Rewind Live TV

[jjjjy7]

For the last two days I have been unable to rewind live TV.  For example, if I had been watching a channel for 15 mins, I was able to rewind at least 15 mins.  That is no longer the case, as it appears that it is no longer buffering the program more than 5 mins or so.  Its happening on all my boxes, and I have rebooted everything.  Anyone else having this issue?

**Labels Added**

[-G-]

---

@mebe wrote:

So, if you want to see if the Ignite TV Live TV buffer is actually 25 minutes, simply wait 25 minutes (without changing channels), and then RW 25 minutes and then press the Pause button. If the Pause isn't quickly aborted (since each second now needs to be replaced with a new second added to the end of the buffer), and the Live TV stream doesn't resume playing, that would mean that the buffer is larger than 25 minutes ... UNLESS the Ignite TV system remains in Pause mode because instead of replacing or adding time to the buffer, it just remains locked at the same 25 minutes (which kills any true buffer effect), until the user releases the Pause, which then allows the Live TV stream to resume from where you last paused it. That scenario is highly unlikely because a locked buffer would be too similar to a recording, and thus quite useless, and inferior to an always active buffer that replaces old seconds with fresh, new Live TV seconds.

---

With Ignite TV, If you rewind Live TV, you will only be able to go back 25 minutes.  If you pause, playback will resume immediately.  If you keep rewinding again and again after you have already hit the beginning of the buffer, you may find that that stream will drop and you will lose all of the buffered content.

If you have a Restart-able program, you can invoke Restart and you will then be able to fast forward and rewind anywhere in the program up to the point that has already aired (provided that the content rights for the program allow you to do this) since that content is accessed over the network.

Similarly, with recorded content, you can fast-forward and rewind freely and are not subject to any "buffer" restrictions.

[mebe]

@G: All of that makes perfect sense, however, since you can sometimes kill the Ignite TV buffer by pressing RW too often, while at the beginning of the buffer, I assume that you can also kill the buffer by going to the forward end ot the buffer, and pressing FF too often.

I think you already mentioned that when you FF beyond the buffer end, you get a quick glimpse of the frame-advance feature that is deactivated (so no slow motion). If I FF too often beyond the buffer, I can also sometimes kill the buffer, and then get a black screen (so I need to change the channel and then go back to watch that channel again. I only sometimes have that problem because I was trying to activate slo-mo Drunk TV.

The VLC media player has a good high-speed chipmunk mode, and the slower speed Drunk version can be adjusted to match the Rogers quality (or even fine tune it, if necessary), but I don't have access to all the different kinds of content through VLC, that I do with Rogers, so the Rogers version of Drunk TV gives me more content to sample and experiment with (even the sports announcers sound drunk).

I only used Drunk TV once or twice a week, but now that it's getting closer to the end of legacy tv, I use it at least once or twice a day. I think I'm developing a drinking problem, even though I've only had one sip of beer about 40 years ago.🍺

Drunk TV ... Responsible drinking for the masses.

[-G-]

---

@mebe wrote:

@G: All of that makes perfect sense, however, since you can sometimes kill the Ignite TV buffer by pressing RW too often, while at the beginning of the buffer, I assume that you can also kill the buffer by going to the forward end ot the buffer, and pressing FF too often.

---

Having the stream drop is not a common problem, just something that can happen from time to time.  Never happens with FF.

The software on the Ignite set-top boxes is actually quite solid and stable.

I think you already mentioned that when you FF beyond the buffer end, you get a quick glimpse of the frame-advance feature that is deactivated (so no slow motion).

---

I don't know whether there is actually a "working" frame-advance feature that has been deactivated or whether I just hit a weird glitch and some old code that caused the wrong on-screen status image to display when the software got into a certain state.