where are we headed?

[ievolve]

First, wow! I got my mvp and have been playing around and must say I am very impressed! Now that I am officially a "user" I am taking more of an intrest of where sub is headed.

There is one item that really cripple the package,a dn I am wondering if it will be addressed. The live tv feature is truely unusable. I say either fix it or just get rid of it. I have a lag of around 5 seconds or more to change a channel and that simply wont fly. I thought it was jsut a limitation of the mvp interface but the pc version is crippled in much the same way.

I guess that snapstream beyond tv has spoiled me, if any of you have uised the most recent version of this package you will know what I mean.

I guess we are talking a free program here and I am not in anyway bashing what has been done. I fully plan on digging in on some plugin ideas I have and more than willing to help where I can.

Lets see where we can take this thing.

[mikey]

I dont think live tv is something that "cripplies the package". Sure, there is certainly plenty of room for improvement, and I'm sure in the long run it'll get there.  Remember, if you dont like this feature you can easily disable it in the Config application.

The last release had a lot of big changes in this area, but it was kind of like two steps forward, one step back. With the previous release channel changing was much faster with it's SBE support, but lacked:
* the ability to properly play recordings that were in progress
* the ability to press the 'record' button while watching tv
* the abillity to FF/RW/Skip when watching an in-progress recording (incl live tv)
Its great to now have these things, and I'm sure with a bit more work we'll see much faster channel change times, giving us the best of both worlds.

Having written directshow software myself in the past, I'd say 2 second channel changes on the PC, or 3 seconds on the MVP would be acceptable and the most we could reasonably expect. It's never going to be instant channel changes like you get on regular analog TV, which doesnt have to go through the whole MPEG-2 encoding/buffering/MPEG-2 decoding process.

Its also important to remember that this is one guy working on this in his spare time, so its probably unfair to compare with Snapstream or other commercial application.

[JansPVR]

I would like to second that Santa! I personally love the Live TV. Even though I am running GBPVR on a lowly 1GHZ spare pc, it takes only about 2 seconds to switch channels. The only problem I have with LiveTV is occassional lockups. I am guessing that as this wonderful product matures, the bugs will get worked out.

As far as I am concerned, Sub ROCKS! I just hope he enjoys his much needed break and the holidays!