3 ms·
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?
by 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 agoThere 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 agoI 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 agoa 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 agoIt 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]