Preview mode WHILE recording for time-shift mode

[johnsonx42]

Currently I see it can Preview live-tv OR record live-tv and watch the recorded stream. Why can't it record the stream, but still show the live preview at the same time (until you pause or rewind, of course, then obviously it has to switch to the buffered stream)? It's been a long time since I played with ATI Multimedia Center, but I'm pretty sure it did this.

Example: you're channel surfing in Preview mode, come across an interesting show and start watching. The kids come in and fuss at you; after a moment you hit pause, but when you come back to the show you've inevitably missed a scene or two. you'd like to rewind, but too bad, GB-PVR wasn't recording until the point at which you hit pause.

Proposed solution: have GB-PVR start recording the channel you're watching in Preview mode once you've stayed on the same channel for 15 seconds or so. This way you can surf without having it constantly starting and dumping record buffers, but once you settle on a channel it starts recording behind the scenes.

(yes, of course I realize not using Preview mode would eliminate this issue, but at least on my setup channel changes are agonizingly slow in buffered live tv mode... I assume they are varying degrees of slow for everyone, else preview mode wouldn't have been added in the first place)

[psycik]

Preview and recording a two quite different modes. It sounds like you need to be in time shift mode all the time, or as soon as the kids come in, hit pause....

[sub]

There is a lot of reasons why this isnt straight forward, and in my book it doesnt justify the effort required. There is plenty of other things I'd rather spend my time on. Timeshift mode is probably about as close as you're going to get.

If you're digital capture device then channel changes can be a bit slow, but some muxes are quicker than others. The TS Mux is probably the fastest of the BDA muxes.

[johnsonx42]

fair enough sub, just throwing out an idea. As I was typing it all in, it did occur to me that getting the same stream simultaneously to both the recording process AND to the rendering process might be a bit difficult. Just because I *think* ATI multimedia center did it with a non-encoded analog source 5 years ago doesn't mean it's automatically simple for a completely different piece of software to do it today with digital mpeg-2 transport streams.

I will see about using the TS Mux instead of the default MS-DVR mux; perhaps I can get time-shift mode channel change time down to tolerable levels (and of course surf in the epg rather than directly changing channels one by one). Like you pointed out in my other wishlist thread, that would eliminate the 'unpolished' preview-to-timeshift transition as well.

[sub]

GB-PVR was one of the first apps to use a seperate recording service, which gave it some huge benefits over what other apps. At the time, SageTV, BeyondTV, ATI Multimedia Center etc all had to have the machine logged in and the app running to be able to do their thing. GB-PVR didnt even need the machine logged in, or the user interface running but could still record. This frontend/backend split did add a lot complications though, and this is one of those areas.

There is some minor speed improvements in the next release when using the TS Mux in the next release, so this helps trim the channel change time a little further.

[johnsonx42]

well, TS Mux doesn't seem to work too well for me. IF it works at all, it does actually seem to change channels reasonably fast in timeshift mode. But on most channels it just exits back to the menu within about two seconds, while one channel does play continuously but has no sound.

I will look into this matter separately then, no need to turn a wishlist thread into a support thread (unless of course you already know what will fix this)

Thanks,

Dave