Loosing HD

[pcostanza]

I merged my local HD channels and noticed that when watching HD live, then switching to an analog channel then back to the original channel, it only displays that original channel in analog. Previously, before I merged the locals, going back and forth worked perfectly.
Why does the channel first play in HD then after switching to analog and going back to any HD channel that was merged, does it grab the analog side and not the digital?
Sorry if I've not explained this well.

[johnsonx42]

I think the answer would be that while watching LiveTV, it prefers to stay on the same tuner if possible rather than re-evaluating tuner priority on every channel change. Since you've merged your HD digital channels with your analog channels, you've told NPVR that the two sets of channels are equivalent. Therefore when you watch a digital channel, and then switch to an analog-only channel it has to switch to the analog tuner; then when you switch back to a channel available on both tuners, it naturally stays on the analog tuner.

In other words, it's dutifully doing exactly what you told it to do.

The work around would be to exit LiveTV and go back in on an HD channel. Another way would be if you have a digital-only channel, you could make that your 'go-to' channel to kick it back over to the digital tuner.

[pcostanza]

I thought along those same lines. I lived with the digital only channels since NPVR was out but decided to merge as I felt it wasn't necessary. It's not a big deal and I have been simply exiting Live tv and starting it up again. I am curious if there is a way for this to work but assume there is not.

[johnsonx42]

The only way I can think of for it to to default back to the digital tuner would be for sub to add logic to make it re-evaluate tuner priority on every channel change. I suppose there's no reason it couldn't do that; it already has to check which tuner has the requested channel, determine whether that tuner is available, switch tuners if needed, and then start a new timeshift file. I can't see what it would hurt, nor can I see anyone not liking that result.

It almost seems like sub must have built in a logical exception to make it stay on the same tuner if possible; depending on how the code is written I would think it would hunt for a tuner based on priority for every channel change unless there's some extra logic telling it not to do that if it can find the channel on the tuner currently in use.

Call it a wishlist request.

[pcostanza]

He needn't do anything on my account, as I can live with it just like it is. However, if he gets bored.......

[BigMoose]

If it made channel changes in any way slower then it would be very bad.... from what I can tell switching between my tuners is a good bit slower than flicking through channels on the same one.

[Reddwarf]

Well, I'v never experienced any problem like the subject here since my analog card has only a subset of the digital ones. However, it is my opinion that even a channel change should be based on the tuner priority as set up in the Devices screen.

[sub]

The main reason it prefers to stick to the currently in use tuner is because you'd typically add several seconds to stop/start a new device when changing channels. I'm pretty sure people would prefer the quicker channel change that comes with sticking to the same device. ie, 2 second channel change time vs maybe 6-8 seconds.

GB-PVR was always the same, and would stick to the current tuner if it had the next channel requested.

[johnsonx42]

Right to all of that, but the only time following the logic of changing to a higher-priority tuner would be likely to introduce a delay would be for the purpose of changing back to a digital tuner which will pretty well always have a better picture - digital SD is usually better than analog, and HD is always better. I think most people would take the delay to get to the higher quality picture over being 'stuck' on a lower quality picture to save a couple of seconds on one channel change. People who have digital and analog sources probably have their digital sources at a higher priority for precisely that reason - they want the better quality when it's available.

There would be one other time you'd get an uneccesary delay when following this logic, and that would be if you're watching live tv on a lower priority tuner due to a recording in progress, and then the recording ends and you change channels - it would then switch to the higher priority tuner. This delay would be uneccesary if both tuners had the same channels from the same source, however it would also be pretty rare and not particularly harmful.

Ultimately it doesn't matter to me, as I doubt I'll ever have anything but digital tuners receiving the same channels.

[sub]

You'd get the delay whenever you switched to a different capture source (unless your were switching to a multirec device which was already running), since this would mean stopping the current graph, building a new one and starting it.

I dont see me changing the current logic. As I said, GBPVR had the same logic, and it didnt seem to bother the majority of people.