I concluded that my tolerance for the modest digital artifacts found in the Basic quality recording made using any higher level of quality a waste of disk space and recording time when the original video was very clean. My trade off of quality vs. quantity said that at these levels of quality, quantity is what I want. The digital artifacts are no problem. When I use the TiVo for normal analog cable applications, I usually go one level of quality up, just to be sure. The difference is the amount of noise in the video being compressed.
Clean video makes a big difference.
The compression algorithm doesn t have to struggle with compressing the noise. Based on this experience, I may experiment with my decision to avoid the Basic level of recording for analog cable programming. Another observation I made is that if you are playing engineer and are studying video quality, you can easily find the digital artifacts and will choose the Best level of recording to get near-perfect pictures. But if you are just viewing programming, and it is good programming, the video quality becomes secondary and even drops out of the equation, if it is halfway reasonable. Another interesting lesson from the PVR experience concerns hacking.