Did you ever notice that with technology, it often seems to be two steps forward but one step back? Before digital TV, our analog tuners could change channels at the speed of a thumb-press. (This was even true in the early days of the remote controls. My grandmother had a Zenith Space Command, and when [...]
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HDTV Almanac - Broadcom Helps HDTV Lose Wait
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alfredpoor
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videograbber
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from BroadCom:
> By minimizing lag, FastRTV™ eliminates viewer frustration caused by long delays and double clicking the remote. <
I find it interesting that they never even admitted this was a problem... until they had a "solution" for it. Of course, this will only be available to those cable services using BroadCom gear, which rules out Charter (for example) which uses Moto and SA boxes.
But they need to sell the crap out of FastRTV as quick as they can. Why? Because as soon as the cable cos. move to SDV, this will kill FastRTV, and put you back to the long latencies again (probably even longer, since there's two-way communications involved).
- Tim
> By minimizing lag, FastRTV™ eliminates viewer frustration caused by long delays and double clicking the remote. <
I find it interesting that they never even admitted this was a problem... until they had a "solution" for it. Of course, this will only be available to those cable services using BroadCom gear, which rules out Charter (for example) which uses Moto and SA boxes.
But they need to sell the crap out of FastRTV as quick as they can. Why? Because as soon as the cable cos. move to SDV, this will kill FastRTV, and put you back to the long latencies again (probably even longer, since there's two-way communications involved).
- Tim
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hharris4earthlink
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- Location: Pasadena, California
Cable R.I.P.
Not to belabor the obvious, but there's a simple fix for this. Go to satellite TV where not only is there no delay in switching, the concept of up and down is not even relevant because it's menu driven. I subscribed to DirecTV when in Los Angeles and switched to Dish when I moved up near the Canadian border because of line-of-sight to the satellite problems, the point being that some kind of satellite works almost everywhere. Cable is, frankly, a dinosaur that belongs in a museum. R.I.P
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720pete
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Slow switching times with digital cable
This is pretty elementary stuff.
When you change a cable TV channel (or any digital channel, for that matter), the TV has to read the MPEG program tables, plus PSIP information, to recognize and start the stream. It has has to find an I-frame (every 15 frames) to start showing you video. There is a delay inherent in this process that is difficult to overcome. This process is repeated every time you change channels, although the virtual channel information and signal format are saved in the TV's memory (or cable box memory).
One way to get around it is to demodulate and decode more than one stream at a time, then jump back and forth between streams. But that would require quite a bit of processing power.
When you change a cable TV channel (or any digital channel, for that matter), the TV has to read the MPEG program tables, plus PSIP information, to recognize and start the stream. It has has to find an I-frame (every 15 frames) to start showing you video. There is a delay inherent in this process that is difficult to overcome. This process is repeated every time you change channels, although the virtual channel information and signal format are saved in the TV's memory (or cable box memory).
One way to get around it is to demodulate and decode more than one stream at a time, then jump back and forth between streams. But that would require quite a bit of processing power.