I am very impressed that when I go to show a live channel, it plays almost instantly on the ATV.
I am not trying to help the competition, but from what I’ve seen with Plex and also heard about Tablo, it takes several painful seconds to display the content of a live channel. Why wouldn’t these two applications do the same that Channels does? Does Channels use some kind of proprietary process that allows the live channels to be shown almost instantly?
I don’t know what the other apps do, but we have spent countless hours optimizing tuning time. There’s nothing proprietary about it since TVs have been able to tune quickly for decades.
One difference is that Plex and Tablo is that they both transcode first, whereas Channels plays the stream directly.
This is what I mean. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t simply go for the quick tuning experience and not transcode when playing natively on Apply TV? Seems odd to me since it is a bad user experience.
Anyway, glad Channels is not doing this! Superior product.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Not 100% sure, but I also believe that the channels devs wrote their own optimized player to display the video (something to do with natively showing mpeg2?) and do not use the built-in player for the ATV.
I think that’s the ticket!
Don’t know about Tablo, but Plex playback ffd on iOS/tvOS is horrendous due to the same limitations. Why Plex doesn’t utilize the processor capabilities of these Apple devices is a true mystery.
I agree, the quick start of live tv, the playback controls and the way the app starts and stops like a regular android app is what has kept me as a subscriber. I’ve used a bunch of different DVR apps through the years. Channels has excellent playback controls. The only other programs that I have used, that are as good as channels are SageTV and NPVR. Both of them allow easy skipping forward and backwards and show the commercials on the timeline. Both of these also offer automatic commercial skipping, which I do miss, but I understand the Dev’s reluctance to add such a controversial feature. SageTV didn’t have commercial skipping built in, since it was also a commercial product, but it had user plugins available, and one of these supports the automatic skip.
Channels is also far simpler to set up. I feel like I could recommend it to a friend without creating a support nightmare for myself…
When I was using my cable TV DVR, skipping forward and backward 30 seconds was sluggish. Channels skips forward and backward so quickly (except the odd times my network gets sluggish, but that’s not the app’s fault).
And the video was RIGHT on the box for your cable box, so it had no excuses!
Yes, I definitely didn’t understand why it was so sluggish. In fact, I went to Cox and they said that boxes from another manufacture was better. So, I changed out the box and, yes, it was better BUT it was still sluggish…just to jump forward 30 seconds!
Glad to get rid of the cable box!