Ceton infiniTV 4 Tuner Slow Channel changing

[brookedow]

My Ceton infiniTV 4 Tuner takes about 3-4 seconds to change channel. I have the latest non beta firmware. I would like to see 1 second channel changing.

Any ideas?

[tzr916]

Your PC hardware?
Your tuner signal levels, snr, temps?
Tuning adapter y/n?

[breakthestatic]

Honestly, that's the best you'll get unless Ceton has something they aren't telling us. I have the InfiniTV 4, and got fed up with the slow channel switching, as well as the extra long (15+ seconds) time to tune on first boot, so I bought the SiliconDust HDHR Prime and it is leagues better than the Ceton. You'll lose a tuner with the comparatively-priced version from SiliconDust, but if you don't need that extra tuner it's a much better functioning device. There is also a 6 tuner version but I think it's quite a bit more expensive.

[richard1980]

3-4 seconds for the InfiniTV is normal. The HDHRP is slightly faster, but not by much. Also, SD discontinued the 6-tuner model some time ago.

[glugglug]

Fairly normal for digital tuners. My non-cablecard HVR-2250 isn't any better. I've seen some cable boxes take several seconds as well. Analog tuner you can just tune to the station and start playing it. Digital tuners you first have to tune to the station, then parse whatever metadata is there to find the subchannel you are looking for and start reading pieces of that stream as they come in. Then MCE can only start decompressing it to play it for you once there is an I-frame. More frequent I-frame may make for faster effective tuning and smoother skip/ff/rew functionality, but the tradeoff is a worse compression ratio for the same image quality. Actually I think it needs to wait for TWO I-frames because a B-frame will require information from the next I-frame to decode it. (sending I-frames only with no B or P frames betweeen them would be the similar to just using JPEG to compress each frame of the video).

If you have SDV, the situation is much worse because first it has to ask the tuning adapter for a pseudo channel-map entry, and if noone else in your vicinity is watching that channel yet this can take a ridiculous amount of time.

You can tell when the tuner has found and started streaming the channel vs. when the I-frame comes in so media center can start playing it by the gap in time between when the "Dolby Digital Plus" logo appears and when the video starts playing. When I had TWC, some of the lesser used channels (particularly the block of music channels) were encoded with only 1 I-frame every 15 seconds. Yes it took up to 30 seconds to switch to one.

[barnabas1969]

3-4 seconds for the InfiniTV is normal. The HDHRP is slightly faster, but not by much.

I disagree. I had 3-8+ second channel changes with the InfiniTV4 PCIe. When I switched to the HD HomeRun Prime, I got channel changes in the 1-2 second range (usually about 1 second) on all channels, including SDV. I wouldn't classify this as "slightly faster, but not by much". I would classify this as 300-400% faster. Definitely not what I would call "not much".

[STC]

3-4 second channel changes here with an infiniTV4 PCIe. No TA. To be honest, usually closer to 3 seconds.

[STC]

Have you tested with the channel up/down vs a channel number selection?

I find if on live TV when you punch in a channel, from the last digit it's quicker to display than pushing channel up or down. This must me a WMC limitation and not a tuner dependent problem.

[barnabas1969]

My testing was all done with channel up/down. I didn't try it from the guide or pressing the numeric keys.

[JohnW248]

My Ceton infiniTV 4 Tuner takes about 3-4 seconds to change channel. I have the latest non beta firmware. I would like to see 1 second channel changing.

Any ideas?

3-4 seconds is about normal for me for both Ceton and SD Prime units and clearQAM as well on MC. Remember that when you change channels it dumps the buffer and then starts another buffer and that has to build before it starts to play the picture. There is no such thing as live tv in the our digital world at least not the way it was where the electron scanning was in sync with the home receiver scan---that was really live tv with just the time delay imposed by the speed of light.

Maybe a device without a buffer will make a faster channel change but that won't allow for pause/replay of live tv.

[blueiedgod]

It has been a very long time since we had a company provided cable box, but playing with TV at in-laws, who have whole house DVR from Rogers, made me realize that 2-3 second delay with Ceton is nothing compared to much much longer delay with Rogers box.

At first I thought the remote was not working, but then the TV started to change channels, once every 8-10 second, well after I stopped pressing the buttons.

[machausta]

I'm in the 2-3 second range consistently with core 2 architecture hardware and an ATI DCT, while a friend of mine has the Ceton and pretty consistent 3 second channel changes with only a single TV going. It seems to be closer to 4 seconds when he has all tuners occupied, but this is on about the same era amd hardware as my intel based system.

[blueiedgod]

We have Ceton InfiniTV6 ETH and 3x SiliconDust HomeRun Duals. It seems that it doesn't matter which tuners are in use. The time to switch channels is a consistent 2-3 seconds. The only time it is slightly longer is when you are switching channels from one type of tuner, to another, i.e. from OTA to Cable, and vice versa.