Change channels on DirecTV STB via ethernet

[heffneil]

My DirecTV boxes do not have serial ports. H23-600's. I will be interested in testing this. Will it work with multiple boxes?

Neil

[MrD]

This works using generic IR tuner plugin on linux server too

using wget

elif [ "$CMD" = "TUNE" ]; then
        if ["$REMOTE" = "H23-100" ]; then
         URL="http://192.168.1.103:8080/tv/tune?major=${CHANNEL}"
         echo $URL >> /tmp/report.txt
         wget -q -O /dev/null $URL
        fi

[MrD]

Originally Posted by heffneil

My DirecTV boxes do not have serial ports. H23-600's. I will be interested in testing this. Will it work with multiple boxes?

Neil

It should have a USB port which is where the serial port really is

[bhyman1]

This is excellent! Thanks for the info!

[Ericvic]

This is a great thread. I found it after I could get serial tuning to work with my new H24. I didn't want to use the multi-app method described at the beginning of the thread so I created a tuning DLL. If anyone is interested I can post what I have done. It has only been tested with my 2 H24 receivers on my Server 2003 box but it is working fine for me.

Eric

[teesee150]

Originally Posted by Ericvic

This is a great thread. I found it after I could get serial tuning to work with my new H24. I didn't want to use the multi-app method described at the beginning of the thread so I created a tuning DLL. If anyone is interested I can post what I have done. It has only been tested with my 2 H24 receivers on my Server 2003 box but it is working fine for me.

Eric

Eric,

It would be greatly appreciated if you could post your work. I'm sure many of us would use it!

[Ericvic]

Originally Posted by teesee150

Eric,

It would be greatly appreciated if you could post your work. I'm sure many of us would use it!

OK. I may take me a couple of days to get the time to get it ready but I will post it soon.

Eric

[Ericvic]

Attached is my attempt at a DLL that does HTTP tuning for DirecTV boxes. Like I said before I have only tested it on H24 boxes and Server 2003.

To use the tuner just unzip the file in the SageTV\Common directory. It will add the following files/directories:
SageTV\Common\DirecTVTuner.dll
SageTV\Common\RemoteCodes\Directv HTTP Tuning
SageTV\Common\RemoteCodes\Directv HTTP Tuning\192.168.211.60.ir

You will need to change the name of the 192.168.211.60.ir file to the IP address of your DirecTV box. The IP address also needs to be entered inside the file. If you have more than one box then you can copy the file and change the name to appropriate IP address.

You will then need to restart Sage to get it to recognize the DLL.

If you use it please let me know how it works for you.

Eric

[zoundz]

Eric

So far so good with your dll. Thanks for putting in the effort to create it. I'm running SageTV 6.6.2 as a service on Win7 32 Bit. Couple of notes. It's terrific that you put in the poweron command. You should tell everyone. It seems to work just fine. For those people that just want to modify their sage.properties file rather than deleting and reinstalling the capture device, the IP address is in the device name field, the same as the USBUirt device names.

As a side note, where did you find the specs for the SageTV tuner dll's. I thought about writing one myself, but I didn't have the entry point specs and never did find them.

Thanks again for your effort.

[Ericvic]

Originally Posted by zoundz

Eric

So far so good with your dll. Thanks for putting in the effort to create it. I'm running SageTV 6.6.2 as a service on Win7 32 Bit. Couple of notes. It's terrific that you put in the poweron command. You should tell everyone. It seems to work just fine.

As a side note, where did you find the specs for the SageTV tuner dll's. I thought about writing one myself, but I didn't have the entry point specs and never did find them.

Thanks again for your effort.

I knew I was going to forget something when I posted. Yes the DLL does send a poweron command right before it sends the tune command just to make sure the box is on.

I don't remember where I got the details for the tuner DLL. I had created one about 3 years ago for my last setup and I found information somewhere on the forum. I'm thinking this is the place http://sourceforge.net/projects/irtuner/

Eric

[war10ck]

this is awesome news thanks for posting.

just to be clear - im not very technical. There are 2 methods listed on this thread, the op and then Eric's?

Also, if I'm running win7 64 bit and use the op's method the registry entry is in a different place, correct?

Thanks for helping...

[raoul]

This looks very awesome! I can't wait to try this. I have the USB-UIRT working and controlling 2 boxes, but occasionally I miss a recording due to the dreading "bonk" when it misses.

A couple of questions: I might be paranoid, but I don't want to put my H21 boxes on my network and give them access to phone home. I just don't trust DTV at all. Is there a way to deny them access to the net? The other thing I was wondering is that my server has a second ethernet port, so maybe I could take that to a HUB that only has the DTV boxes on them and manually assign them an IP and deny them access that way. Is there an easier way?

No harm in including the poweron command, but not sure why anyone ever turns off a DTV box. They never actually go off, and sit there processing and consuming the same nominal amount of power in either state. By turning them off, it just shuts off the video output and a little LED, but still sits there churning away.

Thanks for putting together this awesome DLL. As soon as I work out the network access thing, I am putting it into play.

