How to decrease the live buffer?

[DontBeAfraid]

In PVRX2 there was a way for me to decrease the buffer from 1 or 2 seconds or whatever it is down to less than 5milliseconds. I cant find that option In NPVR? Please tell me its here or that you will add it sub...?

[sub]

Are you talking the delay from the live signal? Its already as minimal as it can be made. The signal is going pretty much straight from the device to the screen until you hit pause or skip, so no way to reduce it further.

NPVR is uses a hybrid live preview / timeshift mode. ie, its the same as PVRX2.exe's live preview mode until you hit pause/skip, then it switches to playback from buffer files.

PVRX2 only had a delay in timeshift mode, but an equivalent problem doesnt exist in NPVR (since it's live preview mode by default).

[DontBeAfraid]

Is that the same for the S-video? Because I was actually able to play my gamecube with pvrx2 and with NPVR there is about a second delay.

[DontBeAfraid]

So you did wintv 7? It is actually pretty sweet. At least the part where it has a "gaming mode" for analog input. Works flawlessly. Thank you so very much for all your hard work!

[sgilani]

NPVR is uses a hybrid live preview / timeshift mode. ie, its the same as PVRX2.exe's live preview mode until you hit pause/skip, then it switches to playback from buffer files.

Does this mean we can't rewind live TV anymore unless we pause/unpause manually whenever we start watching a channel? that'd be a huge dealbreaker...

[johnsonx42]

No, what sub means is that NPVR is always recording what you watch, but until you hit pause or rewind it also sends the live stream directly to the screen. Once you do hit pause or rewind, then it starts reading from the recorded file instead (which has been recording since you started watching that channel). In other words, in GB-PVR terms, it does Live Preview and Timeshift mode at the same time.

This means there's a lot less channel-changing delay than GB-PVR's timeshift mode (because it doesn't have to buffer the stream to disk first and wait for the file to grow big enough to start reading), but a little more delay than GB-PVR's preview mode (because there is still a little more work being done than pure Live Preview mode).

[johnsonx42]

Is that the same for the S-video? Because I was actually able to play my gamecube with pvrx2 and with NPVR there is about a second delay.

I think there was a somewhat accidental path in GB-PVR when using Live Preview mode with a non-encoded analog source where the input would get sent straight to the screen with almost no delay (I say it was somewhat accidental because I gather sub never intended for that to work, it just happens that it did because of the way all the input and output pins got hooked up). This doesn't exist in NPVR because all analog sources (yes, s-video too) use MPEG-2 encoding all the time, either hardware or software encoding. So the delay you see is the time to encode the analog capture to MPEG-2 and then decode it again to the screen; only a second delay is pretty good actually, but obviously useless for playing a game console.

[sub]

Is that the same for the S-video? Because I was actually able to play my gamecube with pvrx2 and with NPVR there is about a second delay.

Yes, its also true for svideo, but the signal does go through an mpeg encoder though (so that the application is always ready to pause or skip back etc) and this adds nearly a second.

I've always said GBPVR/NPVR is not the right sort of application for gaming. You need an application with different qualities for that type of purpose. You'd be best to stick with WinTV's Game Mode which was specifically designed for this pupose. There is no equivalent of WinTV's "game mode" in NPVR/GBPVR.

[DontBeAfraid]

Sounds good. Ill use NPVR for watching and recording TV. Its visual quality beats wintv and wmc hands down.