[dalewking]

I have been a user of WMC for several years (using Hauppauge WinTV PVR card and HD Home Run), but would like to switch to media center that has more features like the ability to share the tuners and recordings with front ends on other TVs.

One of my big problems with WMC is that it is on Windows and for some reason it keeps getting laggier and slower, particularly. Seems you basically have to reinstall Windows about every 9 months to prevent the wife from throwing the remote at the TV. I am facing that situation again, where you might hit fast forward and then it will ignore the remote for 20 secs and you have now fast forwarded half way through the show.

I have tried XBMC, Media Portal, etc. in the past and was looking at them again, but the thing that seems to kill it for me every time is the ridiculously long channel change times (5-10 seconds). That will not be acceptable to the wife.

I have been googling on it, but see all sorts of contradictory and some out of date information and am not sure really which direction to proceed.

So, bottom line, is there a PVR solution (XBMC, MythTV, or other) that does channel changes anywhere near as fast as WMC (< 2 secs)? I am not married to Windows on that box and would switch to Linux if that gave acceptable performance.

[black_eagle]

I used to run mythtv but found it was slow to switch with xbmc (it was ok with it's own frontend though) so I switched to tvheadend. Channel change for me now, with the backend running on a PC downstairs and using the installation in my bedroom, is ~1 second with the latest backend. Its certainly fast enough to stop the wife complaining like she did with mythtv anyway

[FernetMenta]

tv headend and vnsi are not affected by the issue which causes the long switching times. They have their own demuxers.

[dalewking]

I am going to give OpenElec with tv headend a test drive over the weekend and see how it goes. I was going to try it a few days ago, but I needed to make a bootable thumb drive with it installed which requires some extra hoops to jump through.

[nickr]

Why the obsession with channel change times? Get with the PVR programme! Record what you want to watch. Watch it when you want to watch. Stop channel surfing.

[sualfred]

Windows reinstallation every 9 month? ^^ Do you use Windows XP?

For Windows only:
Give the prebuild versions of margo a try. They have channel improvements.

My setup:
- Windows 8.1 (disabled auto updates, running XBMC as shell replacement)
- XBMC builds by margo (https://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcel...build.html)
- ArgusTV for the backend
- Digital Devices Cine S2 DVB-S Card

Channel switchting from SD to SD -> 0-1sec
Channel switching from SD to unencrypted HD -> 0-2sec

Encrypted channels (using Acamd + CCCam server)
Channel switching from encrypted SD to encrypted SD -> 1-3 sec
Channel switching from encrypted HD to encrypted HD -> 1-3 sec

ArgusTV provides me the stablest and fastest PVR solution.

If your wife is throwing the remote: catch it, throw it back, look angry as hell, unplug the HTPC, move the HTPC to your office room (for example) and give her a low budget 10 bucks receiver. This is what a friend did and it worked No more bad comments and flying remotes.

[stuCONNERS]

my set-up gives sub 3 second changes including HD encryptred.

[dalewking]

Why the obsession with channel change times? Get with the PVR programme! Record what you want to watch. Watch it when you want to watch. Stop channel surfing.

Yeah, I've read enough threads to know that eventually some idiot would come along and try to tell me that having PVR means you never ever watch live TV. I have been recording shows with Windows Media Center for years and had UVerse once before that and I know that is nonsense. It does lessen it, but sometimes you do watch live TV and then it is important. Could be related to the fact that we don't have cable so there is less to record, but if I had cable there would also be more to flip through.

There are many things you watch on live TV and will never use the PVR for. Evening news is one example. I am not going to DVR the evening news, but if I happen to watch it there is a strong possibility that I might bounce between news channels. That is just one example.

[cyrils]

I use a server with TVHeadend and a twin tuner DVB-S2 card (DVBSky S952). Channel change on my client Raspberry PIs running Openelec 4.06 and overclocked to 950Mhz is 2-3 seconds. On HD channels it's a second and a half longer. Though it's slower than my old STB, I find given the cost and the added features that it is very acceptable.

[nickr]

@dalewking Well I DVR the news. Both of the local 6.00 pm news shows. I am hardly ever ready to sit down and watch TV at news time. More likely to sit down when dinner is ready nearer 7.30pm. Myth of course allows me to keep a set number of days worth, and deletes the oldest one when a new one records, so there is no ever expanding set of 6.00 pm news shows.

Live TV is extremely rare in my household, but perhaps that's because we have been using mythtv exclusively for about 6 years. Me, wife, kids are all 'with the programme' of 'record what you want to watch, watch it when you want to watch'.

