RANT about Transfer Speed

Jawbraeka · Post by **Jawbraeka** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 13:55

hi im new to the Beyonwiz forum and would like to starts by giving some feedback into my dp-p2 experiences.

i will stress that i am not a programmer of any description but i do come along with some great ideas and i believe that these should be implemented into the beyonwiz range.

Firstly, I understand that timeshifting is a great option for people watching TV.. But what about people that use their gaming console via The AV input... does 'Timeshift' really matter at all cause that just uses up unnecessary buffer, creates heat for the machine itself, causes undue wear on the harddrive as well just generally makes the Beyonwiz a little heatbox.

I really don't want to replay my gaming experience over and over again unless i needed to for example:- add a clip of my gameplay to youtube, or want to keep it for posperity reasons as i noticed while playing my console it would hit the end of the buffer and the gameplay would actually lag due to the clearing of the buffer.

My point through this is can we have the option to turn off timeshift in 'AV mode'?

Another thing i would like to see is a new layout for BW players... i feel that it is a nice machine and it seems to give an image which is let down by the look of the OS on the machines currently.... i mean please don't get me wrong, i love beyonwiz functionality but couldn't a much better layout be designed for the "future" of beyonwiz and impliemented into current models and models for the future.... my comparison is that it looks like a Commodore 64 in a Playstation 3 world and the look could be improved immensily

Also is there something that can be done to have a 5 minute buffer of each side of a programmed automatically into recording channels as i find that if a 5 minute gap is put either side of recording a show that means i won't miss anything from the program at all. also a "series link" type feature with editing capability would be handy for all those shows that are known to be in series and on at the same time every day/week/month.

as mentioned with the previous comments, about not missing a show, i also have gotten quite trigger happy about removing ads from the shows that I like to watch as this leads me to have a much more enjoyable expereience and not have to sit through boring ads everytime. My question here is:- is there a way to have a series of bookmarks setup and tagged to a video file and have the ability to delete the bookmarked sections out of a video

to make this description a bit easier to understand i will use a line

| ----- Featured show ----- | ----- Advert ----- | ----- Featured show ----- | ----- Advert -----|

my point here is this i want to be able to bookmark the 'Advert' Sections and then have the options of deleting all the sections or crop these and save it to another file.

Another thing i find a little obscure is the fact that the box can only transfer files to the beyonwiz at a max of 4.5 Mb/s (Generally my Beyonwiz hits approx 3.5Mb/s majority of the time).

What i would like to see is the option to turn off limitations of speed while you are in the media player mode as i tend not to be watching tv when this happens and it seems a little redundant to have such a feature as "Timeshifting' while im trying to transfer a Movie/TV Show to the Beyonwiz box and Vice Versa Please look into this as it still doesn't make sense to me at all.

Maybe a part of the setup menu could be a calibration tool to find the max speed while the TV is being broadcast and doen't cause jitters in the streamed content from the tv networks. or maybe SSD Hard Discs could be integrated into Beyonwiz products as there are no moving parts to be dealt with and storage Should/Could be a lot quicker.

Also what i would loke to see is a feature to convert TS video to .AVI/.MP4/.WMA/.FLV while transferring to an external USB stick or HDD to save conversion later and be compatible with Windows/Linux/MAC

one other thing that seems to bug me is the lack of internet connectivity and features that beyonwiz have currently with wizTV... some things that i would like to see integrated into the future Firmwares for BW

Email Client with Multiple account configuration
Youtube
Facebook
Google search
Flash and Video Support for Common Video and Audio types and upgrades for the future
Ability to download clips from Internet and store on PVR as a media file.

Updating the Linux Kernel Might Be the answer for all this to be possible but even to see a new look boot screen would be nice or to see the 'Booting' Procedures load up the screen would also make a welcome change to the 'pretty' consumer world and show that Beyonwiz is part of the Open Souce Community as it should be.

I don't want to sound like i'm demanding but there is some feedback i have come up with in regards to making beyonwiz a much better box for current and newer customers alike.

Please feel free to leave comments and responses and if you have some ideas or some feedback or input to add to the current sucess of Beyonwiz. Also if you have an idea for a feature and you see a link for it please include this in your post so that information can be seen by viewers and brainstorming may commence.

By the way im not a Beyonwiz Employee or represent this company in anyway, i just want the sucess of beyonwiz to go as far as possible.

IanSav · Post by **IanSav** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 14:29

Hi Jawbraeka,

Much of what you ask for is covered elsewhere on this forum. Those items that have not been covered would be better handled by posting your requests in the appropriate threads.

This area of the forum is used for people working on external developments and tools for the Beyonwiz.

