Speed and Response

[pbones]

I have a Pentium 4 dedicated box for PVR. The WAF (wife acceptance factor) is tough with the response time. I would like to speed up the functions so that when you navigate through the menus with the remote it responds faster; especially starting up and using the TV Guide.

[sub]

Does it work fine when you use the keyboard? Any pentium 4 class PC should be pretty bloody quick in the menus. Or are you talking about the MVP?

[pbones]

No MVP; I use the hauppauge remote with GBPVR output through the Hauppauge 350. The remote at the TV is slower then the interface at the PC. At the PC it takes some time to start up the TVGUIDE.

One other thing; both the FF and rewind go forward at the remote.

[Guest]

I would second this request.  Overall it is quite snappy, but there are certain functions that just drag...

Displaying the TV Guide (from the main menu), 8 seconds
Displaying the TV guide after looking at the details for a show, 8 seconds
Displaying the recordings (from the main menu), 8 seconds
Deleting a recording (perhaps a status update to let you know that the button was selected, or run the delete in teh background?)
Navigating back to "Ready" when you are looking at the choices for an individual show, 7 seconds

Everything else responds pretty much instantly.  
Setup: AMD 2400, 768 MB RAM, 2x160 gb hd (Media volume raid-0 using WinXP LVM) across both disks, C: is located on a single physical disk, PVR-350

These slow responses are, in my opinion, what is keeping gb-pvr from moving from the "solid" program to great program.

[pbones]

Tipster - very good and glad you asked. I got rid of the MVP. I discovered that there is no distance limitation ( at least over 100 feet in my house) to how far you can extend the Hauppauge remote cable. It has two conductors and a ground and I run it everywhere while it works like a champ. I have ordered more receivers from Hauppauge and will test wiring them all in to the 350 at the same time that way wherever you bring the remote; it works. I then use a channel plus modulator model 3105 ($66) which modulates the GBPVR out put to an unused cable channel. With that said the performance is better than the MVP without the bleeds and quirks. In addition I can display the higher bit rates. I call it Pbones video on demand. The remotes are all run cat 5. The performance obviously is the same as being at the PC. You can really hit on the skip ahead and fast forward which we all know you can’t go to crazy with because the MVP will eventually get out of sync with the server do to network limitations.

[pbones]

I got the channel plus at Digitally Unique no tax and no shipping charge. Can you really pound that skip key on the remote of the MVP without it locking up? I may go back to the MVP some day but modulating the the output of the 350 displays the highest bit rate that the hauppauge can record and looks a little sharper than the MVP can display (capped at 8MB). With this approach you have only the cost of one channel plus and that covers a minimum of 4 TV's. Being able to distribute the remote was the icing on the cake.