Curious about playback differences

[jasonmcroy]

In my general curiosity mode tonight and I am curious why there seems to be such a big difference in some aspects of playback with Channels vs both Plex and Emby.

Example - when I play my local content with Channels and skip forward or backwards it is so much smoother than with the other servers. I have noticed this everywhere on my local network no matter what playback device I use.
I also noticed that if I pause a video with Channels and then skip forward or backwards, I get a still image at each skip point. With Plex or Emby I just see the image that is created where I pause until I get to the point where I am ready to hit play again. The only way I can get that effect with the other servers is if I set them up to create those images ahead of time. I think they create an image from the video like every 10 seconds or something.

I love that Channels handles my video files this way and is the biggest reason I have moved over to using it for both not only recording but all of my ripped blurays of TV Shows and movies. Even my 4K rips are handled really well. I have always had issues with both Plex and Emby being slow on skipping.

Thoughts?

[racameron]

I don't have answers for you, but your post brought to mind a piece of software from the past: SoundPlay.

I doubt few here remember BeOS, but back in the mid- to late-1990s there was a piece of software written for BeOS that took great advantage of its awesome multimedia abilities. SoundPlay was the first software I know of that could play back an MP3 in reverse and live, with minimal (near zero) latency ... on a 586!

(BeOS has been on my mind lately while reading the requests here for fine tuning Virtual Channel scheduling ... around 2000 there was a custom package of software written for radio stations using BeOS called TuneTracker that dealt with scheduling programming blocks, queueing playlists, inserting custom segments, etc. ... all of the pie-in-the-sky features that some have requested here.

TuneTracker lives on as a commercial software package for radio stations to this day using Haiku, the successor of BeOS, as its OS.

Sure, completely off-topic. But, the comment about smooth and responsive seeking, and performing head-and-shoulders above the competition made me feel it just might be relevant to someone.

I wanted to find a better link to SoundPlay, but there really isn't one. However, its code lives on as it is actually incorporated into TuneTracker.)

[jasonmcroy]

Wow. I went to your link and read about this. That's actually very interesting. I am surprised I never came across this back then.