Slow OTA channel changes

[bmac.to]

Everyone,
I have the Hauppauge HVR-2250 tuner card connected to an antenna and have installed the latest beta version of SageTV on Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I have both NTSC and ATSC channels.

I have done a search in this forum and it sounds as though slow channel changes are expected due to Sage buffering the channel. Is this true? If so, is there anyway to get Sage not to buffer the channel until after the channel has changed?

Are there any other settings to speed this up? I do not believe Sage is currently taking advantage of the hardware assist (Avivo) of my video card - will this speed up channel changes when I figure it out?

Thanks.
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Tigerblood

[Conejo]

Are you wanting faster channel surfing? How long is your delay?

We got spoiled when they went from:
Variable sweep tuning
Detent channel-based tuning
Remote controlled channel advance clicker
Remote controlled Phase-Lock-Loop analog tuning

Things went downhill when they introduced scrambling, then digitally encoding. Even with Hardware-based decoders, channel changing on an STB is slow -- especially for someone who became a pro at PLL channel surfing.

SageTV is a file-based system. Data has to be encoded (if it isn't already), recorded to disk, retrieved, decoded and then displayed. That's a fixed system. The only way to lower the delay is to speed up the efficiency of the system. Although there *could* be a configuration setting causing extra delays.

My PVR-500 Analog has a picture change delay of 3.5 seconds
HDHR digital SD channels has a delay of 4 seconds
HDHR digital HD channels has a delay of 6 seconds

[bmac.to]

For HD channels, the time is around 5 seconds. I am comparing it to changing channels using my televisions tuner (granted, there is no recording going on). The TV changes HD channels in under 2 seconds.
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[Conejo]

You could also try comparing it with the Hauppauge WinTV software that came with the card (or downloaded updates) since it's just memory based.

I find a lot of the 'computer based' TV applications are slower than their 'dedicated hardware-based' counterparts. I swear, I think the application designers stick debug loops in and then forget to remove them when the product goes RC or Gold.

[bmac.to]

I have tried the WinTV app and channel changes are super fast (1-2 seconds). There are actually a bit faster than on my television.

Over the last week or so, I have been able to slow down the channel changes to almost 10 seconds. I am not sure what I did to effect this change - I believe it is related to switching to the ATI MPEG decoder.

I will have to play around to see if I can get this thing to switch channels faster - if I can figure out what effects the performance, I will report back.
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