[mythtv-users] Freevo, Tivo & MythTV

[David Brodbeck]

Marco Nelissen wrote:
> The other app I tried was mplayer (I may have tried xawtv once, I don't
> recall). It does not buffer, so in a sense, yes it is apples and oranges,
> however: the difference between an apple and an orange in this case SHOULD
> only be a fraction of a second, since there is no need to buffer 2-3 seconds
> worth of data before starting playback.

Maybe it should be configurable.  I'd really like to see *more*
buffering on remote front ends.  My remote frontend tends to start
stuttering and have to be paused and then unpaused so it can catch up
again, if something else briefly uses a chunk of the network bandwidth
while it's playing.  On a local front end, buffering is obviously
unnecessary.

My desktop machine, running tvtime with a frame grabber card, switches
channels almost instantly.  But like mplayer, it's not storing anything
on disk, so it doesn't have to shuffle disk files around during channel
changes.  I'm not sure it's realistic to expect ending one recording and
starting another to take no time at all.