Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
My sat.reciever has much quicker channel changes than MythTV and it has PVR abilities and is Linux based. It's a Dreambox. Is really tune the channel an issue at all? Doesn't the tuner do that almost instantly? I love Myth but I really do think that channel changing times are tooo long. At 18:45 2005-10-04, you wrote: --- Todd Houle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My wife likes to channel-surf instead of using the program guide when watching live tv. However, with Myth, there's a one or two second delay when changing channels. I guess so myth can clean up the temp recording..? So channel-hopping doesn't work very well. Any idea what's up with that delay or what I can do about it? Thanks Todd ___ There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I don't really understand most of what goes on in the developer list, but that has been some effort to improve tuning (mainly for DVB cards) and store Live TV more efficiently, perhaps doing away with the ringbuffer entirely. So things might get a little better around the edges, but there's always going to be some sort of delay (and you'd get this delay if you had a satellite, digital cable, or Tivo as well) 3) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
RE: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Yep, its held me back adopting this until now. I guess being in the USA with 500 channels I tend to swap around on my SA HD8000 box a lot. Dean From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Osterberg Sent: Monday, 10 October 2005 9:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Discussion about mythtv Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping My sat.reciever has much quicker channel changes than MythTV and it has PVR abilities and is Linux based. It's a Dreambox. Is really tune the channel an issue at all? Doesn't the tuner do that almost instantly? I love Myth but I really do think that channel changing times are tooo long. At 18:45 2005-10-04, you wrote: --- Todd Houle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My wife likes to channel-surf instead of using the program guide when watching live tv. However, with Myth, there's a one or two second delay when changing channels. I guess so myth can clean up the temp recording..? So channel-hopping doesn't work very well. Any idea what's up with that delay or what I can do about it? Thanks Todd ___ There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I don't really understand most of what goes on in the developer list, but that has been some effort to improve tuning (mainly for DVB cards) and store Live TV more efficiently, perhaps doing away with the ringbuffer entirely. So things might get a little better around the edges, but there's always going to be some sort of delay (and you'd get this delay if you had a satellite, digital cable, or Tivo as well) 3) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:21:55AM -0400, Fred Squires wrote: On 10/6/05, James Hansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. My question is, why delete the ringbuffer at all when changing channels? Just tune to the new channel and continue writing to the same buffer as before. That might make changing channels faster and you'd be able to skip back to something from before the channel change. It would also make accidental channel changes less costly. My thought on this is why reuse the same ringbuffer? If you change channels, why not start another buffer, and delete the old one in another process/thread? Big buffers take time to delete if you are using ext2/3 filesystems. Maybe the others would make it faster... Tim -- Tim SailerCoastal Internet, Inc. Network and Systems OperationsPO Box 726 http://www.buoy.com Moriches, NY 11955 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (631) 399-2910 (888) 924-3728 ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On Friday 07 October 2005 11:34 pm, Tim Sailer wrote: On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:21:55AM -0400, Fred Squires wrote: On 10/6/05, James Hansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. My question is, why delete the ringbuffer at all when changing channels? Just tune to the new channel and continue writing to the same buffer as before. That might make changing channels faster and you'd be able to skip back to something from before the channel change. It would also make accidental channel changes less costly. My thought on this is why reuse the same ringbuffer? If you change channels, why not start another buffer, and delete the old one in another process/thread? Big buffers take time to delete if you are using ext2/3 filesystems. Maybe the others would make it faster... Please people, at least try and read the threads from the last 8 or 9 times this has come up. The ringbuffer file is not deleted on a channel change. Isaac ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I agree with all of this but, part of this problem is the perception that it takes a long time... On my Tivo, using an external DVB-T box, the channel change takes about the same time as the Mythbox but the Tivo/DVB-T have something happening on the screen all the the time, which makes it seem faster... I.e if Myth got on with changing the channel, but 1 second into the process it popped up 'Changing channel' message on the OSD and then another 1 second later, it popped up 'To Extreme Sports'... the delay would seem much shorter... As opposed to the screen just freezing, sitting there for what seems like an eon, before suddenly changing channel... Lee Absolutely! That's exactly it. The thing about beos was that although it wasn't actually much faster than any other operating system, the UI thread had quite a high priority. This meant that it never felt like the machine itself was sluggish, and made it far easier to accept that certain actions took a few seconds. Just purely an onscreen message and would make myth seem far more fluid. If I get some time I may have a look at the source and see how tricky this is going to be. James ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On 10/6/05, James Hansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this.The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR.My question is, why delete the ringbuffer at all when changing channels?Just tune to the new channel and continue writing to the same buffer as before. That might make changing channels faster and you'd be able to skip back to something from before the channel change. It would also make accidental channel changes less costly. -- I probably still have a few (well, now a whole bunch) gmail invites.Drop me a line (off list) if you'd like an account. ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
