3 ms·

> One vendor told me reliability simply isn't important as users will subconsciously hit the button again and again till the channel changes. Orthogonally to t

by khafra 2y ago

> One vendor told me reliability simply isn't important as users will subconsciously hit the button again and again till the channel changes. Orthogonally to the point of this excellent article, I found it striking how this was probably true, once--and then TVs got smart enough that it took seconds to change channels, instead of milliseconds. And then it was no longer possible for input failures to be corrected subconsciously.

somat 2y ago
nobody cares enough to actually do it. but what would it take to have near instantaneous channel changes again?, prestarting a second stream in the background? And realistically the linear array of channels is also dead so it really does not matter. so I guess the modern equivalent is having a snappy UI. A horrible idea, as if our current tv features were not already bad enough. the modern equivalent to quick channel changes would be a learning model that guesses what you you want to see next, has that stream prestarted then have the "next channel" button tied to activate that stream. The actual reason this is a bad idea, I mean above and beyond the idea that we want learning models in our tv's. Is that the manufactures would very quickly figure out that instead of the agent working for their customers they could sell preferential weights to the highest bidder. closing thought... Oh shit I just reinvent youtube shorts(or perhaps tik tok, but I have managed to avoid that platform so far)... an interface I despise with a passion.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > so I guess the modern equivalent is having a snappy UI. "With all those DLLs and network access, Dave, you're going to find this rather difficult" /s
- jakewins 2y ago
  There was some article from early instagram times about this the other week - that an innovation there was that they started the upload as soon as the picture was taken, so after the user filled out the caption part and hit “submit”, the “upload” was instantaneous
- gosub100 2y ago
  I think it's irrelevant because TV is dead. But I do remember with rose tinted glasses the days of analog cable where changing channels was done in hardware and didn't require 1.5s for the HEVC stream to buffer
- theamk 2y ago
  a workaround for IP-based TVs may be some sort of splash/loading screen that shows recent-ish screenshot of the channel very quickly. It'd still take a long time for picture to start moving, but at least user will see something and could switch away quickly if they don't care about content at all. Of course this will be non-trivial on server side - constantly decode each channel's stream, take a snapshot every few seconds, re-encode to JPEG, serve to clients... And since channels are dead, no one is going to do this.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > but at least user will see something and could switch away quickly if they don't care about content at all. The main issue is that the switching "app" is not yet loaded. /s
  - myself248 2y ago
    It could simply be the most recent I-frame from the other stream in question. That would require neither decoding nor encoding on the server's part, merely buffering, and I suspect transport-stream libraries have very optimized functions for finding I-frames. Furthermore, once a user starts flipping channels, since most flipping is just prev/next, you could start proactively sending them the frames for the adjacent channels of where they are, and reduce the show-delay to nearly nothing at all. When they calm down and haven't flipped for a while, stop this to save bandwidth.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
robinsonb5 2y ago
And yet if manufacturers cared enough about UX it wouldn't take much for input failures to be subconsciously correctable again. All you need is some kind of immediate feedback - an arrow appearing on-screen for each button press, for instance (or a beep - but I'd be the first to turn that off, so for the love of all that is holy, don't make it always-on!). What's crucial, though, is that mistakes or overshoots can be (a) detected (for example, if three presses were detected, show three arrows) and (b) corrected without having to wait for the channel change to complete.
HPsquared 2y ago
It used to be fun and rewarding to flip through channels on analogue equipment. No buffering, no delay, just press, flash to the next channel.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  What's truly been lost is the speed 20 years ago was when I could flip through all (40ish) analogue CATV channels * in under 20 seconds * and could tell you what shows were going on with each channel. Yes, it only took around 500ms to filter and decide if each station broadcast was on commercial, news, sports, nature, or something else worth watching. To this day, with all the CDNs and YouTube evolutions, we still have not come close to receiving video variety anywhere near that speed.
  - myself248 2y ago
    Seriously. Analog stuff was wild. You could have telephones in adjacent rooms, call one from the other, and your voice would come out the telephone (having traveled electrically all the way across town and back) before the sound came down the hall. Analog cellphones were like that too -- ludicrously low latency. Being able to interrupt each other without the delay-dance of "no, you go ahead" *pause* was huge. Digital cellular networks just enshittified that one day in about 2002 and apparently most folks just didn't care? I curse it every time I have to talk on the godforsaken phone.
    - stackskipton 2y ago
      >Digital cellular networks just enshittified that one day in about 2002 and apparently most folks just didn't care? People cared, your comment made me remember comments my parents made about this problem. However, digital cell signals fixed a ton of congestion issues that analog was having and lowered the price so much people could actually afford to have cell phones.
  - kderbe 2y ago
    Puffer channel changes are near-instant. https://puffer.stanford.edu/ https://puffer.stanford.edu/
myself248 2y ago
Lightswitches are like this for me now. Activating the switch still produces an audible and subtly-tactile click, but then some awful software has to think about it for a moment and close a relay, and then a whole power supply in an LED module somewhere has to start up. It's slower enough, compared to incandescent, to juuuuust make me flinch back and almost hit the switch again, but nope, it worked the first time after all. I don't have a term for the annoyance of that flinch, but I should.
GuB-42 2y ago
I have thought about that for a while and I wonder if it has to do with how memory becomes bigger more than it becomes faster. For example, compared to 30 years ago, PCs have about 1000x times more RAM, but it is only about 100x faster with about 10x less latency. It is a general trend for all sorts of devices and types of storage. It means that for instance, storing an entire frame of video is nothing today, but in the analog times, it was hard, it means you simply didn't have enough storage for high latency. Now, you can comfortably save several frames of video, which is nice since more data means better compression, better error correction, etc... at the cost of more latency. Had memory be expensive and speed plentiful, a more direct pathway would have been cheaper, and latency naturally lower.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > I wonder if it has to do with how memory becomes bigger more than it becomes faster No. It is the software. Just look at Windows: Windows 10 and 11 has a third of functionality of 7 being 10 times bigger. What 10 years ago needed a mouse click, it needs 3 today. Software must communicate with the mothership so that mothership can see which functions are not used and remove them, making the program useless. And security: it just got more layers. Which, most of the time are useless and easy to bypass.

