ran out of space. wtf? i checked my recorded shows and i have approximately 30 hours taped (that was being generous...probably closer to 25). yet its full?! bullshit and i missed out on a couple things i wanted to watch.

it also sucks there is no way to figure out how much space is left. there is no option for it (at least i dont think there is). i almost want to call them up and ask for some prorated refund everytime it does this because why am i paying the fee for a dvr that doesnt work/record when i want it to!?

Are any of the shows HD? They take up more space, which could account for the difference.

none.

I don't know for sure, but considering that the shows are being recorded on a hard drive, maybe they need to be "de-fragged" every once in a while. I mean, considering that we are daily installing and deleating huge chunks of data. I wonder if there is a way for a tech to do this without deleating previously recorded shows.
My Cox setup has been acting flaky lately but the rep on the phone told me the only thing they could do is replace it. I don't want to do that because it is about 70% full of saved shows I swear I will get around to watching

Is it like TiVo, where the XX-hour TiVos are for basic-quality recordings? Can you adjust the quality of your recordings? If so, and you are using a setting other than the lowest, there is your answer.

If you don't have HD, why bother with a cable DVR? Get a Replay-TV or TIVO. Far superior and they shouldn't cost you much more (if any) in the long run.

I have a Cox HD DVR..Although the cable company is not Cox anymore. But it never recorded near 50 hours. Maybe 20, never really counted.

Not sure if its the same software but on the Cox HD DVR if you push the 'A' button while on the list you can see how much (estimated) recording time you have left and how much you've used.

Do you know the model number?