I have to say I have always wondered this too. More from a keeping the history point of view than the channel hopping. PaulOn 10/5/05, Fred Squires [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/6/05, James Hansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this.The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR.My question is, why delete the ringbuffer at all when changing channels?Just tune to the new channel and continue writing to the same buffer as before. That might make changing channels faster and you'd be able to skip back to something from before the channel change. It would also make accidental channel changes less costly. -- I probably still have a few (well, now a whole bunch) gmail invites.Drop me a line (off list) if you'd like an account. ___mythtv-users mailing listmythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Paul Wheeler wrote: I have to say I have always wondered this too. More from a keeping the history point of view than the channel hopping. Paul On 10/5/05, *Fred Squires* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/6/05, *James Hansen* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lee wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. My question is, why delete the ringbuffer at all when changing channels? Just tune to the new channel and continue writing to the same buffer as before. That might make changing channels faster and you'd be able to skip back to something from before the channel change. It would also make accidental channel changes less costly. Of course, none of this would minimize the delay induced by my PVR 350. sigh. However, my wife has become quite happy to schedule recordings and watch them whenever. We're more annoyed with the weekly crashes we experience under 0.18.1 than anything. The only time we watch live TV is when we tune to Nickelodeon for our son. (Too many shows episodes on that channel. Not enough disk space.) -- Jesse Guardiani Programmer/Sys Admin [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:52:27AM -0400, Jesse Guardiani wrote: The only time we watch live TV is when we tune to Nickelodeon for our son. (Too many shows episodes on that channel. Not enough disk space.) Have you considered scheduling all the various shows, but setting them to only keep, say, 2 episodes each? That would get them out of live tv (yay for commercial skip!) without letting them take over the entire hard drive. -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Whatwould be nice in the guide mode is if you couldenter the channel number in and jump right to that point in the guide. I'm pretty sure that you can do that if you set the right option... ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Your wife needs to change her surfing habits. NO! THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Especially when she's your wife. Even when she's wrong. This top has been discussed to death in recent months, and there's basically two camps: 1) Nothing's wrong, all we need to do is change our surfing habits. 2) We ought to make it quicker to change channels, but that's a lot of work. I definitely fall into camp 2, and if only I had more time I would chip in and help do some of the work. So, take your pick Maybe Paul is right, and your wife needs to change her surfing habits :-) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On 10/4/05, Andrew Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your wife needs to change her surfing habits. NO! THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Especially when she's your wife. Even when she's wrong. This top has been discussed to death in recent months, and there's basically two camps: 1) Nothing's wrong, all we need to do is change our surfing habits. 2) We ought to make it quicker to change channels, but that's a lot of work. I definitely fall into camp 2, and if only I had more time I would chip in and help do some of the work. So, take your pick Maybe Paul is right, and your wife needs to change her surfing habits :-) On the subject of the wife is always right, there is the old paradox: - If a man in a forest expresses an opinion but no wife is around to hear it, is he still wrong? ;-) Peter ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Andrew Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/04/05 10:29 AM Your wife needs to change her surfing habits. NO! THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Especially when she's your wife. Even when she's wrong. You sound like a married man! This top has been discussed to death in recent months, and there's basically two camps: 1) Nothing's wrong, all we need to do is change our surfing habits. 2) We ought to make it quicker to change channels, but that's a lot of work. I definitely fall into camp 2, and if only I had more time I would chip in and help do some of the work. Maybe you'd have more time if you didn't surf? LOL... So, take your pick Maybe Paul is right, and your wife needs to change her surfing habits :-) Don't get me wrong, it is a hard sell. But when I asked my wife why she had so much time to just sit around looking for something on TV rather than just sitting down and watching something. At first, that went over like a lead balloon, but eventually she understood because she saw me sitting down, selecting a Monster House/Garage episode or the most recent MotorWeek episode. I think she actually got jealous that my half hour shows were taking me 15 minutes to watch because of commercial cutting and time stretch to about 1.2, which in turn caused her to start asking me how she could schedule her own shows. Ask your wife what she likes. I've recorded so many Rachael Ray, Giada DeLorentis, Emeril, and Barefoot Contessa shows (as well as almost everything on HGTV) that my wife loves that she can sit down at any point and watch exactly what she likes, not what is on. Instead of complaining that nothing looks interesting, she can complain that the networks aren't making new episodes! And Everyday Italian is one of those that I'll actually sit down with her to watch. When I came to her asking if I can buy an external firewire drive case to house an additional 2tb of drives, she didn't give me any flack. Now I just need to actually lay out the cash... Paul ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
