Anyone channel surf w/ GBPVR

[teookie]

I've been using GBPVR to record shows and watch later and it works great! Pausing, fast forwarding, rewinding, all work great on recorded shows, which is what I'm watching 90% of the time so I consider the hardware I bought so I could run GBPVR very much worth the investment.

I've had less success time shifting live TV. It works, but if I do it enough or over a long enough period of time it eventually crashes. Also, just changing the channel too often will eventually crash PVRX2 on my system. Moving to/from analog to HD is particularly prone to crashing. I also have to pause live TV before I can rewind it, no matter how long I've been tuned to the station. This is different than cable company DVR's I've seen that are always recording whatever is playing live so that you can do a instant replay or rewind if you want. (is this a feature thats in GBPVR that I've just not turned on?) For these reasons I still use the TV's built in tuner to channel surf.

So, to sum up my pointless post; I love the recording features, but the 'watching live tv' features don't work so well for me. Anyone else having better luck? A better question would be, anyone got it working so well that you watch TV exclusively through GBPVR?

[soccerdad]

I use it much like you. Mainly for recording, but I change my set up all the time so I play with it live sometime. For the timeshift issue, in config on the Misc tab you can uncheck the live preview boxes and you will always be in timeshift. It does slow down channel changes as it fills the buffer though. (or maybe you check them... I am not really sure since I don't do much live tv.) Those are the boxes that controls it though.

[mikey]

We dont watch a lot of TV live these days other than some sports events and the news. It seems to work well enough for us to use it for this purpose.

[dvasco]

I also have to pause live TV before I can rewind it, no matter how long I've been tuned to the station. (is this a feature thats in GBPVR that I've just not turned on?)

Uncheck Live Preview in the Misc tab of Config so you can timeshift live tv.
http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Config/Miscellaneous

Personally, I don't watch LiveTV. The title of a show and the channel it is on normally tells me if it should be good enough to record and watch later. Then I just find something else to do in the meantime.

[martint123]

We watch little live TV nowadays. After a lot of use, we have a big list of things to record (hint sub for the keyword scan on the wishlist

So for surfing, we surf the available recordings, knowing that 95% of live TV available is garbage (x00-odd satellite channels).

[mvallevand]

Pretty much all my video use of GBPVR is watching live TV and I don't have any issues changing channels moving from HD to SD etc. I think I record one show a week. My wife controls the STB PVR but she won't record Life because she hates it.

Martin

[SLR_65]

If I switch channels by using the mouse quickly it will screw up. Usually the video gets really choppy or freezes. The audio seems to work fine.

It doesn't really "crash" though, I can just exit out to the main menu and come back to LiveTV and it works fine again.

Changing channels with the remote doesn't do this and I use the remote most of the time, so it's not really an issue.

/Steve

[mabloom]

Just an observation: I've noticed that when viewing a broadcast channel in "Live TV" mode on my cable box, it is always timeshifted a couple of seconds behind the same channel picked up by an antenna. Channel change delay is barely noticeable with the cable box, as the old channel continues to play with no glitches (either audio or video) until the new channel appears.

I guess this means that a new thread is used for the new channel so that the old thread can continue to play the contents of the old channel's buffer while the buffer for the new channel is being filled by the new thread.

[martint123]

I think it depends on the setting of "live preview" in config.
If not live preview then ISTR the tuner writes to disk and viewing is done by reading this file. This makes the 'pause' function work instantly if required.

Plus there will always be a delay encoding the analogue signal to mpeg and likewise decoding back (if an analogue source!).