average switch times
#1
Hi, I'm curious what the average times for channel switches are in your setups. In my setup it's unfortunately taking quite long, like ~4-6 seconds I think. Also initial tuning is taking up to 10 seconds sometimes.

So anybody with faster zapping times around?
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#2
Yep. On a local client server setup, my 'initial tune' takes between 5-8 seconds. After that, switching takes about 2 seconds. This is far better than wht i could get on media portal or nextpvr. When I was using Linux, tvheadend was instant at initial tuning and channel changes. Not sure why though.
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#3
tvh and vnsi use a different demuxer. They parse packets in the backend deliver already demuxed packets to XBMC. ffmpeg demuxer requires some time to find stream info. Note this is much faster if you compile release: --disable-debug
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#4
@FermetMenta are you saying that if i compile a ion build with disable debug i would get faster zapping speed from tvheadend?
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#5
Nope, I am saying you would observe faster zapping for other backends than tvh and vnsi. tvh and vnsi use a special demuxer oritinally designed with the requirement of fast zapping.
ffmpeg demuxer analyzes the input stream until it has parsed out all information. We currently working on it to observe at PAT/PMT changes and notify the player about it. That is e.g. when a new audio track like original language is added or removed. For live tv it needs to be optimized in a way that not all information is required at opening but adding new streams on the fly and notify player about it.
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#6
Ok thanks !
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#7
@loggio: have you done any special settings to get that fast switching times ( seconds). my switching time with new argus tv 2.0.1 are 7 seconds. this is much to long.
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#8
No I've done nothing special to get my switching time. This is the general outcome using Argus-tv... its channel change speeds are quite quick. However, I did upgrade to the latest nightly yesterday using Argus-tv 2.0.1 and the new plugin from red-f and the first thing I noticed was that channel changes actually take longer now... but this could be an XBMC thing, after all I am using nightly builds and things are changing all the time... I noticed that timeline wasn't working either.

Keep in mind, switching times are also effected by your tuner card... ie, if you have a cheap tuner card it can be quite slow at switching... I had this issue with my original usb tuner card. After upgrading to a ''newer'' dual usb tuner card I noticed an immediate difference in switching times. So hardware could be and in most cases will be what's causing you to have these problems.

Hopefully XBMC developers can work out a way to greatly improve on switch times because they do suck in most cases. A couple of seconds is ''too long'' if you ask me, but its bearable.

I'll upgrade again in a few days and see if things are better.

Cheers loggio
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#9
got it to work with 2-3 seconds switching time. you have to play with "delay after tuning" and (maybe?) "connection timeout". i set both to "1". all works very well now with fast switching time.
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#10
I find (not with XBMC I might add) that the initial tune time is around 6 seconds to an HD channel but after that, channel changes on the same transponder are around about 1-2s and across transponders around 3 for HD or 2 for SD. Argus changes very quickly, it is simply that the clients seem to need to parse the data before they'll display.

I'm avoiding using XBMC until proper Live TV skin support is out with the EPG as the default view but playing around with the current master of Frodo I get similar results to MediaPortal.
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