by khafra 2y ago

somat 2y ago

nobody cares enough to actually do it. but what would it take to have near instantaneous channel changes again?, prestarting a second stream in the background? And realistically the linear array of channels is also dead so it really does not matter. so I guess the modern equivalent is having a snappy UI. A horrible idea, as if our current tv features were not already bad enough. the modern equivalent to quick channel changes would be a learning model that guesses what you you want to see next, has that stream prestarted then have the "next channel" button tied to activate that stream. The actual reason this is a bad idea, I mean above and beyond the idea that we want learning models in our tv's. Is that the manufactures would very quickly figure out that instead of the agent working for their customers they could sell preferential weights to the highest bidder. closing thought... Oh shit I just reinvent youtube shorts(or perhaps tik tok, but I have managed to avoid that platform so far)... an interface I despise with a passion.

hulitu 2y ago
> so I guess the modern equivalent is having a snappy UI. "With all those DLLs and network access, Dave, you're going to find this rather difficult" /s
jakewins 2y ago
There was some article from early instagram times about this the other week - that an innovation there was that they started the upload as soon as the picture was taken, so after the user filled out the caption part and hit “submit”, the “upload” was instantaneous
gosub100 2y ago
I think it's irrelevant because TV is dead. But I do remember with rose tinted glasses the days of analog cable where changing channels was done in hardware and didn't require 1.5s for the HEVC stream to buffer
theamk 2y ago
a workaround for IP-based TVs may be some sort of splash/loading screen that shows recent-ish screenshot of the channel very quickly. It'd still take a long time for picture to start moving, but at least user will see something and could switch away quickly if they don't care about content at all. Of course this will be non-trivial on server side - constantly decode each channel's stream, take a snapshot every few seconds, re-encode to JPEG, serve to clients... And since channels are dead, no one is going to do this.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > but at least user will see something and could switch away quickly if they don't care about content at all. The main issue is that the switching "app" is not yet loaded. /s
- myself248 2y ago
  It could simply be the most recent I-frame from the other stream in question. That would require neither decoding nor encoding on the server's part, merely buffering, and I suspect transport-stream libraries have very optimized functions for finding I-frames. Furthermore, once a user starts flipping channels, since most flipping is just prev/next, you could start proactively sending them the frames for the adjacent channels of where they are, and reduce the show-delay to nearly nothing at all. When they calm down and haven't flipped for a while, stop this to save bandwidth.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

