Slow channel change DVICO FusionHDTV (1 Viewer)

[lerebel]

Hi everyone,

I am using MP with a FusionHDTV dual 4 card and it works very well, except for channel changes which takes anywhere between 9 to 20 seconds, with 15 seconds being the norm!!

What puzzles me is that the software that came with the card is able to change channels very quickly (less than 5 seconds). I also tried MCE and the results are the same as MP in terms of how long it takes to change channels.

How can I improve this? Can one of the developpers explain whether it's a software/hardware issue?

Thanks.

 

[lerebel]

Anyone?

 

[Taipan]

What puzzles me is that the software that came with the card is able to change channels very quickly (less than 5 seconds). I also tried MCE and the results are the same as MP in terms of how long it takes to change channels..

I think you will find that the Dvico Fusion application uses its own native drivers to get quick channel changes, whereas MCE and MP use the BDA drivers. Hence the difference in channel change times.

How can I improve this?

I think that you need to take this issue up with the Dvico developers - they need to improve the quality of their BDA drivers. Dvico support is usually pretty good, so I encourage you to email them with your observation and ask them if they can fix it?

 

[Marcusb]

I've got the Dvico dual 2 and the Dvico lite.
With the TV engine 3 the channel changes are much faster than with TVE2.

There are a few other threads where it has been discussed that the Dvico BDA drivers are pretty bad and return incorrect values, which causes the lenghty channel changes. The TVE3 engine is immune to these, so the changes are back to five or so seconds. With the original TV engine, the changes I got were about 15-20 seconds.
Look in your log files for any reference to "Wait for tuner lock" or something when changing channels. This is where the delay is, because the drivers are returning negative values for signal quality.

I've since decided I won't be buying any more dvico cards.
I think the best bet is to go for hardware that uses BDA drivers for its own application as well. That way you know they will be caring as much about BDA as they should be.

 

[lerebel]

Thanks guys - much appreciated. I have lodged a ticket with DVICO and they have indeed confirmed the issue. They will apprently provide a fix. So stay tune, I will keep you up to date.

You mentioned TVEngine is better in terms of latency. Is the FusionHDTV dual 4 natively supported by TVEngine or will I have trouble with the detection and tuning?

Regards.

 

[htpcoz]

I've had a ticket with DVICO now for over a month trying to get a response on the nonsensical DVB signal values coming back from the driver, and after a few requests still getting no response.

I'm interested to know what they are saying that they will "fix" in the next release... do they know the specific issue that they are looking for? I'm struggling to find what exactly is the difference in the drivers (other than the signal strength value).

But the observation is true from me also, TVE3 is much better at handling what is coming back from the DVICO drivers.

The other thing that I find slows things down is if MP has to rebuild the decoding graph based on changes in the audio stream. Channel 9 in Aus transmits it's SD with both AC3 and MP2, whereas most other channels only have MP2, I find that when changing from AC3 to MP2 or visa versa, the graph has to be rebuilt which seems to add on around 3-5 seconds to a channel change. Changes between like channels (MP2 to MP2) is even quicker again on TVE3.

One other thing that might be helpful is to have TVE3 to use both tuners to keep the last channel active on the last tuner, that way when channel flicking between two channels the channel change should be immediate. This is something that is used by another BDA open source app DigitalWatch which has very fast channel changes.

 

[lerebel]

Hi htpcoz,

I don't know whether DVICO will fix this issue... I am not hopeful.

What is your experience with TVEngine3? I tried it tonight, and I first I was amazed, it could change channels very quickly. But I am having trouble with timeshifting, where when I change channels, the LiveTV stream points to the wrong position in the buffer. So in effect, TV will sometimes play from the beginning of the timeshift buffer when I change channels, or it gets itself caught in a loop and replays segments of 30 seconds or so indefinetely! At other times, it will simply freeze while changing channels.....

What would you guys suggest?

Regards.

 

[htpcoz]

unfortuantely TVE3 is still BETA so we can't expect miracles... but I've got the last bits of functionality across now (blaster and powerscheduler) so I'm moving to TVE3 fulltime now.

I've found that there can be some problems with the buffer management, especially when changing between DVB and analog cards, but as I find issues, I will raise them and hopefully get them resolved. Changeover between the two card types can be very slow and buggy, but I don't do it all that often, so

What would be nice is to find out why TVE3 is so much better than TVE2 at this, and get it put back into the very stable TVE2, but I think there will be little motivation to invest the effort from the devs in that, as there is much more push on getting a stable TVE3.

I guess, for the moment, if you need the stability you will need to live with the slower channel changes, and wait for the stability to come with TVE3. I'll see how I go with TVE3, and the WAF, if it becomes too much of an issue, then I'll move back to the old slow changes (or just throw out the piece of junk DVICO card), and buy something cheaper that actually works.

 

[and-81]

I can tell you guys that the devs are putting a heck of a lot of effort into TVE3.

And the best thing people could do is change to TVE3.

Here's why:

1. If you change to TVE3 you get all the benefits that it has to offer. I don't need to go into this, but channel change speed is one of them.

2. If you find a problem with TVE3 you're likely to get it fixed pretty quickly (if you report it). Due to all the work that is going into TVE3 at the moment. TVE2 problems take longer because there are less (very few) people working on it now.

3. The more people that use TVE3 the more problems will be found and fixed and the sooner we will have a feature release of TVE3.

4. I have found TVE3 to be more stable than TVE2 in my setup. You're results may differ, but for me it's better. And I'm running two DVICO cards, a FusionHDTV DVB-T1 and a FusionHDTV Hybrid. And yes, I don't think I'll get DVICO cards again unless they improve their BDA drivers.

Cheers,

 

[lerebel]

Hi,

For sure, I agree that TVE3 is a nice piece of software, and I am certainly not giving up on it. I will install the latest snapshots again tonight and will lodge a bug report with the timeshift buffer again if it's still there. (I saw other people have reported the same bug in the past, it must have made its way back in the later snapshots maybe...)

Cheers.