Firewire Channel Changing Question

[Ender]

Now I have read the entire STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support thread, and did not see a solution to my problem there, therefore I would ask all if they know of a resolution here.

I have had firewire channel changing working well on my SA4250HDC cable box with both EXEMultituner, and FWChannelproxy, currently I am using FWChannelproxy.

Alas a few weeks ago Time Warner decided to downgrade the os on the box to their new Navigator (Mystro ODN 3.13_3) software form the old SARA os.

My issue as of this time is every few hours of inactivity on the cable box, it will go into a screen saver mode. Fortunately as of now it has not affected a recording in progress, but, if the box ix in screen saver mode when a channel change goes through I loose the first digit, so if channel 818 is to be tuned, it tunes to 18 instead.

Has anyone come up with a way to correct this? Currently I go about an record some random channel in the time slot prior to the desired show i wish to record, but this is tedious, and I am sure i will forget one.

An idea I have is to find a way to either send a keypress down the line early, if possible, or send the channel change command twice. The only problem is i cannot fathom how to do it.

[rrhorer]

I do not have the answer for you; but I believe I recall seeing an answer to this problem in a different thread (or threads) than the one you read. Could I ask what OS you have? I had firewire channel changing working with my SA 4240 HDC on Vista. On moving to Win 7, it no longer works from Sage (V7). If your OS is Win 7, I would like to know how you got it working. Mine does work from thecommand prompt, just not from Sage.

BTW, good luck with getting an answer right now. It seems that everyone is preoccupied with the evolving plugin features and other matters related to Sage 7. I say this because I've noticed several 0 replies recently -- mine was posted yesterday (see it several lines below).

[Ender]

I am running Win 7 32 bit, with Sage 7. I do have channel changing working. It is more the issue of the cable box going to sleep every after a few hours of inactivity, thereby causing tuning errors.

I have UAC turned off, and tuning with FWChannel Proxy. I do though have to use c:\STBFirewire\channelw.exe -f -a6 %DEVICE% %CHANNEL% to effectively change channels.

[rrhorer]

Thanks for responding. I was starting to feel as though my posts had an attached virus that everyone was avoiding. Anyway, I tried with FWChannelproxy, but must have let the earlier version (without ability to set the "a6" parameter) slip in. I'll give it another go with the later version.

[Graygeek]

I've noted the same thing with my TWC SA4250HD. I noticed that if I park the box on a local station it does not sleep. My suspicion is it happens only on Switched Digital Video channels. I just, today, added a scheduled task that kicks the same channel change routine that Exetuner calls to a certain local channel. I change, delay 5 seconds and change again. If all goes as planned that should park my box on that channel at 3AM every day. All my channels are 3 digit so I also setup 4 digit tuning. i.e. channel 700 will tune as 0700. I'll leave feedback on how this works. Maybe someone will post a better solution before then ... fingers crossed! hmmm .... I wonder it I can do a double channel change via Exetuner, go experiment for this weekend.

[Ender]

Well I went and experimented a bit.

I can now have sage do a double channel change via exemultituner, it though is a bit of a kludge, and really looks ugly while channels are being changed, but I can overcome that in short order I hope.

What I did was, replace the command line in the registry to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\EXEMultiTunerPlugin]
"command"="c:\\Firewire\\fwchange.bat %DEVICE% %CHANNEL%"

This of course runs a batch file (must learn how to use vbs scripts)

c:\Firewire\channel -f -v -a0 %1 %2
choice /T 4 /D y
c:\Firewire\channel -f -v -a0 %1 %2

I found that anything less than a four second delay in the commands produces unreliable results.

My main issue now is while the batch file is running, the command console window comes up, and that is the ugly part. Must go try and fix that issue next.

[rrhorer]

You can try writing a simple stand-alone program (e.g., in Visual Basic) to execute channelw.exe from the command line w/o opening the console window, using the Windows API function "ShellExecute". In the simple Delphi program that I wrote, the relevant line was as follows:

ShellExecute(Handle, 'open', PChar('cmd.exe'), PChar(s), Pchar(s2),SW_HIDE);

-- where the PChar(s) and Pchar(s2) parameters allowed input of the actual command ("channelw -f -a6 2") and the channelw.exe path ("c:\STBFirewire"). The actual command with parameters filled in for changing to channel 710 would be:

ShellExecute(Handle, 'open', PChar('cmd.exe'), PChar(/c channelw -f -a6 2 710), Pchar(c:\STBFirewire),SW_HIDE);

My Delphi program was about 7 lines of code and would change channels quickly and reliably. The command line part is the "/c" that precedes "channelw". I believe you could accomplish the same thing as above by substituting your own fwchange.exe for fwchange.bat in the above registry "command". For coding examples in Visual Basic or other programming languages, simply google "ShellExecute".

[Ender]

That is my next endeavor, too bad my programming skills are a bit rusty. Haven't done much in many years. Thanks for the nudge in the right direction.