Tvheadend

I'm not sure if the DVB standard is the same, but here in North America the ATSC signal seems to take a long time to tune in. My KWorld stick takes about a second, maybe a bit more, to flip channels. This makes the "surfing" experience, going up or down the channels in order, rather painfully slow.

Ok, here's an idea that would fix this. Perhaps there is a way to do this already, which would be great, but otherwise...

Let's say I have a setup with two tuners and ten channels, 1 through 10. At a given time I'm on channel 5 on tuner 1, and I press the "channel up" command. Normally this would cause the tuner 1 to be sent the command to change to channel 6.

Now one immediate improvement would be to look to see if there's another free tuner, and it just happens to be on channel 6. If there is, let's say tuner 2, simply switch to that tuner. I suspect this would make that one channel switch much faster?

Now let's add a new option, "pretune". With this option on, after switching the current tuner to channel 6 (or flipping tuners), it also sets any other free tuner to the next station, in this case channel 7. Now if I press the "channel up" button again, and there's a large chance I will do so, it flips tuners again, and sets the now-free tuner 2 to channel 8.

So in my example, with two tuners, I'm bouncing back and forth between them as I surf. First I'm watching 1 and 2 is pretuned, then I flip to 2 and tuner 1 is pretuned, etc.

And if I have three tuners, I could set them to 5,6,7 so I could go either direction. Have another? Set that to the last channel you spent any time on, for "instant flashback", etc.

These would all be low-priority, of course, so practically anything else could grab the tuners if it needs it.