[mythtv-users] commercial skipping recorded shows

Isaac Richards ijr at po.cwru.edu
Fri May 9 10:08:04 EDT 2003


On Friday 09 May 2003 06:49 am, Bruce Markey wrote:
> While Isaac is correct about decoding hardware encoding,
> what you describe is consistent with the lack of a "seektable".
> This is used for rapid navigation around the file but is
> appended to the end of the file when the recording finishes.
> Until the seektable is written, playback needs to search
> through the file without this road map.
>
> So, if you record a show from 8:00 until 9:00 and start watching
> it at 8:30, any seeks (commercial skips, ff/rew, jumps, etc.)
> will all be slow and commercial skips on a remote frontend are
> no fun at all. You can't Save Position even if it says so on
> screen and edit mode doesn't even try to pretend it might work.
>
> However, if you exit playback at 9:01 then start watching it
> again, all these features work correctly and your commercial
> skips will be instantaneous.
>
> So it's not the fact that you are watching the recording in
> progress that's slowing things down, it's the fact that the
> recording hasn't finished.

That's pretty much completely false.  The recorder (with both software and 
hardware encoding) builds the seek table as the program is being recorded 
(and with live tv).  The player, if requested to seek to a portion of the 
program it hasn't seen itself yet simply queries the recorder for the proper 
position to seek to.  It's only slightly slower than seeking around after the 
recording has finished.

Isaac


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