faster channel changing

[docin8]

Hello
I have a 4500 and 5xxx series replay tv. I am a cable vision customer so i have to go thru the IR blaster to change channels. Is there any way to make the unit change channels faster?

thanks in advance for your help
greg

[Norbert]

Use the channel guide to select your show, or turn off the ReplayTV and use the cable remote to "speed surf" the channels directly on the cable box. Then when you see something you like, turn the ReplayTV back on and select that channel.

[brbrice]

Since getting the Replay, it's much easier to use the "up" and "down" directional arrows to scan the title/info on what's playing and then select/change to that channel (than to "surf" and wait the 3-5 secs for the video to appear for each channel press).

[blacknoi]

If you are using a digital cable box (i'm a cablevision customer too), assuming you are using the scientific atlanta 4200 box, when setting up the cable box IR code, hit the replayzones button to "finetune" the remote codes...

change it so the minimum digits typed in is 3. Send enter: No.

This should speed things up a little bit.

[Bobcrane]

I don't want to hijaack the question but everyone I've spoken to firsthand that has a problem with channel changing speed finds it goes away in a few weeks. Not because of anything they changed, but because once you've got thirty or so hours of shows you never channel scan again.

JMHO

[oldyellow]

Please forgive me if I am informing the already informed, but I had to explain this to my wife the other day.

Keep in mind that slow channel changing is a fundamental problem with any DVR that has to encode on the fly. As blacknoi mentioned, you may be able to speed things up a bit with tuning, but there is a point at which you can not get beyond.

Remember that your Replay encodes the analog feed from your cable box into an mpeg2 format. Even if you have a Digital box, the signal going to the Replay is analog, because your box has decoded it. The Replay then writes the mpeg2 stream to the hard drive.

When you watch your Replay, the mpeg2 stream is read from the hard drive, and decoded and sent to your television. This happens whether you are watching live, delayed, or recorded programming. For live programming, I would guess that a small (2 to 3 second) buffer is maintained to account for glitches that may happen during live programming.

When watching live programming the Replay has to (1) encode, (2) write, (2) read, (4) decode the signal. The part that you can't tune away is the time that it takes for the Replay to encode, and write (e.g. buffer) enough programming to start sending it to your television. The only way to reduce this is to have faster hardware and better written software doing the encoding/writing/reading/decoding.

I don't know from experience but DVR's that record digital streams directly (e.g. DirectTivo) should not have this problem.

My personal experience is that Bobcrane's solution has worked very well for me.

[jbarr]

Probably the only way to ensure the fastest channel changing is to send the "raw" cable feed into your box. Of course, you can't do this if you have Digital Cable. Even when I had my ReplayTV conencted to a DirecTV receiver via a Serial cable, channel changing was slow. The additive effect of sending IR commands, the Digital cable box changing the channel, and the inherrent lag of PRV's wil always cause a delay.

The above posts are absolutely correct: After a while, you just get used to it...

[clambert11]

You learn quick that Channel Surfing doesn't cut it with a RTV. You'll adapt quickly to Channel Guide Surfing. At first it seemed like a hassle, but I think I like this way much better now anyway. It's much quicker because you can view a page of shows @ one time.

The only real drawback is if your vision isn't all that good. If you struggle to read the guide, you're just screwed.

[MIS-Man]

I have always seen this as a trade off. The guide on the Replay is 10X faster than the one on my cable box, but there is the 3 second delay. So, my wife and I agreed to just use the Replay as we can get to the channel we want and still net a few seconds with the guide changing pages quicker. Just my opinion.

[Scallica]

[QUOTE=docin8]
Is there any way to make the unit change channels faster?
[/QUOTE]

How about this.. Is there a way to configure the RTV to not change the cable box channel when pressing the record button?

I searched, but I could not find any threads on this issue, so I appended this thread :rolleyes: