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I would really like to buy a box that was sophisticated enough to cache which channels I have and what is showing on those channels. They all seem to do a very
by LanceH 8y ago
I would really like to buy a box that was sophisticated enough to cache which channels I have and what is showing on those channels. They all seem to do a very slow refresh every time I switch between menus.
It's now a distant memory being able to switch between channels instantly. I should at least be able to page through the menus quickly.
- untog 8y agoIf you have a cablecard based system you can often get a network tuner like the HD Homerun Prime and do away with the company's cable box altogether. It's what I did, and I'm pretty happy with the results - through Plex I have unlimited DVR and the ability to watch on any device. Channel switching is still slow, though...
- cronix 8y agoI do the same, it's great! The cable companies are mandated by the fcc to supply subscribers with at least one cablecard free of charge so you can use your own equipment, like a TiVo. I have a HDHomeRun Prime and use 2 cards. The rental on the 2nd card is only $1.50/month, and I get 8 streams with it. I also bought a cablemodem for like $50. Other than the $1.50 cablecard rental, I don't rent anything from them except the service itself. Saves a boatload over years.
- ascagnel_ 8y agoComcast used to (circa 2014-2015) give me an $8 customer-provided equipment bill credit every month for using a CableCARD w/ a HDHRPrime.
- BonesJustice 8y agoLast time I signed up for cable was about a decade ago, and at the time, I had a HD TiVo box with twin cable cards. Worked out to something like $1-3 a month for the cards, IIRC. Way more reasonable than what my parents were paying for their awful, laggy Comcast boxes. Of course, my cable provider had to make like three visits before they managed to scrounge up two working cards.
- captainmuon 8y agoI always thought about putting multiple tuners in the box, and just decoding multiple channels simultaneously. Then to switch a channel you would just "put another window in the front". You could have a predictive system that would decode the three most likely next channels and start decoding them. In the best case, this would move the latency of the first switch close to zero, and of subsequent switches to 1/2 or 1/3. To save energy, you could get one of these fancy remotes that they have for telefone conferences, that can detect when you pick it up. Once you lift the remote, start the extra tuners.
- gowld 8y agoDoesn't this already exist, and that's how picture-in-picture works?
- sjm-lbm 8y agoI have a (pretty old) TiVo that lets you do something similar to this - there's some button on the remote (I honestly can't remember what it is called) that lets you cycle between the tuners. It works pretty much like you describe - if a bit more manually - and has the added benefit of not requiring you to type a multi digit channel number every time you want to hop between your favorite channels.
- wkearney99 8y agoCurrent models have six live tuners. All running a buffer for whatever channel is tuned on each. Works fantastically well. There's a "Live TV" button on the remote than cycles through them, or you can manually poke through a quick submenu to jump right to one in particular.
- FooHentai 8y agoThe 'EE TV' boxes in the UK work in this way. You pick your top channels (up to 4, I think) and it PVRs the lot continuously.
- rasz 8y agoAfaik the delay is not in tuning per se, but in waiting for first decoded valid mpeg segment with I frame, and those are usually 1 per second? What could be done, on the cheap, Cable provider wide is authoritative server ready to give you arbitrarily generated I frames with 1/60 time resolution on demand, as most cable boxes nowadays are two way anyway (they need upstream link to transmit all the spyin^^^ channel usage statistics back).