On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 4:58 PM, Steffen Barszus steffenbpunkt@googlemail.com wrote:
a) save some energy - if DVB devices are not opened all the time, the driver has the chance to put it into standby saving some heat, energy and lifetime of the cards
There are a couple cards that consume a lot of power iirc so this could actually be useful for users of those cards. But what about performance/lag? And also how healthy is it to constantly put a device in and out of standby?
Actually how likely it would be that this is constantly happening ? Having 2 or 3 tuner watching 1 single channel, then every now an then a couple of recordings i think it's likely 80% in standby - similar to harddisks which i have in standby except i watch recordings etc.
My main vdr box has a few tuners. Aside of people watching live tv often, there are numerous daily timers pretty much for every day of the week. I had to disable spin-down on my recording drive because of this. It was simply getting hammered too much with spin-down/up. The same holds true for my dvb devices. I'd rather not hammer my devices with in/out standby mode at the chance of negligible savings. At the very least the user should have the option to enable/disable "power saving mode" or whatever you'll call it. I guess each user will have to decide if this is something he wants to use or not.
Another thing this patch should consider is card capabilities. If a certain transponder requires a certain card, is the patch smart enough to know that? An example of this is the mixture of transponders requiring 8psk turbo fec modulation, other transponders requiring qpsk turbo fec, and yet others using just plain qpsk. If qpsk turbo fec is needed but a device that only supports regular qpsk is powered up, that's useless.