[mythtv-users] Channel Hopping

[James Hansen]

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