I’m afraid there isn’t “faster” unless you’re throwing more horsepower at PrismCast. The ideal environment for PrismCast is a modern macOS environment, not running in a container.
There is no getting around that constraint. Utilities like CC4C and PrismCast require decent CPU/GPU to do what they do. I’m afraid there’s unlikely to be a version of PrismCast that isn’t going to require horsepower to do what it does.
In my environment - a modern M4 Mac - from when I tune a channel in Channels on my Apple TV to when I receive video on that Apple TV is less than 8 seconds (7.2 seconds)…and to finish tuning the channel (e.g. all the browser stuff gone and just full screen video) an additional couple of seconds for a total of less than 10 seconds (9.7 seconds to be exact).
Even if Channels times out trying to tune in a channel on PrismCast, Channels will retry in short order and PrismCast keeps a channel open for 30 seconds for channel-surfing/reconnect scenarios like that. You can configure that number to be higher - say 60 or 90 seconds. Either way, if you have a scheduled recording. PrismCast will be able to immediately stream if the channel’s already tuned. You can always schedule your recording to start 30 seconds or a minute early to account for that if you’re in a CPU constrained environment. Imperfect, admittedly, but functional.
But…stay tuned. Let’s see what the next couple of releases bring. I’ve been pretty conservative with the design of PrismCast to this point. Finer grained optimization is coming…first, I wanted to ensure we had a solid foundation.