Recordings have no thumbnails while FF/RW?

Beta Community DVR Beta
#1

I just watched my first recording as a test but I noticed a few things that seem odd:

  1. Although I have “Detect Commercials” checked in settings, there are commercials in the recording. I do have black tickmarks along the timeline but I can’t yet determine what they mean because my FF/RW will not allow precise control to move to the marks.

  2. There are no thumbnail previews while FF/RW through the recordings. If I swipe and stop, it does appear that the full screen image eventually updates to show the current frame. So, perhaps my 3.06Ghz imac is not powerful enough to show the full frame previews during scrub. If that’s the case, perhaps an option to show standard Apple scrub thumbnails may be good for those of us with hardware that does not show full screen updates while scrubbing through recordings.

My iMac is on wifi and not hardwired into the network, so that may come into play as well.

I’m sure I’ll figure this stuff out, but there are things happening that I’m not expecting, so I have to ask…

#2

  1. Commercial indexing is good, but not perfect. Some programs will have their commercials detected better than others. The darker areas of the timeline denote commercial blocks. When the playhead is inside a commercial block, double clicking right or left on the touch surface will jump to the next marker.

  2. The thumbnail previews you’re talking about are a feature of the system video player. Channels does not use the system video player since it does not support the video format that comes from the HDHomeRun. We’ve built our own video player to support the format. As for showing full frame previews, yes, your network speed would impact this. The only time it would show a “preview” is once the video player has streamed the data to be able to play.

There is still some work to be done getting the recording playback to be a little better. This is planned during the Public Beta.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the quick response! Your customer service is excellent. Really appreciate that.

  1. Noted, thanks.

  2. Hopefully I’m explaining this correctly because while I’m watching live TV in Channels, my thumbnail scrub previews are different than what I’m seeing while playing back recordings in Channels DVR. When I’m viewing live TV in Channels app, if I pause, rewind or fast-forward, I get a 1/4 screen thumbnail preview window on top of the timeline. This preview updates in near real time to show where the playhead is while I’m paused, or while I’m scrubbing back and forward. It works perfectly.

Are you saying the Channels uses a different video player depending on whether it’s showing live TV (using the Apple TV hard drive as buffer) or when its playing back a DVR recording?

#4

The video player is the same, but you hit the nail on the head: When viewing live TV, the entire buffer is stored on the ATV, so it’s able to scrub with previews. When playing a recording, it depends on how much has been buffered from the DVR server to the ATV, as well as how fast the network connection is. (Basically it can’t show you previews whilst scrubbing if the data haven’t been buffered to the ATV yet.)

#5

Makes sense. Would be interested to hear from other users on whether you are able to get previews to work with a different setup. Wired vs Wifi for example, or with a faster CPU.

I may run a cat 5 down to my basement (my router is upstairs) to see if there is any noticeable difference.

Aside:
I know that the official word from Apple with respect to the USB-C port on the back of the ATV4 is that its for service only. However, if we didn’t have that limitation, I wonder how much simpler this implementation may be if we could just plug a USB3 hard drive into that port and run DVR from that.

#6

There is no 1/4 screen thumbnail preview in Channels. You’re thinking of the system video player which other apps use.

tvOS does not contain any implementations of usb storage, nor does it come with any filesystem drivers. This is basically never going to be possible so there is no sense in discussing it.

#7

It’s also worth noting that there are no “previews”. what you see is the first frame of the buffered video. Therefore, being able to “see” the spot you are in the timeline while scrubbing is 100% network dependent. A faster ethernet connection will always work better.

#8

Thanks for the clarifications. I’ll test some more when I get home from work later. Really like what you have done. Looks like it could easily become a leading solution for those of us who need OTA DVR.

#9

As for wired vs. wifi, I recommend you go wired for your DVR server. The DVR server can be pressed to handle multiple streams at once as it is possible to be recording several shows at the same time one or more recorded shows are being watched. With the size of HD Mpeg2 shows, putting all this traffic on your home wifi network has the potential to cause viewing issues such as stutter. DVR server is the most important device to be wired as it will get the most traffic.

In my install the mac mini used as the DVR server as well as all of my AppleTVs are wired. Only devices using channels wireless are iOS devices.

1 Like
#10

:bow:

Down with wifi!

#11

Double click on commercial block rocks. Great feature. The more I see, the more I like. Well thought out.

On thumbnail previews. Thanks for setting me straight on that. Can’t believe I never noticed Channels is full screen previews vs 1/4 screen thumbnails like the other video apps I’m used to on ATV4