Keep digital tuners primed

[time_lord]

Is there any known case where you don't want "Keep digital tuners primed" ticked? Eg if they are always primed, will it reduce their lifespan?

[mvallevand]

The feature is really for live TV so if you primarily use your tuners for recording there would be little benefit, DVB-S users would notice it the most. There definitely more computing going on so there will be a marginal hardware and energy cost to consider. Digital tuners to some extent are partially primed since the process stays running even when not primed. The more tuners you have the more it makes sense (unless there is a lot of Live TV users since they could all be tuned to the same channel.

To answer the question for known cases, I wouldn't keep my HDHR network tuners primed since you are actually streaming the tuner data over the network 24/7. All of my digital channels are on different frequencies and so the only benefit for me is watching the same channel and tuning a different frequency isn't particularly slow so I can't say I would really notice.

I expect with some tuners it could impact the ability for the PC to sleep too. If the PC is able to sleep the primed tuners are torn down too.

Martin

[time_lord]

superb, thanks for all those points!