Are we ever going to get rid of the "pause"? YES WE DID!

[95TBird]

I’ve been running Sage for many years now & I've been getting 1 constant complaint both from my Wife & Everyone who ever visits (and watches TV)

Every time Sage starts recording a new stream, (IE when 1 show ends & another begins) there is a momentary pause in both Audio & Video.

When this happens I’m Always asked the same question.

"What’s wrong with the TV?”

I have sent requests to Sage that they implement some sort of buffer to eliminate this, but have never gotten any response other than "I'll pass your suggestion along"

So I'm posting this poll in the hopes that Sage can see how many customers want this feature.

[MitchSchaft]

That's the biggest annoyance ever. Missing the last few seconds of a show is not what I call a quality experience. From the sound of it, this is a permenant issue that they do not plan to "fix". Saying that's just the way it is.

[wrems]

I would love for the interruption to go away.

That said, I think as Mitch pointed out, it is a necessary evil when it comes to stopping one recording and beginning a new one. That’s just the way it is and it’s not likely going to change.

I have gotten used to it, so it's not that big of a deal for me anymore.

[othy]

Originally Posted by 95TBird

I’ve been running Sage for many years now & I've been getting 1 constant complaint both from my Wife & Everyone who ever visits (and watches TV)

Every time Sage starts recording a new stream, (IE when 1 show ends & another begins there is a momentary pause in both Audio & Video.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're describing, but I think you're talking about Sage "re-tuning" to the same channel when it begins recording of the next show (even if it's on the same channel). This can be disabled by turning off the "Always tune channel" setting.

It's been a long time since I messed with that setting though, so maybe I'm off-base. I do know that option has been there for a long time. Try it and see if it works.

Tim

[MitchSchaft]

Nah, I have that turned off thinking it was the cause. It has to do with there being no memory buffer deal like in windows media center. I came from MCE2005 and never had that issue. It makes Sage seem a little "cheap".But, there's no way I'm going back to MCE with all the other benefeits we get from Sage.

[evilpenguin]

The pause is never going away as its comes from all the de-initialization and re-initialization that comes from switching video files.

Prolly the best solution you can hope for is some type of visual element that fades in/out to lets you know you're moving onto the next show.

[95TBird]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

The pause is never going away as its comes from all the de-initialization and re-initialization that comes from switching video files.

Prolly the best solution you can hope for is some type of visual element that fades in/out to lets you know you're moving onto the next show.

I find it hard to believe that it is "never going away"

It appears that MCE can manage it, So why would Sage not be able to ?

However if it is "never going away" I'd like to hear that from Narflex.

No offense, EP, I know you are Very Knowledgeable & I respect that, But if I hear it from Narflex, then I'll know that it will "Officially" never change & I can decide if I need to start looking at another interface for Live TV.

-Bruce

[evilpenguin]

IIRC MCE has the pause if you watch a scheduled recording live and it transitions into another scheduled recording then it does have a pause for the same reason as Sage. The only time it doesn't have a pause is if you're watching unscheduled, live, TV and in that case it writes/reads from a circular buffer and there's no file switching regardless how how long you watch.

Isn't there a pop-up window in SageTV that gives you the option to not tune to the next show if you're watching a live show and are coming to the end? I can't remember, I only do this during football season.

[MitchSchaft]

There's no pause at all with MCE regardless of what you're doing. I still run MCE2005 out in my living room to serve 2 extenders.

[reggie14]

Those of you who have been using Sage for quite a while can help refresh my memory, but it seems like the playback hiccup between shows was shorter back in version 1.4. And, actually, I think the hiccup is shorter now that it was in the recent past. I think a lot of this depends on the decoders, splitters, etc., used, at least when you're using a software client. Since Sage doesn't completely control those, I think there's only so much they can do.

It's sort of a similar case to gapless mp3 playback. You can do this, but I find most music software does put gaps of various lengths between files. I suspect it's possible to do gapless video playback (under certain conditions, set-top box users don't apply), although I suspect you'd really have to design the whole video playback (and recording) system to allow that. I can imagine theoretical ways of doing it, like maintaining a circular buffer that you play live TV from, and copying the contents of the circular buffer into recording files to keep the kind of functionality in Sage that many of us know and love. But, I'm not sure you could really implement it that way.

