TiVo : Will this speed up TiVo?

[steveh]

Has anyone used Liberty Global's Horizon set-top box? Would be interesting to hear how that compares in real use.

[denphone]

l have heard from certain sources that its not that clever and full of bugs.

[Itshim]

Originally Posted by denphone

l have heard from certain sources that its not that clever and full of bugs.

Mine knocks spots of the outdated
tivo

[denphone]

Well that's good for you young Sir.

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

I think that scrapping the apps on the Tivo would be a major mistake and a move in the wrong direction.

What we need is faster responses, not deterioration of services.

About 40% of my viewing is through various apps these days. The old method of watching TV is fast becoming outmoded, Richard.

But the problem is that without VM replacing all the old hardware (which I doubt that they would be prepared to do), the response times aren't going to improve. In fact, if all the apps that were promised come to fruition, it may become worse!

It's easy and cheap enough to enjoy apps via alternative methods these days

That's the logic behind my suggestion. Let's hope that the work that SP mentioned will improve things.

Originally Posted by denphone

l have heard from certain sources that its not that clever and full of bugs.

Ohhh, that's interesting. I've heard nothing but praise for the Horizon box, but i'm certainly no expert.

Originally Posted by Itshim

Mine knocks spots of the outdated
tivo

What have you got Itshim?

[Stephen]

Having all the apps in the world wouldn't slow TiVo down as an app is only loaded and taking resource when it's running.

[RichardCoulter]

If that's the case, maybe those unhappy with the speed of their TiVo should exit all apps as a way to speed it up??

[steveh]

You can't run one more than one app at a time. Different parts of the TiVo interface - My Shows, Home, On Demand - are also effectively Haxe apps. The biggest performance issue is in switching between those and the time it takes to unload one and load and prepare another for use.

[23prince]

Meanwhile my 2TB Sky boxs are faster than slime off a shovel.

Good for you...

[Mr K]

Most people don't use the apps (apart from iPlayer). They just use it for watching and recording TV programmes. Tivo is painfully slow at times. Sky's and VMs own VHD box put it to shame. It needs a clear out of the rubbish people don't use to increase the speed on services they do use.

[mike_gain]

Originally Posted by Stephen

Having all the apps in the world wouldn't slow TiVo down as an app is only loaded and taking resource when it's running.

I'd expect this to be the case and if so a question that remains is what's eating up the physical memory (I'm assuming Spiderplant's description of the main symptom is correct)?

There's no way the hardware spec, as "old" as it is, should be struggling as it has since the Plum update.

[steveh]

With Haxe / OpenFL it's possible to bring in a lot of other libraries that will eat up physical memory but might only actually be used for one small function within an app. I assume that was Spiderplant's point about stripping out unnecessary stuff. Developers using Haxe are also mostly targeting mobile or desktop devices with much larger physical memory than the TiVo so there is less incentive for them to ensure an efficient memory footprint. Adobe Air in comparison was built to support lower-end devices.

Someone I know who evaluated Haxe for a project also said that it was not especially clean when it came to memory leaks and in a device like the TiVo where an application is running for a long time that is more of an issue than in a mobile phone app. You would expect these things to improve in time - this was a first release - though I get the impression the TiVo dev team is not especially large and time spent firefighting issues like this after a major architectural change mean less time on new features or improving the UI.

[mike_gain]

Originally Posted by steveh

With Haxe / OpenFL it's possible to bring in a lot of other libraries that will eat up physical memory but might only actually be used for one small function within an app. I assume that was Spiderplant's point about stripping out unnecessary stuff. Developers using Haxe are also mostly targeting mobile or desktop devices with much larger physical memory than the TiVo so there is less incentive for them to ensure an efficient memory footprint. Adobe Air in comparison was built to support lower-end devices.

Someone I know who evaluated Haxe for a project also said that it was not especially clean when it came to memory leaks and in a device like the TiVo where an application is running for a long time that is more of an issue than in a mobile phone app. You would expect these things to improve in time - this was a first release - though I get the impression the TiVo dev team is not especially large and time spent firefighting issues like this after a major architectural change mean less time on new features or improving the UI.

This is pretty much what I've heard in and around the industry. For the record though Adobe Air was first touted as a platform on which to build Flex apps as desktop apps as opposed to browser based apps. But I think once that wasn't taken up it moved more into the mobile market. Also Air doesn't protect lazy/less experienced developers from pulling in rafts of dependencies and Haxe is the same. Developers need the experience working with it and the discipline to protect their target device.

We could of course be totally wrong but My initial thought on reading Spiderplant's "paging" comment was memory leak or bloated software (didn't think it would be from the apps though).

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by steveh

You can't run one more than one app at a time. Different parts of the TiVo interface - My Shows, Home, On Demand - are also effectively Haxe apps. The biggest performance issue is in switching between those and the time it takes to unload one and load and prepare another for use.

Ahhh right, I didn't realize that; I don't actually have a TiVo.

Originally Posted by Mr K

Most people don't use the apps (apart from iPlayer). They just use it for watching and recording TV programmes. Tivo is painfully slow at times. Sky's and VMs own VHD box put it to shame. It needs a clear out of the rubbish people don't use to increase the speed on services they do use.

That was my thinking to speed it up.

Originally Posted by steveh

With Haxe / OpenFL it's possible to bring in a lot of other libraries that will eat up physical memory but might only actually be used for one small function within an app. I assume that was Spiderplant's point about stripping out unnecessary stuff. Developers using Haxe are also mostly targeting mobile or desktop devices with much larger physical memory than the TiVo so there is less incentive for them to ensure an efficient memory footprint. Adobe Air in comparison was built to support lower-end devices.

Someone I know who evaluated Haxe for a project also said that it was not especially clean when it came to memory leaks and in a device like the TiVo where an application is running for a long time that is more of an issue than in a mobile phone app. You would expect these things to improve in time - this was a first release - though I get the impression the TiVo dev team is not especially large and time spent firefighting issues like this after a major architectural change mean less time on new features or improving the UI.

Surprised to learn that a mobile phone has more memory than a TiVo!

Maybe a solution could be to issue some type of hardware to provide it with more memory (in the same way that SD cards increase the storage capacity of tablets) if this is technically possible.