The end result is fantastic though! It puts a smile on my face every time I tune a channel. A tricky job well executed.
I'm so happy it made you happy. That means a lot. I stayed up so late doing that! It was really not a fun one but I'm glad someone enjoys it!
I actually had to shut it off because it made my wife think the TV was broken.
She wasn't a fan, so I have to leave mine disabled. Maybe I'll have some fun with her and put some test color bars up or something. 
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The old Indian head test pattern.
@daldana7296 This comment has been stuck in my head, and today I passed a couple of the same Capture Cards you're using through to my Channels DVR LXC in Proxmox.
Testing both using VLC as a client (as I can specify the virtual tuner number I want to use in ah4c), with DirecTV via FastChannels, my tune times were in the same ~4 second range that I see with my network encoders.
We should probably revisit your setup as some point, if you're still seeing those long tune times, as something isn't right. Even without FastChannels, my tune times were ~10 seconds using deep links with the DTV app.
Using FastChannels, with just the Single HDMI Encoder running, my tune times are around 5-6 seconds, so I'm really happy with that! I'm not sure what the big difference is between the single encoder and the FC integration with ah4c that would cause such a difference.
I do know that I don't see the DTV splash screen or the guide page with the single encoder setup, whereas I did with the ah4c integration.
Yeah, from sleep to wake with an Osprey, I get about 7 to 8 seconds. So that is right on par, I would say.
There's no difference between the single encoder and the ah4c bridge when using FastChannels for both -- you're comparing two different things.
The FastChannels bridge does not use the DTV app (which is where the splash screen comes from), which is what slows down tuning when using deeplinks. I'm sure neither of us has plans to go back to tuning "the old way" using deeplinks, so your long tune times using that method is probably a mystery we'll never solve.
It is good to know that this option exists if DirecTV ever kills the Osprey line.
I have 10 of them, so there is no point in switching to the bridge right now, but it is really good to know that this is an alternative to getting fast tunes.
Absolutely!
There are a couple of issues to address with ah4c. The first is the View & control window isn't working with my virtual encoders. It works initially (for maybe a second), but then goes gray with a spinning circle. The virtual encoder URL looks like this:
http://channels:8089/devices/M3U-Capture/channels/90474/stream.mpg?format=ts&codec=copy
The second is that our attempt at changing tuner numbers from starting with 0 to starting with 1 is a bit of a bust, as if you want to target a specific tuner (for testing or whatever), it's done by /play/tunerx/. And, as you might imagine, it's a bit confusing when looking at Activity-Tuners. Apparently changing the way the tuners are referenced, internal to the program, is no small task. I propose we revert this.
I'm happy to take a look at these issues myself, but if you'd prefer to dig into them, that's great too.
I am just the teeniest bit burnt out right now, so I might have to take a little bit of a breather and then look at it another time. I also have not set this up yet, so I would have to maybe look into setting up a test Channels server. I do not want to keep interrupting people while I test various things related to Channels, so it would probably be best if I take my spare LinkPis that I have lying around and look into setting up a spare Channels/ah4c server with those extra encoders at some point.
No problem. I'll see if I can make any inroads on either issue tomorrow. View & control seem the most pressing, so I'll look at that first.
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That's exactly my thought as well!