Each to their own of course, but personally for the above reasons I don't see channel switch times as a major factor. I can see others might.

Oh and I don't consider myself an idiot, you might like to read the forum rules if you want to keep posting here.

[bluechris]

Windows reinstallation every 9 month? ^^ Do you use Windows XP?

For Windows only:
Give the prebuild versions of margo a try. They have channel improvements.

My setup:
- Windows 8.1 (disabled auto updates, running XBMC as shell replacement)
- XBMC builds by margo (https://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcel...build.html)
- ArgusTV for the backend
- Digital Devices Cine S2 DVB-S Card

Channel switchting from SD to SD -> 0-1sec
Channel switching from SD to unencrypted HD -> 0-2sec

Encrypted channels (using Acamd + CCCam server)
Channel switching from encrypted SD to encrypted SD -> 1-3 sec
Channel switching from encrypted HD to encrypted HD -> 1-3 sec

ArgusTV provides me the stablest and fastest PVR solution.

If your wife is throwing the remote: catch it, throw it back, look angry as hell, unplug the HTPC, move the HTPC to your office room (for example) and give her a low budget 10 bucks receiver. This is what a friend did and it worked No more bad comments and flying remotes.

I'm exactly as this and works fast and solid

[dalewking]

So here is the status of my search.

I spent an entire evening trying to get OpenElec working with TvHeadEnd. I have a Master's degree in computer science and I still could not successfully get TvHeadEnd set up. There is almost no documentation on setting it up that I can find. It isn't as though I have a complicated setup, just US over-the-air ATSC channels.

I also had issues with its detection of my tuners. It would usually after boot detect the HD HomeRun and assign them to adapter0 and adapter1. Sometime later it will realize that I have the Hauppauge card and assign it to adatper0 and adapter1 and move the HD HomeRun to adapter2 and adapter3. I would end up with 4 HD HomeRun definitions in TvHeadEnd.

I did try the margo build of XBMC with ServerWMC under Windows and it does improve things to say 3-5 secs per channel change (which is still probably too slow), but I had weird de-interlacing artifacts (if I remember correctly) on some channels. I could try the ArgusTv to see if that is any better.

I ran SpinRite on the computer and went on an uninstall spree and that seems to have Windows 7 behaving more reasonably again.

So where I am at now is continuing to use WMC for PVR and live TV as I can't find anything that matches it for that. But I have installed the XBMC integration that lets me open XBMC from WMC so I can also access all the other goodies from XBMC. I will leave ServerWMC running so that other devices can access PVR functionality, but I actually have not been able to get that to work yet (at least from Android).

I hope to eventually install Raspberry PI devices on other TV's in the house (which is one of the main reasons for wanting to switch to something like XBMC), but at the moment all the other TV's are older and don't have HDMI but those TV's need to be upgraded any way. I am not as concerned with channel change times on these other TV's.

[yellowjacket]

My channel-changing times using a HD-Homerun Prime, MythTV 0.27.1+, and Gotham are currently about 3 seconds on a AMD E350 OpenElec box and about 2 seconds on fairly powerful Windows 7 box using the margro build.

For me this is an enormous improvement from a few months ago with a HD-PVR, Myth 0.27, and Frodo. Channel changing times then averaged 15 seconds. Changing to the HDHR reduced that to about 11 seconds, and the added combination of 0.27.1 (which has many zapping improvements) and Gotham took it down to about 4 seconds. I gained another second by setting cacheindvdplayer to false in advancedsettings.xml. The margro build on Windows hacks off the last second and makes the changing time more consistent. That system now changes channels just as fast as mythfrontend does.

The only caveat I have is that you need a fairly beefy backend machine for MythTV if you set cacheindvdplayer to false. When you're watching live tv and the schedule indicates the show has changed, MythTV closes out the current recording file, starts a new one, and updates the database. On my old Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM, that took long enough that XBMC interpreted the interruption as a disconnection and stopped playback. On my new i3-4130 with 16GB, you can see the playback pause for a moment while MythTV does its thing, but XBMC has yet to disconnect the stream.

[negge]

just US over-the-air ATSC channels

That's your problem in a nutshell. tvheadend's support for ATSC is a bit lacking, especielly the tuner part. There's a guy working on improving the HDHomeRun integration (https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/pull/425) but I can understand if you don't want to fiddle around with it anymore than you already have.

[snorkel]

I have been using two HDHomeRuns (latest generation) with nextpvr as the backend and the
channel change is pretty decent in XBMC.

The network attached tuners seem to change channels faster than a card right in the backend server PC.