Quick question about SA4250 and other STBs with firewire ports.

[SDeGonge]

How is the firewire (1394) port used on these devices?
- For channel control instead of IR Blasting?
- For video/audio feed to Sage Server instead of component, svideo, etc to the PC?

[Clift]

Originally Posted by SDeGonge

- For channel control instead of IR Blasting?

For channel change you simply connect, install the drivers, and configure SageTV and the channel change application. It's a bit more involved than that, but not too difficult.

- For video/audio feed to Sage Server instead of component, svideo, etc to the PC?

For that you are dependent on your cable provider and what channels are "clear", that is, not copy protected with the 5C flag. usually those would be your local channels, but some have gotten lucky and had more. To set that up you connect, install drivers, configure channel changing, and configure the network encoder. The network encoder basically acts as a bridge to capture the stream coming from the cable box and dumps it to a file. SageTV reads from that file and assigns the appropriate meta data to the database as well as scheduling any recordings. In essence, it looks like any other capture device from within SageTV.

[kevine]

Originally Posted by SDeGonge

How is the firewire (1394) port used on these devices?
- For channel control instead of IR Blasting?
- For video/audio feed to Sage Server instead of component, svideo, etc to the PC?

Essentially, both. See here for more info.