ATI's Multimedia Center 8.8 - The Home Multimedia Server

EazyShare — Client (continued)

The EazyShare TV application takes anywhere from 11 to 20 seconds to display streaming TV content from the EazyShare server. This is due to the time it takes for the server to initialize TV, switching to TV-On-Demand mode, and the delay behind live broadcast option (2 to 8 seconds) on EazyShare clients. The delay behind live broadcast option is actually a buffer for the clients.

Clients will never really watch live TV per se, as the server needs time to encode and broadcast the signal. Two seconds is the minimum that can be set.

Changing the channel isn't as smooth as possible, but is understandable due to the buffer implementation. In order to avoid conflicts between clients, only one client per network is allowed to change channels with the request control button in place of the TV-On-Demand button. The build that we got was basically the final build, but we were unable to test this feature out. In our version, multiple clients were granted access at the same time. The demo that we saw at Comdex worked fine, and we expect the web release version of MMC 8.8 to work in a similar manner. The demo that we saw was designed so that when the second client requests control, the first client will be prompted with a question asking if he/she will relinquish control. If there is no response by the first client, control will be granted 10 seconds automatically after the request has been made.

Once a channel change has been requested by the client, it takes two seconds for the server to change channels. This is in addition to the delay behind live broadcast setting because the server needs to build up the buffer for broadcast. If seven seconds is set for the delay, it will take a total of nine seconds for the client to show the channel that has been requested. During that time, the client will freeze the last frame from the previous channel until it receives the signal from the new channel. Having the delay set differently for different clients won't affect the ability or consistency of the server to stream content. If the server changes the channel, it will only take the time set in the delay for the client to display the new channel.