Live Preview Questions from a Newbie

[moldina]

Some short questions from a newbie (hope I am posting in the right forum):

1.) Is Live Preview available if client and server (with tuner card) are on different machines being connected by LAN?
2.) If yes, how fast is channel switching in Live TV?
3.) If not, how fast is channel switching in Live TV?

Thanks in advance and sorry if these questions are stupid

[whurlston]

1.) Is Live Preview available if client and server (with tuner card) are on different machines being connected by LAN?

You can watch semi live on the client. It's actually recorded to a temp file by the server and then that file is viewed on the client (same as timeshift mode). Watching on the server will use true Live Preview mode.

2.) If yes, how fast is channel switching in Live TV?
3.) If not, how fast is channel switching in Live TV?

If you are watching only standard definition stuff, you can set the preplay delay pretty low, like .5 - 1 second.For HD, you want to give it a little longer to cache, about 2.5 seconds seems to work well for me.

[moldina]

@whurlston: Thank you for your quick and helpful reply.

The channel switch time seems to be acceptable, but are these numbers valid for the "true" or "semi" Live preview mode?

Thanks in advance for your help

[whurlston]

They are true for timeshift mode ("semi live", which the client would be using). If you use Live Preview on the server, channel change would be instant since nothing has to be cached to the drive first.

You can press pause when in Live Preview mode to switch to timeshift mode on the server. There is a setting in the Config utility that you can set to switch back to Live Preview on channel change if you are in timeshift mode (would work on the server only since clients are always in timeshift mode).