[mythtv-users] Idea for faster channel surfing

Cory Papenfuss papenfuss at juneau.me.vt.edu
Fri Dec 3 12:30:19 UTC 2004


> But oddly, just reposted it yesterday in some other myth discussion
> areas.  Something whose time has come -- if it weren't for the fact
> that part of "getting" a PVR is to realize that channel surfing
> is a silly idea.
>
 	That's been the sentiment of most people on the list.  Bottom line 
is once you've used a PVR for a while, you hardly ever go 
"channel-surfing," since the signal/noise ratio is so low.

 	Playing games with pre-buffering is probably a waste of time. 
It's difficult to say where the person will go next (e.g. Change from 
watching Channel 5 with Ch+-, Fav+-, Prev, '61', etc).  A much more useful 
approach was discussed a few weeks ago.  It's possible (with an 
ivtv-device) to get both the MPEG2 streamand the YUV stream at the same 
time.  WatchTV could use the raw YUV data in screen overlay (i.e. just 
like xawtv), while still ringbuffering up the MPEG2 stream.  If you hit 
pause, it'll switch you to the recorded stream.  If you change channels, 
you'll only have to wait for the tuner card to sync to a new channel and 
spit out YUV data.... fairly quick.

 	Again, most people in the know enough to code this up don't care, 
and I don't blame them.  There are lots of other more important tweaks to 
make.  I wish I had time to play with it.

-Cory


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list