Firewire STB issues

[ktuimala]

I have a motorola dch6416 that i am trying to get to work via firewire with SageTV. I have followed a myriad of instructions found on the form. Bottom line, I can watch my STB through VLC media player and change channels using Timm Moores STB package. Furthermore, I can setup filters with GraphEdit and successfully dump STB video from the fireware port to a TS file that I can open in WMP 11.

I have downloaded and installed SGraphRecorder, configured the ini file to use the GRF file i created in GraphEdit, and started SGraphRecorder before SageTV.

Suffice it to say SageTV spins its wheels for ages when i setup a new source using the firewire device. The SGraphRecorder debug screen shows sage making communication with the port in the SGraphRecorder ini file. I can verify his with netstat -bno as well. However, i get please wait while looking for a preview. During channel setup, any channel I select that will work doesn't make a single call to the channelw.exe that I setup in the SGraphrecorder INI and i get no input. Note that i can change channels with channelw.exe via the command line while viewing in VLC or capturing in SGraphRecorder.

The SGraphRecorder debug makes continuous calls to GET_FILE_SIZE for a generated file with a .mpgbuff extension. This files has 0 bytes, not mater how long it runs.

So, any help would be grateful. I don't understand how all of this works on one end, but does not work with Sage..... It is all very frustrating......

[WellThen]

Not sure if this will solve your problem, but here's something to try. Go into channel setup, and activate a couple of channels, without bothering with trying a preview. Then, go back and try to access them from the Program Guide. I've never had much luck with viewing the SGraphRecorder tuner through preview, but it (mostly) works when normally accessed via regular tuning by Sage. (Of course, this assumes you have channel changing for your STB correctly set up to work via Sage first)

[ktuimala]

Genius!!

It "sort" of works. Very buggy. Any chance you could share your sage.properties configuration for your firwire setup. Any other config options would be helpful.

Thanks!!!

[reggie14]

I have a couple suggestions.

First, the transport stream container seems to be particularly problematic. I modified my graph and added Sage's tssplitter filter, which converts it to a program stream. Now it works much better on software clients. I messed around with splitters and decoders on my software clients for ages, but never got it working reliably until I made the switch to program streams. The HD100 never seemed to mind the TS though.

Also, I think either the firestb driver or sgraphrecorder is buggy. My computer was crashing on a weekly basis after setting up firewire recording until I turned off DEP on my machine. That's sort of an awful thing to have to do, but it significantly increased the reliability of my server. Now I can last 1-2 months between crashes. One of these days I'm going to try a different firewire card to see if that helps (maybe its the firewire card driver that's crashing).