Hi,

I am thinking of getting either a HDX 710 or HXH 910 as a late christmas present for myself.

I've trawled through the main threads but I can't see anything obvious.

When recording a freeview channel (using the built in receiver), does the HDD record the actual broadcast bitstream or does it record using MPEG2 ? Simple question..hopefully easier to answer.

Thanks for any help.

I think the broadcast is MPEG2!

I don't know if the Sony just puts the MPEG2 files on the hard disk without translation or not. The clever bit is encoding into a format suitable for DVD recording. Translating MPEG2 > DVD takes ages on my fast PC, so I assume Sony have some clever dedicated chip doing it in their boxes!

I'm pretty sure it decodes to to uncompressed video, and then recodes it for recording. I say this as the "press red" icon appears on recordings. Also, you can choose the quality that it records in, if it just stored the broadcast bitstream surely it would have a setting for "as source"