There's some question about what a reasonable gap is. For a while, I think there was a bug that would create long gaps if your system clock got off. For instance, let's say over the course of an hour your system clock got off by 5 seconds. What I seemed to experience is that I'd get a black screen for 5 seconds at the end of playback of a live TV show before the next show would start playing back. That was when I was using a different server, and I don't have that problem anymore. I'm not sure if my new server fixed it, if syncing my server's clock with the atomic clock every 15 minutes fixed it, or if Sage did something to fix it. In any event, I only have a second or two blip between shows, unless I'm watching live TV recorded over firewire. How long if your gap?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

There's no pause at all with MCE regardless of what you're doing. I still run MCE2005 out in my living room to serve 2 extenders.

Ahh, well I stand corrected. That's kind of interesting, I wonder how they solved the gapless playback of different video files.

[Brent]

This "issue" isn't something that bothers me at all really.

However I don't think I remember ever experiencing that "pause" with BeyondTV either.

[Graygeek]

Originally Posted by Brent

This "issue" isn't something that bothers me at all really.

However I don't think I remember ever experiencing that "pause" with BeyondTV either.

Brent is right, I ran BeyondTV almost two years before converting to SAGE and recall being surprised by the pause in SAGE. It was definatley not there in BeyondTV, ..... or on the TIVO I had until about a year ago.

[MeInMaui]

I'm pretty sure BTV, Tivo, and probably VMC all use a circular buffer for timeshifting, so you would not get the pause between programs. SageTV began with a different design philosophy and chose to treat everything as a recording. The advantage is that you are not limited to the length of the buffer. So if you decide to hit 'Record' in the last 5 minutes of a 2hr movie that you had watched from the beginning, it would save the whole thing. The disadvantage is the pause while the next recording is set up.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Ahh, well I stand corrected. That's kind of interesting, I wonder how they solved the gapless playback of different video files.

I think media center overlaps the recordings in other words starts the next one in the background and then switches once the stream is started (would require two tuners in sage) but should be a much quicker switch than currently my wife hates the delay

[wrems]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I'm pretty sure BTV, Tivo, and probably VMC all use a circular buffer for timeshifting, so you would not get the pause between programs. SageTV began with a different design philosophy and chose to treat everything as a recording. The advantage is that you are not limited to the length of the buffer. So if you decide to hit 'Record' in the last 5 minutes of a 2hr movie that you had watched from the beginning, it would save the whole thing. The disadvantage is the pause while the next recording is set up.

I certainly don’t know the complexity or even if it’s a possibility; but couldn’t the two approaches co-exist within Sage? The user could choose the strategy that makes them happy and then they would have to deal with the pros/cons of their individual choice.

I’m not suggesting that one approach is better than the other, at the same time, if it were an option it could make a lot of people happy and add one additional feature that would allow a person to customize their experience to their liking.

To be honest, I have gotten used to the pause and pad all my favorites with additional time to prevent the jump from interfering with my recordings.

Just out of curiosity would this technically be possible?

[ghostlobster]

Hmmm...I thought the initial question here was 'do you want to see Sage get rid of The Pause' and not the technical reasons why it exists today. We're not here to design a fix, we're here to provide input to the overall impact of an issue (and to see our names in print on the screen afterwards.)
I hate The Pause. I understand why it happens and the capability that is provided at the cost of The Pause, but that dos not make me hate it less. There are some very bright people around here. I think that if they were given a directive "Get rid of The Pause without sacrificing current function" and left to their devices to figure it out, I'd be very surprised if The Pause was not put out to pasture.
It's an SMOP...nearly anything is possible in application development with enough time and money. Now, the question then becomes, is it worthit to fix The Pause.

[blammo585]

Yeah, it definitely is annoying. I find it most annoying when it is a show that doesn't end on time. So the pause happens during the show.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by ghostlobster

It's an SMOP...nearly anything is possible in application development with enough time and money. Now, the question then becomes, is it worthit to fix The Pause.

I agree. I voted that I'd like to see a "fix", but at the same time this isn't something that concerns me greatly. I wouldn't be willing to use a fix that loses some of the core functionality in Sage (i.e., being able to hit record 95% of the way through the show). I also wouldn't want Sage spending a bunch of time dealing with this issue if it would prevent them from making significant usability changes to Sage (e.g., updated interface, built-in configuration wizards for IR blasters and firewire channel changing). I'd probably even say multi-user functionality would come slightly ahead of this too, even though I'm not inclined to use it.

[aflat]

I would love to see a circular buffer, configurable. MCE allows you to configure how big your circular buffer is. If you have the hard drive space, a 2 hour circular buffer should cover most things.

On the other hand, it would make doing comskip on LiveTV almost impossible.