2008-03-19, 12:44 PM
I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has helped me over the last few days getting started with GB-PVR. We are successfully using it full time now and I have disabled Windows Media Center completely.
My wife has always been a fast channel surfer so the Live Preview mode has made her really happy. I tried to explain how to enter timeshifting by pressing pause but I'm not sure if she understand exactly. So I was thinking about a couple things that might make that process easier.
1. Could you add more keys that would enable timeshifting mode instead of just pause? I was thinking about the rewind, fast forward and skip forwards and backwards buttons at the minimum. I know they wouldn't function the first time but it would make getting into timeshifting a little easier for someone that doesn't know the system well.
2. Is it not possible to watch and record from a tuner at the same time? I'm guessing not since it seems you're forced to watch the recording instead of the actual live video. In that case, could you possible take advantage of a second tuner for timeshifting if it happens to be available? So if you're watching something, the second tuner could be doing the timeshifting in the background. That way if you do decide to enter timeshifting mode, you've got a stream already going that you can switch to. This may be too complex of a setup to want to implement though.
Like I mentioned before, I've got an Adaptec dual-tuner USB device. It also includes composite and S-Video inputs. I had to use one of the composite inputs to record something from a digital camcorder. I had not previously done this. I went into my capture devices and added a new one with only a single channel listing of my choice. This gave me a new channel labeled Input 2. This seemed to do exactly what I wanted. I doubt Media Center would have been so easy to accomodate this request. I was then able to record from that channel just fine. This lead me to another suggestion though.
If I'm watching a channel and push the record button, can you add a quality setting to the screen that pops up? It's much easier to start recording from here and be able to choose a relative time to record (30 minutes for example) instead of going into the guide and doing a manual recording from there just so I can choose the quality. I've got my medium quality tweaked just the way I want it for everything else but then wanted to use a higher quality for this capture.
Finally, I have a question about conflicts. So far I have not seen any conflicts in the Recordings section. If I try to watch something while both tuners are recording, I get prompted what to do there. However, I was wondering what would happen if a new episode of a recurring recording became available but somehow conflicted with another recording. Since I'm not manually adding recordings at this point, what happens? Will a box pop up telling me of the conflict or do I need to manually check the conflicts section?
My wife has always been a fast channel surfer so the Live Preview mode has made her really happy. I tried to explain how to enter timeshifting by pressing pause but I'm not sure if she understand exactly. So I was thinking about a couple things that might make that process easier.
1. Could you add more keys that would enable timeshifting mode instead of just pause? I was thinking about the rewind, fast forward and skip forwards and backwards buttons at the minimum. I know they wouldn't function the first time but it would make getting into timeshifting a little easier for someone that doesn't know the system well.
2. Is it not possible to watch and record from a tuner at the same time? I'm guessing not since it seems you're forced to watch the recording instead of the actual live video. In that case, could you possible take advantage of a second tuner for timeshifting if it happens to be available? So if you're watching something, the second tuner could be doing the timeshifting in the background. That way if you do decide to enter timeshifting mode, you've got a stream already going that you can switch to. This may be too complex of a setup to want to implement though.
Like I mentioned before, I've got an Adaptec dual-tuner USB device. It also includes composite and S-Video inputs. I had to use one of the composite inputs to record something from a digital camcorder. I had not previously done this. I went into my capture devices and added a new one with only a single channel listing of my choice. This gave me a new channel labeled Input 2. This seemed to do exactly what I wanted. I doubt Media Center would have been so easy to accomodate this request. I was then able to record from that channel just fine. This lead me to another suggestion though.
If I'm watching a channel and push the record button, can you add a quality setting to the screen that pops up? It's much easier to start recording from here and be able to choose a relative time to record (30 minutes for example) instead of going into the guide and doing a manual recording from there just so I can choose the quality. I've got my medium quality tweaked just the way I want it for everything else but then wanted to use a higher quality for this capture.
Finally, I have a question about conflicts. So far I have not seen any conflicts in the Recordings section. If I try to watch something while both tuners are recording, I get prompted what to do there. However, I was wondering what would happen if a new episode of a recurring recording became available but somehow conflicted with another recording. Since I'm not manually adding recordings at this point, what happens? Will a box pop up telling me of the conflict or do I need to manually check the conflicts section?
