One of the annoyances with DTV is that channel switching times tend to be slow. On my TV using the built-in tuner it takes about a second, maybe a bit more. That doesn’t sound long, but it makes surfing pretty slow.
I’ve played with TVHeadend on my ATV, but it takes about five seconds to change a channel. I don’t know what causes this, but you can imagine it’s painful.
So for those of you on the ATV using a HomeRun, how quickly can you change channels?
We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing channel tuning time. There’s some overhead we can’t avoid since it’s going over a network link, but usually takes between 0.5-1s depending on the channel.
Once you select the channel it is pretty much instant. You can select channels from the menu or from the slide down bar. This was the thing that surprised me the most.
UPDATE: I just noticed @tmm1 reply while I was posting so decided to try and time it. OK, not instant. Almost 1 second. Before we returned our DVR’s and STB’s from FIOS we wanted the same kind of feel when moving though channels and it is pretty much the same. The wife and I have never had a problem with speed of switching channels.
mike, your reply is interesting. Is there a way to simply surf up and down channels, say by sideswiping? How does this “slide down bar” work, is that another menu?
tmm1, out of curiosity, how much of that time is buffering, and how much is latency in the tuner itself? If there is an latency in the tuner, perhaps it would be a reasonable option to have any idle tuner move to the “next channel”?
So for instance, if I just surfed up from channel 4 to channel 5, then the idle tuner would move to channel 6 (or whatever is next in my channel list). Then it would eliminate that delay at least.
Surfing up/down: There is no channel up/down on the remote. You can double tap the play/pause button to go back to the prior channel and then again to go back but I seldom use it. Sometimes and hit the Menu button and then select a new channel but mostly slide down from the top menu of favorites and slide left/right for the channel I want. After using Channels for almost 1 year we are very quick at moving around.
Very interesting. I suspect that we too will use menus for most navigation, as is the case with the sat tuner at the cottage. I think it’s primarily the lack of a menu that keeps me on the up and down buttons as it is, and that when I have a guide I’ll mostly use that.
So I’m poking about the 'net now looking for tuners…
I should say I was going to go with a Tablo, but two things stopped me from pulling the trigger. One was the price, it’s not too high considering cable costs, but still. The other was that the EPG had to be paid for, a monthly fee which was precisely the thing I was trying to avoid.
I did try the TVH solution, but as I note above, it’s not really useable. Setup is insanely difficult, and performance is not good. Much of that may be due to my running it on an ODroid SBC, but for this sort of thing it either works or doesn’t, you know? And I’m sure not going to dedicate a desktop for it!
One big complaint we’ve heard about Tablo is that it does not support surround sound. Also its supposed to be quite slow, as someone recently mentioned on Channels 2.0 for Apple TV
Note that only 4 hours of upcoming guide data is available within the app. We plan to offer more EPG with our upcoming Channels DVR service, but that will require a monthly fee like other similar products.
I was the person mentioning that Tablo channel switching is slooooooowwwwwww.
So to the OP, if you think 1 second is slow. Or that 5 seconds is slow. Don’t bother with Tablo as you will hate it. Switching channels is 10+ seconds. You want to scream when accidentally changing channels!
My understanding is that it has something to do with the way Tablo buffers/records/converts the content, so it is “by design” and not going to change.
Overall Tablo is a nice system, but it is far from speedy. The HDHR+Channels combo is light years ahead (other than recording, of course).
I haven’t used Tablo, but because they use the system media player on iOS and tvOS, its pretty clear that they’re transcoding the mpeg2 streams to HLS h.264. This can be pretty brutal and you need some really good hardware to do it.
It sounds like their hardware isn’t that great. I’ve used the Tivo stream, which does essentially the same thing, but it’s pretty fast. It’s still like 4-5 seconds, though. It’s almost impossible with today’s CPU/GPUs to get anything better 
Our primary goal was to get Channels feeling as close to what we’ve all been used to for years. We wanted Channels to feel like real tv, not just an “app” that sort of eventually gets you a video of live tv. We wanted it to replace your set top box. A TON of work has gone into doing this (thank @tmm1) and it’s really paid off. We ourselves are still impressed that its as close to regular cable boxes as it is, lol.
Good goal for sure and you accomplished it.
Note that only 4 hours of upcoming guide data is available within the app
Is there any reason you won’t use more EPG from the OTA feeds? In my area every channel has at least three days, and some have a week. I don’t need more than a day, and even 6 to 8 hours would likely be enough, but 4 hours seems, hmmm, artificial?
but that will require a monthly fee like other similar products
Just so you have a data point on this, I will NOT pay for a channel guide. Period.
For me the only reason to go OTA is to get rid of monthly fees. A fee just for something that’s freely available on many, many websites, and is streaming into the device in real time? No, I will not pay for that.
Switching channels is 10+ seconds
Wow. Good thing I didn’t get one!
We use EPG provided by SiliconDust, who offer 4 hours of data for free to all HDHomeRun customers. This includes metadata like episode name and number, as well as high quality program images.
Our app is currently unable to parse ATSC PSIP EPG within the OTA stream, as the format is quite complex. We do parse DVB EPG for international users, which comes in a much more sane format and consistently includes 7-days of data. But users still prefer to use SD or Gracenote data because it includes channel logos and show images.
Well, that does explain that.
Out of curiosity, I assume the SD is passing along the OPG data? They don’t filter it out do they?
What is OPG?
A freudian typo 
I mean OTA. OPG is Ontario Power Generation, the $25 billion sinkhole that built the ancient nuclear plant outside my window.
My question was: does the PSIP data get out over the network cable, or does SD filter it out somehow?
Ah, ok I see.
Normally when you tune into a channel using the HTTP API on the hardware device, it only sends you the audio/video PIDs from the stream.
But using libhdhomerun code or the hdhomerun_config utility, you have full control. You can manually tune the device to an entire mux, or filter down to the specific PIDs you want.