Tim M Moore Firewire drivers

[wayner]

I don't know if anyone has a good answer for this, but here goes...

The drivers used for connecting a Cable Set Top Box to a PC have been around for about 4-5 years and appear to be written by a guy named Tim M Moore. There have been some updates for newer STBs but these drivers have never really been improved and, at least in my experience, have been known to BSOD your PC.

No offense to Tim, but these drivers tend to be somewhat buggy, especially when it comes to transferring video from the STB to the PC - they are kind of in a permanent beta phase. Then there is the problem that we are rapidly moving away from 32 bit to 64 bit OSes and there is no 64 bit version of these drivers.

How come no one has ever written a more stable version of these drivers? Are we ever going to see a 64 bit version of these drivers?

Is it because there is no commercial incentive to do this? Are these drivers hellishly hard to write? Should those of us that care about functionality on 64 bit OSes offer a bounty for such drivers, especially for channel change?

[Brent]

I've wondered why someone hasn't updated the drivers for so long also - especially for 64Bit.

Fortunately the driver I'm using 32Bit is working flawlessly.
I chose 32Bit Windows 7 on my server specifically because of the no firewire on 64Bit thing.

[gplasky]

And if you think about, SageTV is a 32 bit app that needs 32bit java to run properly. If your requirement is firewire channel changing then what would drive you to run a 64 bit OS? Your media application isn't going to run any faster and if you're only running 2 or 3 applications at the same time having more than 4GB of RAM available won't really buy you much either. I agree they should be written for 64bit but that request has been hanging out there for a long time and from more than just SageTV. I would think it has to do with the complexity of programming it.

Gerry

[wayner]

Originally Posted by gplasky

And if you think about, SageTV is a 32 bit app that needs 32bit java to run properly. If your requirement is firewire channel changing then what would drive you to run a 64 bit OS?

If you want to use WHS and upgrade to the next version, aka Vail, then you have no choice but to go to 64 bit.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by wayner

If you want to use WHS and upgrade to the next version, aka Vail, then you have no choice but to go to 64 bit.

Agreed. Vail is a ways off. (Probably 4th qtr) But at the speed of the firewire driver development not much hope of them being ready at all. Meanwhile my trusty USB-UIRT hasn't missed a channel change in years. (And it does have 64 bit drivers.)

Gerry

[Brent]

Originally Posted by wayner

If you want to use WHS and upgrade to the next version, aka Vail, then you have no choice but to go to 64 bit.

Hmm. That's a pretty good reason...
Not sure how much hope there is of a 64 bit firewire driver as it's been the #1 request of HTPC enthusiasts re: firewire drivers for a while now.

[aflat]

Driver development is painful. Blue screens happen, they are hard to debug, and there isn't a ton of info out there for drivers in general. Since we are dealing with firewire, you can't even use a VM, since VM's don't support firewire, so it just keeps getting worse.

[UgaData]

Originally Posted by johnb003

Hey, I'm working on a new driver for STB using firewire.

I've made a lot of progress so far, and started a thread on avsforum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1145429

The last I checked is wasn't looking very hopeful.

[Taddeusz]

My only problem with the Tim Moore driver/program suite is that they strip any leading zeros. On my SA box this causes it to wait a couple seconds for further input. I switched back to using my USB-UIRT because of this as my record delay needed to be inordinately high enough to be quite annoying.

[Fonceur]

If you are talking of the driver itself, it wasn't written by Tim Moore, it was for a Panasonic Tape Drive and has been written earlier than that, which is why no one has the source code to update it...

What Tim did is the firewire channel changer, an MCE app to use them and an INF file to install the driver on various models of cable box. The latest updates to that INF file being from ExDeus.