TWC, Firewire, SDV, Navigator, oh my!

[Graygeek]

Thinking about some upgrades to my setup .... things are stable and working too good so I desperately need to break it!

Anyone out there using FW channel change with the new TWC Navigator software and SDV? My TWC box will in effect sleep the SDV channel if it senses no activity over a defined period of time. My concern is how this SDV sleep mode plays with firewire. With my current IR blaster I need to send the cablebox to a non-SDV channel, wait 5, then tune the wanted channel, to overcome the SDV sleep! Then there is the wonderful "Start Over" bug that splats on the screen 5 minutes into the show ... grrrrr, not that a different channel change method will help that. Anyone care to share their TWC channel change solutions and how you deal with the new Navigator & SDV?

[Ender]

You and I discussed this issue some time back. I am using Firewire changing, with mostly good results. I get a mistune every now and then, but for the most part all is well. The only thing I see as an issue, is if I record some marathon of shows on a channel, even though i have tune always set, it will still time out (the cable box that is) after about four hours.

It was all described in this post:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...98&postcount=6

To recap:

[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 %1 111
choice /T 4 /D y
c:\Firewire\channel -f -v -a0 %1 %2

Now if I could just write a nice VBS script, or something else that will not have the command window pop up for the 4-6 seconds every time I change a channel.

[Graygeek]

Yes, unfortunatly since we are the only posters on this topic, it's beginning to sound like no one has devised any better solution than what we discussed a while back. I was hoping now that Navigator had been out a while someone had a better idea .... so far my IR blaster setup works 100%, just seems a shame it has to flip channels back and forth to do it.

[Wirenut]

I'm using firewire with a pair of TWC SA4640HDC's without issue. I believe my box had a setting for timeout... and the ability to disable it... in the navigator preference menu. The only channel change issue I've ever had is when the power went out and came back on... and now they're on UPS power. I'm using 5.1 optical audio and the latest HDPVR 1.5.7 drivers. I do believe this is the newest STB from TWC.... I had to "mod" the timmoore drivers to work with it, as I found all the instructions here in the forum, it wasn't all that difficult... It was a few hours of setup... but the info is here.