Regards,
Ian.

tonymy01 · Post by **tonymy01** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 14:31

It is MB/s, i.e. Megabyte/s, very different to Mb/s, i.e. megabit/s. If it was 3.5 to 4megabit/s it would be lame. 3-4megabyte/s is not too bad, in Topfield 5K territory which is 24megabit/s (when it has turbo mode enabled which removes nearly every feature of the box, and has the USB speed hacks). There is only so much I/O bandwidth between the CPU and bus, both to the HDD and to the network, so I don't think this number could improve a whole lot more without too many compromises to the box behaviour (e.g. Topfield Turbo mode, a giant compromise there!).

prl · Post by **prl** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 15:16

Jawbraeka wrote:hi im new to the Beyonwiz forum and would like to starts by giving some feedback into my dp-p2 experiences.

i will stress that i am not a programmer of any description but i do come along with some great ideas and i believe that these should be implemented into the beyonwiz range.

Firstly, I understand that timeshifting is a great option for people watching TV.. But what about people that use their gaming console via The AV input... does 'Timeshift' really matter at all cause that just uses up unnecessary buffer, creates heat for the machine itself, causes undue wear on the harddrive as well just generally makes the Beyonwiz a little heatbox.

I really don't want to replay my gaming experience over and over again unless i needed to for example:- add a clip of my gameplay to youtube, or want to keep it for posperity reasons as i noticed while playing my console it would hit the end of the buffer and the gameplay would actually lag due to the clearing of the buffer.

My point through this is can we have the option to turn off timeshift in 'AV mode'?

I'm not sure why you're running the games console through the Beyonwiz. Why not direct into the TV? That would mean that you could turn off the Beyonwiz entirely while gaming, if you wanted to.

Jawbraeka wrote:...
Also is there something that can be done to have a 5 minute buffer of each side of a programmed automatically into recording channels as i find that if a 5 minute gap is put either side of recording a show that means i won't miss anything from the program at all. also a "series link" type feature with editing capability would be handy for all those shows that are known to be in series and on at the same time every day/week/month.

The Beyonwiz has this capability (provided you're running anything like up-to-date firmware). SETUP>Misc>PVR>Soft Padding. You'll typically need a good bit more than 5 minutes after the show to get all of a typical commercial prime time show. I have 2 min before and 15 min after.

Jawbraeka wrote:as mentioned with the previous comments, about not missing a show, i also have gotten quite trigger happy about removing ads from the shows that I like to watch as this leads me to have a much more enjoyable expereience and not have to sit through boring ads everytime. My question here is:- is there a way to have a series of bookmarks setup and tagged to a video file and have the ability to delete the bookmarked sections out of a video

to make this description a bit easier to understand i will use a line

| ----- Featured show ----- | ----- Advert ----- | ----- Featured show ----- | ----- Advert -----|

my point here is this i want to be able to bookmark the 'Advert' Sections and then have the options of deleting all the sections or crop these and save it to another file.

If you only want to watch a show once, and then delete it, you may find it better to program the skip buttons in SETUP>Misc>PVR>Skip... (you'll need to scroll down in the PVR screen). You can set any of the arrow keys to skip forwards or back either a number of seconds or a percentage of the recording length. I have my skips set for +60sec, -30sec, +30sec, -15sec. I hardly watch any ads; just skip over most of them.

If I want to edit programs, I do it on my Mac.

Jawbraeka wrote:Another thing i find a little obscure is the fact that the box can only transfer files to the beyonwiz at a max of 4.5 Mb/s (Generally my Beyonwiz hits approx 3.5Mb/s majority of the time).

What i would like to see is the option to turn off limitations of speed while you are in the media player mode as i tend not to be watching tv when this happens and it seems a little redundant to have such a feature as "Timeshifting' while im trying to transfer a Movie/TV Show to the Beyonwiz box and Vice Versa Please look into this as it still doesn't make sense to me at all.

There is already a way of doing this. Simply go into the FilePlayer menu, start the copy, and don't go back to LiveTV while the copy is going on. That will give you the fastest transfer rate that the Beyonwiz can do. IIRC, it disables timeshifting when you go into the FilePlayer.

Jawbraeka wrote:Maybe a part of the setup menu could be a calibration tool to find the max speed while the TV is being broadcast and doen't cause jitters in the streamed content from the tv networks. or maybe SSD Hard Discs could be integrated into Beyonwiz products as there are no moving parts to be dealt with and storage Should/Could be a lot quicker.

SSD disks are still significantly more expensive than HDD. Beyonwiz has already got a system in place that automatically adjusts the network transfer speed in response to activities on the Beyonwiz. Network (and USB) transfers are simply slow.

