Suggestion for channel change lag time

Long pauses when changing channels are not something I’m looking forward to as I prepare to dive into this pool. But I noticed something while watching PhiloTV today on our Roku Streaming Stick+…

When each show starts, there is a period of lower quality video. Then it kinda snaps into the crystal clear we expect. I started paying attention to how long these little excursions lasted. They last about 10 to 30 seconds. Roughly. Coincidence that this is about how long a Tablo takes to buffer up a previously untuned channel?
Is it possible that what’s happening is similar and that we’re being shown a slightly degraded video stream until something “catches up”? Once a show is playing on Philo it stays clear. When the next show starts, it is degraded for several seconds again.
Is this something that Tablo may be able to implement to make channel switching faster? I would think a period of degraded video would be preferable over simply pausing or delaying the channel switch while the transcode and spool operation is happening.
I don’t have my Tablo yet. Just keep seeing this issue/observation coming up and now looking at how other streaming services are handling it. I don’t even know if this is within the technical capabilities of the Tablo hardware. Just tossing it out there.

Philo has adaptive bitrate streaming, that’s what you’re seeing. They have multiple already encoded h.264 video streams at different rates.

Very different than Tablo. Tablo has a single h.264 video stream at one bitrate. The delay is caused by the real time conversion of the video from MPEG2 to h.264 video.

Ok :slight_smile:

It was a thought.

aka mpeg-DASH Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

Does the delay have anything to do with “buffering” to disk (buffering may not be the right term here) prior to playing?

Well my understanding is it creates a 10-second stream before the player starts streaming. The Tablo has to have something to playback so it creates that amount of h.264 video. This is for Live TV of course.

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You can try this feature to decrease the time. See link below.

Enable fast live TV startup : This feature will speed up the time it takes for your Tablo to begin playing a live TV channel. If you are experiencing buffering, try disabling this feature. The Tablo will take a few seconds longer to being playing this channel, however this reduces the chances of buffering mid-stream.