Live TV and EPG at the same time.

[Picker]

Hi.

I believe something like this has already been asked for, but I'd like to bring it out again...

It would be really great if we could get the EPG and LiveTV at the same time. There are various ways that this could be accomplished:

1) Overlay a transparent EPG onto the live TV.
2) Have a mini Live TV beside the description box in the EPG.
3) Have a mini EPG in a corner of LiveTV.

I'm sure others methods could be thought of as well.

Regardless, I would love to be able to surf the EPG while still being able to watch whatever channel I was last looking at.

Thanks!

[bucknljake]

I agree, overlay would be nice (TVedia does this for almost all menus and other displays like the epg)

What I think would be a great solution to the channel changing delay would be to display the epg channel info (overlayed above the currently showing channel) so instead of normal "surfing" you surf through the epg w/out actually changing channels. when you want to switch to the epg channel that's on the screen you just hit 'OK'

[reven]

Quote[/b] (bucknljake @ Jan. 07 2005,02:41)]I agree, overlay would be nice (TVedia does this for almost all menus and other displays like the epg)

What I think would be a great solution to the channel changing delay would be to display the epg channel info (overlayed above the currently showing channel)  so instead of normal "surfing" you surf through the epg w/out actually changing channels.  when you want to switch to the epg channel that's on the screen  you just hit 'OK'

the mini guide does this, sure it only displays whats on right now, but if your surfing thats all that matters, and sub does plan to extend this to show the entire epg (or well perhaps just 24hrs, not 100% how much he will show).

[jasonf]

Up to now, a lot of the feature requests involving video have been technically challenging for Sub to implement, due to the need to support MPEG decoding output devices (XCard and PVR350) as well as the MVP.

However, perhaps the bigger wish is to fork some functionality for those people like myself that use a video card's TV Out for video. The LiveTV improvements that are desperately needed (i.e., faster channel changing response time, ability to show mini-LiveTV in EPG, channel surf feature, etc) would then become a reality when you don't need to first create MPEG files to stream to the output decoder.

This may mean that LiveTV capture needs to be integrated into the GB-PVR application itself, instead of being handled by the service. I'm sure that the actual implementation is far more complex when you need to deal with overlays, but I've built a graph myself that shows video and records the MPEG2 stream at the same time (off of my PVR150). Channel changing is instantaneous.

LiveTV in general is the Achilles heel of GB-PVR that, IMHO, prevents it from being the all-being home entertainment hub. I would like to see GB-PVR evolve so that I don't have to switch inputs on my television in order to jump between LiveTV, DVD, and pre-recorded video. Right now, I can't let my wife use the LiveTV functionality because she'll quickly become discouraged when trying to change channels.