STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[ftlee]

Does anyone know of a SA box that is able to change channels via Firewire? Also, has anyone tried the Pace 550 box yet? I have one, do I need to find a WinXP driver for it?

Thanks,

Frank

[timmmoore]

Originally Posted by ftlee

Does anyone know of a SA box that is able to change channels via Firewire? Also, has anyone tried the Pace 550 box yet? I have one, do I need to find a WinXP driver for it?

Thanks,

Frank

I just got hold of some more information about firewire change channel commands. I will be adding them to channel so you can try them as an option and see if they work. No information about whether they work with SA3250 or not though

[DFA]

ftlee:

Just plug in your Pace box via the Firewire and see if it is recognized. If recognized, XP will come up with Unknown, Tuner and Panel devices. Use the INF set (MeiSTB.inf w/ drivers) package and install as Generic Tuner device. Spaceghost has compiled nice instructions.

Last few posts discuss lack of success for SA in the channel change dept. But OS variants for SA may not mean universal failure.

DFA

[timmmoore]

I have updated channel.exe on www.thegreenbutton.com. It includes a couple more ways to change channel. Maybe one will work on the SA3250. Can you try

channel -a0 -v D C

channel -a1 -v D C

channel -a2 -v D C

channel -a3 -v D C

and see if any have an affect on SA 3250HD. Where D is the device number and C is the channel to change to.

[oachalon]

Have any of you guys had any problem with SGraphRecorder crashing on you. It will work fine all day and then you go to change the channel once and watch something and it crashes. I keep adjusting the tuning delay which is at 5000 now and it still crashes once in a while. You guys have any ideas?

[aperry]

No crashing here, but I do have it take 100% CPU for no apparent reason. Then I have to exit it and restart.

[Diginerd]

I solved my installation problem.

Turns out that microsoft produces an "application Compatability Toolkit" that spoofs an app into thinking it's running on a different version of windows than it is. Tricked my installer into thinking it was on XP and I managed to install the direct show filters on my 2003 Server box..

Sweeet.. :-)

[timmmoore]

Dont know whether its useful to SageTV or not but I have modified channel.exe so you can send any key press via firewire (from a suggestion on avsforum). I haven't found much of interest except for
channel -v -d DD 16 is channel up
channel -v -d DD 17 is channel down
channel -v -d DD 18 is last channel
I dont know if SageTV supports these types of commands.
0-9 is the digit, some other numbers are not implemented, others response ok but I haven't worked out what they do.

[spaceghost]

anyone in the huntsville, AL area? PM me...just a quick question.

[gtd885a]

So, is this working well for some people? Are there any updates to Sage coming that will possibly help with stability? I know there was talk of being able to support TS files, getting rid of the conversion, but I don't know how long that is going to take (haven't seen any updates). Seems like this would help a lot.

I'm thinking about giving MythTV a try again (don't know if I have that much patience though), I can't seem to get this thing stable. And my wife is getting pretty tired of it crashing, locking up, and/or giving errors.

I'm starting a new job next week but I'm taking a couple of days off in between. Maybe I will try to reload ONE MORE TIME, cross my fingers, pray to the firewire gods, etc.

Thanks.

[gtd885a]

Well, I decided to load my primary PC and try it out. It is an Athlon 64 3400 w/ 1GB pc3200 and multiple SATA WD Raptors, Radeon 9800 Pro. Shouldn't have any problems with hardware.

But I'm still experiencing about the same problems. I have to be doing something wrong in my setup. Obviously user error, think I need to RTFM a few times and do some more research.

Doesn't help that I have a 2 year old constantly demanding attention

[Naylia]

gtd,

what kinds of problems are you having? can you get HD to work just in VLC or CapDVHS? can you correctly record a file just with your graph?

[gtd885a]

Originally Posted by Naylia

gtd,

what kinds of problems are you having? can you get HD to work just in VLC or CapDVHS? can you correctly record a file just with your graph?

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I can watch HD in VLC and record from CapDVHS. Also, I can record to Dump.mpg with my graph and it seems to go ok. However, my problems have been 1) Audio render errors 2) Sage skips, then eventually the video/audio hang w/ HD 3) Sage actually closes with a windows error message.

When I reloaded on my primary PC and then looked at the machine I am using as my HTPC, I noticed 2 things. One was that I had a different version of AC3 filter installed. I originally had 0.70b installed and then must've installed a newer version while troubleshooting (can't remember the exact version). Secondly, I didn't have Intervideo WinDVD installed. This was because in a previous installation attempt I could never get graphedit to accept the Intervideo filters (it wouldn't allow them to be connected).

