Postby markfm » 04 Mar 2005 19:36
Doesn't look like it, though I don't know what the code was like before that variable was introduced.. There's similar code, in dshow, for Windows.
That's an input buffer, at the vlc level, doesn't do anything to the card.
What it's for is to provide a bit of smoothing if the input device (framegrabber in my case, PVR in yours) has any jitter/inconsistency in providng data to the PC. The effect is to actually add a bit of latency, overall, equal to the size of pvr-caching. Only when that buffer is initially filled does VLC start to process the incoming data.
So, if your card has a 2 second internal latency, using --pvr-caching 1000 woula actually increase the latency to a total of 3 seconds.
As I said, I don't know what the old implementation was -- perhaps it had a high default value.
Personally, based on what I do with Windows I would try a pvr-caching 50, just to see what happens.