[mythtv-users] Channel Hopping

Mark Kundinger mkundinger at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 4 16:45:45 UTC 2005



--- Todd Houle <thoule at wesleyan.edu> 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)  


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