On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 04:52:06AM -0500, Brad Benson wrote: > On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:31:37 +0000, Chris Martin > > Would it be technically possible to have an option to enable the PVR > > functionality only once the pause button is pressed (i.e. only create > > a buffer on pause)? You'd lose the ability to rewind through stuff > > you'd just been watching , but it might work better for some people. > I'm not sure how well that would work, but the first thing that comes > to mind is that if you don't create the buffer until the user presses > the pause button then you absolutely can't pause on the same frame
I think that some PVRs do this and it sucks, because you get an even bigger delay when you hit pause or rewind. Now you may say you would rather have that with a shorter delay on channel change (you won't get zero very easily) but that means yet another set of modes for people to configure. Of course, another option is just to remember you are on a linux box here, and there are other live tw watching programs, like xine and xawtv and mplayer with channel change patches. You could even throw in an analog capture card ($20) for very fast surfing and occastional recording. What's $20 if you have a spare slot? With digital TV you have it worse because in the atsc stream you must wait for a key frame (or present a very bizarre blocky mixture of channels that would look like a bad disolve from one channel to the next.) That's part of why changing channel on digital cable boxes and satellite is so long. I am surprised to see my new HDTV has a delay, even when tuning analog TV. I'm not sure why that would be but the engineers must have figured nobody cared any more. However, if you want to help the surfers, here is something you could code. People are making the mistake that channel surfing has to be LIVE. It might not be. So write a program that uses all available tuners to grab snippets from a set of channels -- short snippets from all channels, longer from favourite channels and even longer from adjacent channels in the surf list. Use the listings data to assure the snippit is from the same program that is on now. Do this constantly, be constantly grabbing snippets, updating them if they get too old. When the user wants to surf, surf the snippets (which always start with a key frame) When he actually changes channels move into an even more agressive snippet grabbing mode that tries to update nearby channels if it can. Use all available tuners for the given video source. The result would be something that looks like instant-channel-change surfing like an old analog TV. The difference is, you won't be watching what's on the channel right this instant, it might be as much as a minute ago. It's really, once you think about it, just a very fancy visual version of surfing the listings, but you are getting more than the listings data you are getting a few seconds of video too. If you stay on the channel for more than a few seconds, by then a tuner has switched to the channel you're on, and after displaying a small transition graphic switches you to live (or rather 2 seconds behind live) on that channel. yes, that might be frustrating to some, knowing they can't see the exact clip they looked at, but understand the alternative was a BLACK SCREEN during those intervening seconds. You could also, of course, allow 4x4 grid displays of what's on 16 channels at once. Some TVs have done this for a while, showing a 4x4 grid of still images in most cases, you could do moving ones. Now I don't surf live tv any more, so I'm not going to code this, but if getting back the live tv surf experience is your goal, this would be one way to do it.
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