--- Todd Houle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My wife likes to channel-surf instead of using the program guide when watching live tv. However, with Myth, there's a one or two second delay when changing channels. I guess so myth can clean up the temp recording..? So channel-hopping doesn't work very well. Any idea what's up with that delay or what I can do about it? Thanks Todd ___ There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I don't really understand most of what goes on in the developer list, but that has been some effort to improve tuning (mainly for DVB cards) and store Live TV more efficiently, perhaps doing away with the ringbuffer entirely. So things might get a little better around the edges, but there's always going to be some sort of delay (and you'd get this delay if you had a satellite, digital cable, or Tivo as well) 3) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
Folks, It might be nice to have a settable ringbuffer delay. So if it is set to 10 seconds, for example, it would tune the channel and then not start the ringbuffer for 10 seconds. If you changed the channel before the delay was over the channel change would be quick. Even if it wasn't smooth, and the experience was to tune to a channel and then after 10 seconds the screen went blank for a few seconds as the ringbuffer gets set up, some people might find this worthwhile. I certainly can't program this, but it doesn't seem like it would be a huge task. I'm of course talking out of my hat on this, so it could be more complex than it seems. Thanks, Peter Darley On Oct 4, 2005, at 6:20 AM, PAUL WILLIAMSON wrote: Your wife needs to change her surfing habits. There is no getting around the fact that the ringbuffer has to be deleted and the new one has to be created. ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 09:45:45AM -0700, Mark Kundinger wrote: There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I don't really understand most of what goes on in the developer list, but that has been some effort to improve tuning (mainly for DVB cards) and store Live TV more efficiently, perhaps doing away with the ringbuffer entirely. So things might get a little better around the edges, but there's always going to be some sort of delay (and you'd get this delay if you had a satellite, digital cable, or Tivo as well) 3) My Tivo has been dead for a few months now (which is why I finally tried myth), but the delay on changing channels with it was definitely under a second and I remember is as being imperceptible (although I could probably percieve it if I did a test right now, but, like I said, it's dead). I don't know how they manage to do it so fast, but they do. I have a separate gripe about the ringbuffer, though: It gets unconditionally wiped if the tuner changes channels for any reason. Now, you may say, Well, duh... If you change the channel, then you're watching something else., but that ignores the case of the backend changing channels on its own for a scheduled recording while the ringbuffer is displaying something from the past. If this happens, then you should be able to continue watching from the buffer up to the point at which the channel was changed. This is the way my Tivo worked and I assumed the same would be true of myth - until one night when I was getting ready to go out and stumbled across Mutant X. Not a show that I like enough to watch regularly, but the episode premise seemed interesting, so I started watching it, then hit pause and headed to the shower, planning to watch the rest (at an accelerated rate) while I got dressed. Unfortunately, I got back to find that a recording had come up on another channel and I was now watching that instead of my paused Mutant X and, of course, there was no way to get back to the now-deleted live buffer, so I never got to see the end of the episode. -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html) ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
There was a recent lengthy (and somewhat heated) thread in the dev list about this. The technical reason for the delay is because the system has to do the following things when changing a channel on Live TV: 1) Tune the channel. 2) Start encoding the feed. 3) Store the file. 4) Decode the file. Each of these steps takes a little time. If you don't do them, you lost the ability to pause or rewind Live TV, which is one of the sexy things about a PVR. I agree with all of this but, part of this problem is the perception that it takes a long time... On my Tivo, using an external DVB-T box, the channel change takes about the same time as the Mythbox but the Tivo/DVB-T have something happening on the screen all the the time, which makes it seem faster... I.e if Myth got on with changing the channel, but 1 second into the process it popped up 'Changing channel' message on the OSD and then another 1 second later, it popped up 'To Extreme Sports'... the delay would seem much shorter... As opposed to the screen just freezing, sitting there for what seems like an eon, before suddenly changing channel... Lee ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Channel Hopping
One thing I don't understand is why we have a delay between starting to write to the ringbuffer and displaying to the screen. Isn't it possible to stream directly from the tuner to the frontend while writing to the ringbuffer at the same time, and then only switch to reading data from the ringbuffer when someone presses pause or rewind? This would get rid of the prebuffering pause that seems to account for a large chunk of the delay. What am I missing? ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
