Pre-Play Delay Settings

[mkuyper]

First of all, I just want to say that version 98.8 is working GREAT with my H2 MVP! Thanks!

Now that my MVP is fairly stable with the new dongle, I want to be sure to optimize stuff.

One item being the "pre-delay" settings. I want the channel changes to be as fast as possible, but I don't want any crashes. So I'm trying to figure out the best setting for the "MVP Live Tv pre-play delay" and the "MVP Transcode pre-play delay". I'm just not sure exactly how they're related, how much longer one should be than the other, and what reasonable settings most people have success with, etc.

FYI, I'm using GB-PVR 98.8, a Win-TV PVR USB2, MediaMVP H2, Intel Celeron 2.8 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, Ethernet connection to MVP, XP Home, Actiontec 1524 Gateway.

Any input would be greatly appreciated - either on this item or anything anyone else has done with a similar setup to make things more stable, reliable, and fast.

Thanks!

[HtV]

The livetvpreplay you have to find out yourself. It's already pretty low, default is 600 msecs. I don't know if you can take of a lot there and if you would notice.
The transcodepreplaydelay is for playing avi's or other non-mpg's on the mvp. Default is 6000 msecs. That's the time your system gets, to get ahead of the playing. It only effects the startup-time of a movie so it's akind of a onetime thing.

[mkuyper]

I think I have my pre-delay set to about 1200 ms. when changing channels, I push the button on my remote, there's about a 2-second delay, then the video freezes for a second or so, pixelates a bit, then goes to the new channel. Is this normal? Anything I can tweak?

[HtV]

Sounds pretty normal to me, I don't know why you've set your delay to 1200 (afaik 600 is default). Buying a faster system seems to help, also in the menu's

[mkuyper]

when I had it set to 600ms, when changing channels, it would sometimes "lock up" and play a short segment of live TV over and over. couldn't get out of it - would have to restart MVP. do you think this is related to the pre-play or something else going on? And I think I've got a pretty decent system. 2.8 Ghz Intel Celeron. I shouldn't have issues with speed I wouldn't think.

Thoughts? (BTW, thanks for the lightning fast responses HTV!)

[HtV]

Ok then I would definitely stick to the 1200 msecs. You could check if in config.xml :
<MvpHighPriority>true</MvpHighPriority>
is set to true. I think that's default.

[sub]

I think I have my pre-delay set to about 1200 ms. when changing channels, I push the button on my remote, there's about a 2-second delay, then the video freezes for a second or so, pixelates a bit, then goes to the new channel. Is this normal? Anything I can tweak?

This is pretty normal, and about the best you can expect. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes when you try to watch tv.

Remember, the MVP is devices designed for playing video files over the network. GB-PVR has to trick it into watching live tv. When you try to watch live tv on the MVP, GB-PVR has tell your capture device to start recording, then let it grow a little bit, then tell MVP to play the file. These steps can easily consume a couple of seconds.

The pixelating effect is because I'm trying to make things quicker when changing channels by not explicitly stopping playback of the old file before playing the new file. This would be smoother but add another second or so.