Composite input revisited (1 Viewer)

[jasonblack]

Looking back through forum threads, it's been a while since this question has been addressed...what to do about time-sensitive composite input (eg., gaming consoles)? I'm trying to simplify the HTPC experience for my family. Part of that is to avoid input switching on the TV (even a properly programmed Harmony remote can be klunky with this). Since I've got two tuner cards, the obvious choice would be to wire our game consoles to the tuners and create menu shortcuts to those 'channels'. The problem is that it is still not possible, to my knowledge, to disable timeshifting for composite inputs. The one-two second time delay introduced by timeshifting makes using the composite inputs in this manner untenable.

How are others addressing this issue? If disabling timeshifting within TVServer is not going to happen, would a 'composite input' plugin be a possibility?

 

[mm1352000]

Hi jasonblack

There is certainly no way to "disable" timeshifting. In fact I would consider the mechanism for timeshifting (ie. writing the stream to an HDD and reading it back) as a core part of the link between the MediaPortal front end and TV Server back end. It is very far from trivial to remove.

Technically the major sources of lag are probably the writing and reading from an HDD and well as digitising (encoding) and decoding the video. You do have some tricks up your sleave:
- using an HDD with good IO speed - an SSD if you can afford it, or maybe a RAM disk - for timeshifting would possibly reduce the read/write dependent lag significantly
- a tuner with hardware encoding is possibly best for reducing lag in the encode process
- you can also disable post-processing features in codecs and drivers
- there would also be hacks that you could use to reduce the buffer sizes (and hence the lag introduced) in TsReader

I think at the end of the day you can bend MP in its current form to make it do what you want but that doesn't change the fact that it is not really designed for it - the result won't be the best possible solution. If you are really passionate about the idea then I think it would be feasible to create a plugin for the MP client that supports rendering an external video input directly, however creating such a plugin would require a lot of skill and time. It might be a struggle to find developers who are interested in helping if you're not able to do it yourself. I don't see us creating such a plugin or adding the ability to disable timeshifting for a few reasons: the size and complexity of the task, the number of people who need this functionality, the additional complexity introduced in the code logic, the lack of developers...

mm