robinsonb5 2y ago

And yet if manufacturers cared enough about UX it wouldn't take much for input failures to be subconsciously correctable again. All you need is some kind of immediate feedback - an arrow appearing on-screen for each button press, for instance (or a beep - but I'd be the first to turn that off, so for the love of all that is holy, don't make it always-on!). What's crucial, though, is that mistakes or overshoots can be (a) detected (for example, if three presses were detected, show three arrows) and (b) corrected without having to wait for the channel change to complete.

HPsquared 2y ago

It used to be fun and rewarding to flip through channels on analogue equipment. No buffering, no delay, just press, flash to the next channel.

1970-01-01 2y ago
What's truly been lost is the speed 20 years ago was when I could flip through all (40ish) analogue CATV channels * in under 20 seconds * and could tell you what shows were going on with each channel. Yes, it only took around 500ms to filter and decide if each station broadcast was on commercial, news, sports, nature, or something else worth watching. To this day, with all the CDNs and YouTube evolutions, we still have not come close to receiving video variety anywhere near that speed.
- myself248 2y ago
  Seriously. Analog stuff was wild. You could have telephones in adjacent rooms, call one from the other, and your voice would come out the telephone (having traveled electrically all the way across town and back) before the sound came down the hall. Analog cellphones were like that too -- ludicrously low latency. Being able to interrupt each other without the delay-dance of "no, you go ahead" *pause* was huge. Digital cellular networks just enshittified that one day in about 2002 and apparently most folks just didn't care? I curse it every time I have to talk on the godforsaken phone.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    >Digital cellular networks just enshittified that one day in about 2002 and apparently most folks just didn't care? People cared, your comment made me remember comments my parents made about this problem. However, digital cell signals fixed a ton of congestion issues that analog was having and lowered the price so much people could actually afford to have cell phones.
- kderbe 2y ago
  Puffer channel changes are near-instant. https://puffer.stanford.edu/ https://puffer.stanford.edu/

myself248 2y ago

Lightswitches are like this for me now. Activating the switch still produces an audible and subtly-tactile click, but then some awful software has to think about it for a moment and close a relay, and then a whole power supply in an LED module somewhere has to start up. It's slower enough, compared to incandescent, to juuuuust make me flinch back and almost hit the switch again, but nope, it worked the first time after all. I don't have a term for the annoyance of that flinch, but I should.

GuB-42 2y ago

I have thought about that for a while and I wonder if it has to do with how memory becomes bigger more than it becomes faster. For example, compared to 30 years ago, PCs have about 1000x times more RAM, but it is only about 100x faster with about 10x less latency. It is a general trend for all sorts of devices and types of storage. It means that for instance, storing an entire frame of video is nothing today, but in the analog times, it was hard, it means you simply didn't have enough storage for high latency. Now, you can comfortably save several frames of video, which is nice since more data means better compression, better error correction, etc... at the cost of more latency. Had memory be expensive and speed plentiful, a more direct pathway would have been cheaper, and latency naturally lower.

hulitu 2y ago
> I wonder if it has to do with how memory becomes bigger more than it becomes faster No. It is the software. Just look at Windows: Windows 10 and 11 has a third of functionality of 7 being 10 times bigger. What 10 years ago needed a mouse click, it needs 3 today. Software must communicate with the mothership so that mothership can see which functions are not used and remove them, making the program useless. And security: it just got more layers. Which, most of the time are useless and easy to bypass.