Jawbraeka wrote:Also what i would loke to see is a feature to convert TS video to .AVI/.MP4/.WMA/.FLV while transferring to an external USB stick or HDD to save conversion later and be compatible with Windows/Linux/MAC

Right... you do know that the processor on the Beyonwiz is only about 1/10 of the speed of a typical modern PC? It has only 128MB of RAM; half of that is dedicated to video processing, and not available for applications; and ~20MB of what's left is dedicated to the root file system. The Beyonwiz has 8MB of firmware flash. And you still want it to transcode video?

Jawbraeka wrote:one other thing that seems to bug me is the lack of internet connectivity and features that beyonwiz have currently with wizTV... some things that i would like to see integrated into the future Firmwares for BW

Email Client with Multiple account configuration
Youtube
Facebook
Google search
Flash and Video Support for Common Video and Audio types and upgrades for the future
Ability to download clips from Internet and store on PVR as a media file.

It's not intended to be a general-purpose computer. It currently has about 64kB of spare firmware flash to use for enhancements. Choose well.

Jawbraeka wrote:Updating the Linux Kernel Might Be the answer for all this to be possible but even to see a new look boot screen would be nice or to see the 'Booting' Procedures load up the screen would also make a welcome change to the 'pretty' consumer world and show that Beyonwiz is part of the Open Souce Community as it should be.

It runs uClinux, a Linux variant for embedded systems that don't have memory management. uClinux development is some way behind the mainstream Linux kernel. The Beyonwiz uses the uClinux based on the Linux 2.4 kernel. There is a Linux 2.6 kernel port available now, but I doubt we'll ever see that in the current Beyonwiz series.

Jawbraeka wrote:I don't want to sound like i'm demanding but there is some feedback i have come up with in regards to making beyonwiz a much better box for current and newer customers alike.

Please feel free to leave comments and responses and if you have some ideas or some feedback or input to add to the current sucess of Beyonwiz. Also if you have an idea for a feature and you see a link for it please include this in your post so that information can be seen by viewers and brainstorming may commence.

By the way im not a Beyonwiz Employee or represent this company in anyway, i just want the sucess of beyonwiz to go as far as possible.

If you want to familiarise your self with the other enhancements that the forum community has put forward, have a look at the current bugs and wishes list.

Jawbraeka · Post by **Jawbraeka** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 23:54

thanks for the input. i wasn't aware of how big the community was for beyonwiz. thankyou for the link in regards to checking the bug list.

prl · Post by **prl** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:25

Jawbraeka wrote:thanks for the input. i wasn't aware of how big the community was for beyonwiz. thankyou for the link in regards to checking the bug list.

No problem. Welcome to the happy band

Jawbraeka · Post by **Jawbraeka** » Fri Oct 01, 2010 18:01

quoting prl here,

It runs uClinux, a Linux variant for embedded systems that don't have memory management. uClinux development is some way behind the mainstream Linux kernel. The Beyonwiz uses the uClinux based on the Linux 2.4 kernel. There is a Linux 2.6 kernel port available now, but I doubt we'll ever see that in the current Beyonwiz series.

My question is, has this been TESTED to see whether or not the kernel would be suitable?

prl · Post by **prl** » Fri Oct 01, 2010 18:18

Jawbraeka wrote:quoting prl here,

prl wrote:It runs uClinux, a Linux variant for embedded systems that don't have memory management. uClinux development is some way behind the mainstream Linux kernel. The Beyonwiz uses the uClinux based on the Linux 2.4 kernel. There is a Linux 2.6 kernel port available now, but I doubt we'll ever see that in the current Beyonwiz series.
My question is, has this been TESTED to see whether or not the kernel would be suitable?

If you want to quote a post, try using the QUOTE button in the top right hand of the post you want to quote. Makes things much clearer.

In answer to your question, I don't know. I doubt it very much. But why do you think changing the kernel will help with this problem?

peteru · Post by **peteru** » Sun Oct 03, 2010 18:00

prl wrote:why do you think changing the kernel will help with this problem?

Because the USB stack in 2.6 is miles ahead of the USB mess in 2.4.

I have no doubt that going to 2.6 based kernel would improve USB reliability and may even improve USB performance. Unfortunately, there are so many other factors involved in going to 2.6, that I can pretty much guarantee that we will never see it happen on the current hardware. The MRUA toolkit for EM862x hardware, as well as the bootloader are stuck on ARM 2.4 kernel. The newer hardware supports MIPS 2.6 kernels, but that is a very different hardware design, with much higher levels of hardware integration.