A Circular Buffering Algorithm for Hiding Channel Zapping Delay in a Digital Television

In this paper, we propose a new method for hiding the channel change delay by efficiently utilizing multiple tuners. One tuner is used to capture a channel being watched and the others are used to buffer other channels. In order to raise tuner usage efficiency, each buffering tuner circulates multiple channels and buffers the A/V stream. The channel change delay is hidden by displaying a buffered A/V stream during the channel change delay. Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm gave higher user satisfaction results when compared with other methods.