What do you think of this HDD recorder's quality from a 2006 Capture?
 

Got a RD-XS34 DVD/HDD recorder to work on and found it still had some recordings from back in 2006, so thought I'd post a short clip since it is kind of interesting to see what the quality is like. The full 45 minute file takes up about 1.6GB which is right about what an elgato video capture would take space-wise for the same duration. Appears this specific recording is variable bitrate averaging 5kb/s and maxing out at 6.5kb/s.

The device also labeled the show by itself which is kind of cool and it must have been able to do that without an internet connection since this model doesn't have internet connectivity. Also has English subtitles that can be turned on.

The noise pattern isn't particularly appealing on still frames, but seems pretty ok when actually watching it. I imagine it would have looked pretty good on a CRT or plasma back in the day.

This machine will let you set it to go as high as 9.2kb/s with 192Khz audio or 8kb/s plus PCM stereo audio. At either of those bitrates/audio combinations, that comes out to 4.7GB/Hr that fits 1 hour on a DVD.

I can't exactly tell if this was over the air or an SD cable recording though.

Curious what others think, but I'll have to do some more testing with new recordings at higher bitrates - eventually.

Even without compression, SD broadcast channels looked that way anyway. I had a FTA receiver from that era that can record the original satellite SD DVB stream without a second compression and it looked similar, DVB, DBS and ATSC were all bad and were tailored for the era, None until HD came to the scene and compression was improved a bit due to higher resolution, Was still abused but less abused than SD.