Anyway, I went ahead and loaded WinDVD 6 and the old (0.70b) version of AC3 and it worked beautifully... at least I thought it did. I set up Sage to use the Intervideo Video Video and Audio decoders, and everything seemed to work with just a few skips between channel changes. But it never crashed , hung, etc., it just seemed to work. I was very excited.

However, I soon realized one very big problem: my audio was only stereo, not 5.1/6.1. So, I went into AC3 config and told it to use SPDIF (although in Bitstream information for Channels it still says 1+1 - Dual mono???). That didn't change anything. So I went into WinDVD setup and made sure that it showed S/PDIF as the audio output. That still didn't change anything.

So, that's where I am right now. Not sure where to go from here. I tried to update my audio drivers to make sure (I have an Abit NF7-S) and that didn't change anything either. Oh yeah, wanted to mention, when I play a DVD through WinDVD, it plays in 6.1 DD sound, just not when I play anything in Sage. I tried to tell AC3 to "prefer other decoder" over AC3, but that didn't help either.

Anyway, thanks in advance if anyone has any suggestions

[Naylia]

i don't know if I can help you but hopefully someone can now that we know what works and what doesn't

have you tried using the nvidia filters instead? there's a 30 day free trial available to try them out.

[sigma957]

I have been using SGraphRecorder for a few weeks to capture HDTV via firewire from my Mitsubishi TV to Sage. My computer, however, is only an Athlon XP 2500+, and I was having mixed success with the method described here (I know that 3000+ is the suggested minimum CPU).

To help reduce the hardware requirements for HDTV capture, I have written a dump filter that takes the transport stream directly from the firewire capture filter, converts it to program stream data, and writes it to a file in one step. With this filter you no longer need the TS info, demux, and mux filters. Your filter graph is simply:

Firewire Capture Filter -> DumpPS Filter

If any of you are familiar with the HDTVtoMPEG2 program by Ben Cooley, basically what I did was take his source code and wrapped it in a DirectShow dump filter. In theory, the results are what you would get if you recorded to a ts file and then converted it to MPEG with HDTVtoMPEG2. The filter just does it on-the-fly in one step. I have been using it myself with SageTV and the NVIDIA decoder for a couple of weeks, and the resulting mpg files seem to work well.

Using this filter in place of the TS Info Parser -> MPEG2 Demultiplexer -> Cyberlink Mux -> Dump Filter combination, I am able to watch live HDTV in Sage using < 30% CPU on my 2500+ machine.

I don't know if this will be useful to any of you, but if you do try it, let me know how it works for you.

Edit (6/9/05): I have attached a new version of the filter which I hope will solve some of the problems people have had with PID detection.

Edit (6/15/05): OK, here is a new version of the filter. I have fixed a couple of bugs and modified the PID detection some more. Hopefully this will work better for everyone.

[lovingHDTV]

Sigma,
This is exactly what I was looking for. My client machine in an AMD 2500+ and I was hoping to be able to view HDTV material on it. I just ordered my A180 and will try out your DumpPS filter, when I get everything installed.

It is good to know that someone has successfully done this with the same processor.

thanks,

[gtd885a]

Awesome news, sigma957. I also use 2500+ (in the box I was trying to get working), What motherboard do you have? Are you getting SPDIF passthrough to work without problems?

As soon as I put my daughter to bed tonight, I'm trying this out! Thanks!

[ChuckvB]

I have not found the file "proppage.dll" on my machine in any hidden on not hidden directorys. I also struck out in looking for it on the web and in graphedit downloads. If someone has the "proppage.dll" would you send it to me at Chuckvb1@cox.net?

Thanks

[gtd885a]

Originally Posted by ChuckvB

If someone has the "proppage.dll" would you send it to me?

Thanks

Sent it to you.

[ChuckvB]

Originally Posted by timmmoore

There shouldn't be any problem with using DFA's stuff.
It will need meitape.sys amd meistrm.sys in the the directory with mstapeo.sys as well. If you used DFA's inf file those files with get copied but not used. You can copy meistb.sys and meistrm.sys from dfa's package to the directory and rename meistb.sys to meitape.sys.

Tim
I'm looking for the mstapeo.sys as it appears I need to install the panasonic tuner drivers. I see some comments but not how to generate it or which file to rename. Above you mention meitape.sys but not mstape.sys can you clarify this for me?