Any way to speed up HD-PVR channel change?

[myoung84]

I got my 2 HD-PVR tuners a couple days ago and had DirecTV out today to install new dish and upgrade 2 of my tuners to HD. Everything seems to be working ok for now without crashes or lockups but the tuning is slow. It takes a good 10 seconds from the time you click on watch til the video is up and running (also occurs between shows when watching live). I am used to about 3-5 second tuning with my old PVR-500 card and SD DTV boxes. Is there any way to speed this up a bit?

[Peter_h]

Firewire channel changing is going to be the fastest.

[myoung84]

Does DirecTV support firewire channel changing?

[myoung84]

Also, I don't think it a problem with the actual channel changing, I believe it's Sage and the HD-PVR setting up the new recording.

[Peter_h]

I'm not sure if your boxes support it. I have cable. Check to see if there are firewire ports on the back.

I have firewire channel changing setup and my channel changes are about 5 secs.

[myoung84]

I only have USB ports. I know DTV supports USB/Serial changing just not sure if that will help anything.

[bhyman1]

Quick channel changes aren't a good thing with the HD-PVR. It needs a little time to lock up the new video signal.

[toricred]

By default the newer versions of Sage have a 4 second delay before starting to show video with HD-PVR capture devices. This is to improve their stability. I don't know if anybody has tried to reduce it since 6.6 came out, but I tried with one of the late 6.5 betas and it caused lockups. Note that I am using Digital Audio so it might be fine with Analog Audio.

[metzz71]

How would one go about changing it to see if we could cut down the lag? The best I can get with UIRT is 10 seconds... I have u-verse and the channel changes are almost instant. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Found the setting.. changed it to zero, now tunes in about 5 seconds. NICE!

[mistergq]

Originally Posted by metzz71

How would one go about changing it to see if we could cut down the lag? The best I can get with UIRT is 10 seconds... I have u-verse and the channel changes are almost instant. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Found the setting.. changed it to zero, now tunes in about 5 seconds. NICE!

where is the setting at?

[metzz71]

sage.properties file under sage/sage

[Savage1701]

Tori - FWIW, I knocked the 4000ms delay back to 1000 without any lockups. It is noticeably faster.

I'll post if I get lockups.

[Rico66]

I'm using an IR blaster (MCE), and I played around with this setting at some stage. While my HD PVR did not lock-up as a result of channel changing, there was no actual benefit of decreasing it much below the 4s. The HD PVR needs a couple of seconds to become stable. In my case it (the recording light) simply switched on and off for ~2 times, if I left the setting e.g. at 0.

Right now I have it at 3s and it's border line. Changing channels HD - HD or SD - SD is OK with this setting, but changing resolutions (HD - SD or vice versa) typically causes one additional on/off cycle.

[Savage1701]

Rico, you are right. I should not have even made that post or altered that property. I'm pretty much asking for an issue, and as you correctly point out it's not like the HD-PVR is a lightning-fast changer when a STB and IR Blaster is involved on top of it.

I actually just set mine back to 4000ms today. Why tempt fate. There's plenty of other things for me to mess up with in Sage anyway... :-)

[metzz71]

knocking it down to 0 is well worth it IMO. 5 second change is much better than 10.