** Hey DIRT, please forward this on to the development guys for the Hopper 3 **
This seems a major issue. Anytime I'm watching something live or delayed that also happens to be recording, at the end of it I'm stuck at a paused screen. My wife is constantly complaining about it because of our specific use case of watching the 10pm news live on the local NBC or CBS affiliate. Here's what happens.
- At 10pm she changes to the local channel, hits the pause button, and goes to do her "going-to-bed preparations."
- At 10:02pm the PTAT ends.
- At 10:09pm the play button is pressed and we start watching the news.
- At 10:11pm the screen goes into pause mode (because PTAT ended at 10:02)?
- The only way to get back to the news we were watching is to change the channel to something else and then back to the channel we were watching.
- Congratulations, we missed whatever happened between 10:02 and 10:11.
This also happens on non-PTAT channels, say there's two shows we want to watch, and also want to record the first one for repeated viewing later, what will happen is that two minutes after the first program ends, the screen pauses because the recording stopped, we have to change channels and back, and miss part of the second program (or possibly all of it if the phone rang in the middle of the first and we hit pause).
It seems that the root cause is that the box decides to share out the recording tuner with anyone wanting to watch that same channel live. While the concept of users at the Hopper and several Joeys all sharing a single tuner if they are all watching the same thing is a fantastic idea, having a recording of that channel also use the same tuner is not, because the live TV experience ends when the recording stops.
Bottom Line: There is NO EXCUSE, when there are up to 15 other tuners available doing absolutely nothing, to share the live viewer with a tuner that is recording something. If there is an idle tuner available, USE IT.
Proposed fix: Since the box has 16 tuners and can record 16 things at a time, let's actually use those tuners.
- Every recording gets a dedicated tuner.
- If recording two programs back to back on the same channel, each recording gets a dedicated tuner so the end of one can overlap the start of the next.
- DO NOT USE a tuner which is recording something to serve users who think they are watching "LIVE TV"
- It is OK to share a tuner with all the users who are watching the same channel but DO NOT use that tuner for recording something.
- If a user initiates a recording of the channel they are watching, launch that recording on a separate tuner and leave the one the user was watching alone.
- OR, record the stream from the same tuner if you can keep it separate from the LIVE TV buffer.
- A live user changing channels gets a new tuner, but the previous tuner keeps buffering the previous channel (up to six if idle tuners are available)
- Those tuners still buffering whatever channel they were tuned to can be accessed by pressing the recall button making it more useful, for example: I'm watching program "A" - wonder what's going on with program "B" so I change channels, later I want to go back to program "A" so I use the recall button, rewind back to before I changed the channel in the first place. Later I can recall again and rewind program "B"