-R

[Fuzzy]

You might be able to limit internet acces by port on your router - if not, you'd have to purchase a more expensive router/firewall.. someone prone to such paranoia might want to go that route anyways.. ;-)

[Ericvic]

I was somewhat worried about them "phoning home" as well but for better tuning I figured it shouldn't harm anything.

There is a setting for the gateway that you could probably put a bogus IP address into and then they wouldn't be able to find a route home but I'm not sure if the box will pass it's tests if it has a bogus IP address for the gateway.

Also one thing I had to do was to restart the box after I connected the Ethernet cable because it didn't seem to see the interface or network without the reboot.

Eric

[war10ck]

yes there is a very simple way to block your receivers from getting to the net. It is called a MAC address filter (Also may be called Network filter) in my router and will keep any device you enter from getting to the Web but will allow LAN traffic. Most routers should have this feature.

Would someone please answer my post above??

Thanks

[raoul]

Unfortunately, I think I got close but never got this working. I tried the dll and instructions that Ericvic posted above, but couldn't get it to actually change the channel. I did not ever make any of the registry changes or downloaded the files that btrumsey posted in the original thread.

I found that it was quite easy to use the MAC filter in my router to prevent the DTV box (H21) from calling home. I went ahead and assigned the DTV box the IP 192.168.0.100. Interestingly, the DTV box didn't really take this IP and kept thinking it was something else, but I manually entered this for its IP, 255.255.255.0 for the subnet, and just set the DNS and gateway to my router (192.168.0.1) and it seemed to stick. when you test the connection, it fails to find the internet (good) but also complains about not seeing the network (bad).

However, I went to the mythTV post originally linked by btrumsey, and found that I could communicate with the DTV box from any browser on my network. Using the command http://192.168.0.100:8080/info/getOptions I would get a successful response from the DTV box.

I was able to go into sageTV and tell it to use this tuner method and the correct IP (listed in the .ir file), but it never actually changed the channel. I can see it pause, so I was confident it was sending out the channel change command packet.

Going back to any browser on my network, I tried to manually send the channel change command. I used the command: http://192.168.0.100:8080/tv/tune?major=100 and I got a successful response back:

{"status": {
"code": 200,
"msg": "OK.",
"query": "/tv/tune?major=100"
}}

but it wouldn't actually change the channels. Maybe not all the DTV receivers are fully turned on to allow this? I went through the setup and found the "entire home" area and set it to allow external commands, but still no go.



UPDATE: Works now. Thanks Ericvic, btrumsy, and the guys working on it at MythTV. I am not sure exactly what my problem was before, but I just reset everything one more time and it all started working. I will play around some more with giving it a false gateway, but all I did so far was deny the MAC addresses any access to the internet through the router to prevent any phoning home. In the network menus of the DTV boxes, it does fail the internet connection test, so I have to think it is blocking everything correctly. Not sure if there is a better way to test or not.

The sageTV part with your DLL was trivial to get going. I do recommend that if people are setting this up for the first time, that you make sure you can change the channel first via the browser with the listed commands. Once I had that working completely, the sageTV part just worked like magic.

I think it is superior to USB-UIRT, as it is faster and seems to have less chance of missing a channel change. Also, I had some other IR extenders in the same room, and if I didn't get them separated from the USB-UIRT, I would get some feedback which could add to the missed channel changes. To be clear, I have used the USB-UIRT for almost 5 years prior to this. Also, this is virtually free to add to your setup. I realize I could have gotten some usb to serial converters and a null modem in there for fairly cheap, but free is even better.

[Ericvic]

Raoul,

Looking online I see the others have http working on the H21 so I don't think that is the problem.

You can use http://192.168.0.100:8080/tv/getTuned to see if the box thinks the channel change took. Also if /info/getOptions shows that it supports /tv/tune then I would think that it would work.

Eric

[raoul]

Originally Posted by war10ck

yes there is a very simple way to block your receivers from getting to the net. It is called a MAC address filter (Also may be called Network filter) in my router and will keep any device you enter from getting to the Web but will allow LAN traffic. Most routers should have this feature.

Would someone please answer my post above??

Thanks

I am sure they are related in concept, but there are two methods in this thread as you pointed out. I just copied Ericvic's dll and the .ir file, and didn't do any of the registry entries. I got the IPs of the DTV boxes from the router, and edited the IR file with the IP inside the file, and renamed the file with the IP.ir. Restarted sageTV, and reconfigured the source (I had to add it as a new source to see the tuning.dll). Then I selected the change tuner option and selected the IP of the box.

I don't know anything about the 64bit OS requirements, but I think this is just sending a packet with the IP and the simple channel tune command, so I would expect the 64bit OS to not matter.

[Beefcake550]

Eric, your method rocks. got it working in no time with my new H24. I'm going to try it on my existing H23-600 tonight and I don't expect any problems.

[Ericvic]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

Eric, your method rocks. got it working in no time with my new H24. I'm going to try it on my existing H23-600 tonight and I don't expect any problems.

Glad it is working for you.

Eric