[anon102010]

Wow. How can this be SO much better than even my cable box!

Seriously, clicking up down with channels, there is very little of that slow feeling blank out / blank in thing that is so annoying.

I'd love to have an OTA receiver go into something like this at my house with this simplicity and speed (I did HD Run or something once and the hoopjumping was high and quality low).

[toast0]

OTA channel surfing is slow because before you can see a picture, first you have to tune the digital signal, then you have to wait for an I frame, plus whatever decoder delay and output image processing. In order to make it better, you really need to three tuners, so you can process the streams of the up and down channels. Random access would still be slow, but oh well.

I imagine cable is pretty similar, but I suspect most cable boxes are more capable than tuners in tvs, so they may be running multiple tuners, and I think there's more of a chance of subchannels being useful, too.

[TylerE]

Every cablebox I've ever dealt with is a pile of shit than struggles to display simple text-based menus.

[jedieaston]

Comcast's newer IPTV/X1 boxes are somehow worse, as they have 100x the processing capacity of the old Motorola/Cisco boxes, but use it to run a slow as molasses JS SPA. The Netflix app runs at probably half the speed of the Apple TV (or the Fire TV Stick) and even Comcast's UI can sometimes take upwards of 1-2 seconds to respond to a button press.

[schnable]

X1 uses a cloud-based UI, kind of like X-Windows client and server.

[Symbiote]

TVs sold in Europe are sometimes advertised as having multiple tuners. OTA viewing is the most common type in several countries here.

With digital TV, several channels are multiplexed into a single broadcast frequency, so channel hopping is sometimes OK even with a single tuner.

[julianlam]

While hoopjumping is still rather high (I did need to configure a MySQL database and read through some rather cryptic docs for SchedulesDirect), it was much easier to get running using MythTV than it was a couple years prior (last time I had tried).

It's definitely a nice weekend project if you are serious about cutting the cord and are in an area with decent OTA signals.

I will say though, that MythTV does have the annoying "slow channel switch" issue, since it literally needs to buffer some video data before it begins to play.

[nitrogen]

Ah, takes me back. I ran a MythTV box ages ago. What is the I-frame interval on ATSC streams? Is it all still MPEG-2 or are there more advanced streams being broadcast now? Presumably you have to wait for an I-frame, or show garbled video until you get one.

[toast0]

ATSC 3.0 is starting to show up in some markets, which brings with it newer than mpeg-2 codecs. I haven't yet started to pay attention to that, but it looks like it's h.265

They skipped ATSC 2. There were a couple broadcasters experimenting with newer codecs on ATSC, but I think that mostly fizzled out.