STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[eobiont]

With 3.0.5 and the new version of UNE, I am able to change between channels quickly (1 sec or less), the playback is choppy for 1-2 seconds and then everything is perfect. Audio goes through the default codec (ffdshow in my case). This is definately the best HDTV experience with no real glitches. Sometimes I have to rw/ff to get lipsync, but that is rare. I only wish I knew of a way to add cropping into the graph. I would like to crop off the bottom 8 pixels. I can do this in FFDSHOW, but this adds too much processing to the image I get some stuttering.

Between the playback improvements in 3.0.5, Anders new UNE and Timmmoore's FW channel changing exe, this system is perfect. Now if only my cable company had never heard of 5C, I would be in TV heaven.

With 3.0.7 and the new version of UNE, channel changes among HDTV channels take ~ 15 seconds - but they do work - previously they crashed.
For fun, I unregistered the AC3 codec in the Sage 3.0.7 folder but that had no effect on audio playback (still no audio). I hope Sage doesn't get released this way - or at least there is some way to change the way the files are played back.

[DFA]

I am now also running 3.0.5. My findings and experiences are identical to those of eobiont except for one thing:

I am getting extra channel number digits from Sage 3.0.5 for certain HD channels. This seems to have something to do with OTA cards and sub channels. I currently have to stay away from a few channels because in addition to not changing channel properly, audio will go away causing me to have to send Sage through a "sleep" cycle.

Others are also reporting the extra channel numbers issue.

Oh the fun of beta testing.

The only thing I wish feature wise is a way to let Sage know that a tuner is being shared. In my case, I would like Sage to know that the PVR-250 S-Video input and the UNE network encoder are in fact sharing a common tuner.

DFA

[AndersNolberger]

Just a clarification about the new SGR. The new SGR is specially written to use functionality in the new dump filter. Older versions of SGR will not take advantage of the new filter.

Anders

[Morgan111]

Now that I seem to be having more reliable results with the recent changes I am ready to turn this on for the family. And it figures Comcast just 5C'd me on InHD1/2, Discovery, TNT... )

I have one problem I am sure has come up that I don't find talk about. If I only want to use firewire for the HD channels from the STB and have a capture card hooked up to the same STB for the other channels how do I keep their use by Sage mutually exclusive?

If I want to be able to handle firewire from 2 STBs can I run SGraphRecorder.exe from two different directories that have their own .ini file?

[msmith8228]

Anders:

Can you clarify for us just what are the new features that are in your new dump filter when it is used with the new version of SGR?

DFA:

You indicated that when you use the new dump filter that "pans" are much smother -- can you provide more information about this.

One issue I have had for quite some time with this firewire recording in Sage is that the playback is "jerky" when the screen does a fast pan from left to right. It is as if some frames are lost although the sound does not experience any problems. This is not a problem with Sage playback as I get the same effect when I playback the file separately outside of Sage using a number of playback options (such as the IO Data HD networked player) and external software -- everything seems to give the same effect -- poor smoothness when panning so I believe that the problem exists in the Sage file that was created by the old dump filter I was using. I originally was using the Moonlight dump filter and this problem was repeatable. The results using the new dump filter from Anders seems to be significantly better.

[AndersNolberger]

The new dump filter has a function to report the number of bytes it has written to the file. If the new filter is used with SGR the result send back to Sage on a Get_File_Size command is directly from the dump filter, in the old version SGR asked the file system about the file size. But the file system is always a little behind so the few first seconds the file system is reporting 0 as the size and Sage has to wait to begin playback. When the file system eventually reports a size Sage begins playback but then Sage might play all of the bytes before a bigger file size is reported and there might be jerkiness in the playback.

But when the file has played a while this should not matter. The files written to disk is identical so the pannings should not be affected, at least not if you are looking on an old recording.

[Naylia]

So this means playback should begin a little faster?

And is the dump filter included in the SGraphRecorder 1.0.9 download?

[AndersNolberger]

Yes and Yes.

The file is recorded exactly as before but Sage will now about it a little bit faster. This might depend on the delay in Sage.Properties file but I have not tried that delay myself.

[jblust]

I just got my new Motorola 6200 cable box yesterday and decided to try this out. Using the new 1.09 SGraphRecorder and the new dump filter, along with Timmmoore's drivers and channel program, things work very well with 3.07. (I was assuming from the reports I'd seen that I wouldn't get any sound with 3.07, but it actually works for me, using either the Nvidia audio decoder or AC3Filter.) There are some occasional glitches in playback (audio sometimes gets skippy over SPDIF to my receiver until I stop and restart playback, or the whole thing refuses to play of I leave it on pause too long), but so far, it's working much better than my A180... Thanks all!

[eobiont]

Originally Posted by jblust

(I was assuming from the reports I'd seen that I wouldn't get any sound with 3.07, but it actually works for me, using either the Nvidia audio decoder or AC3Filter.)

I have tried and tried to get audio in 3.0.7 and can't. Did you do anything weird?

Are there others with working audio in HD programs with 3.0.7?

[eobiont]

Originally Posted by Morgan111

If I only want to use firewire for the HD channels from the STB and have a capture card hooked up to the same STB for the other channels how do I keep their use by Sage mutually exclusive?

At this time there is no way to let SageTV know that these two capture devices are really using the same source. Please submit a feature request too so that it gets additional "votes" on what needs fixing.

The other part of this problem for us HD-STBers is to allow us to use the same guide data for two different sources. Right now, we have to do something like pick a similar lineup from a nearby town with the same cable provider and munge it into our lineup.

I think the best solution would be to be able to list each program source along with it's guide data and then be able to associate one or more capture devices with each channel in source/lineup. It does get confusing...

[jblust]

Originally Posted by eobiont

I have tried and tried to get audio in 3.0.7 and can't. Did you do anything weird?

I think the only thing I did that could be considered weird/different is that I didn't bother doing the TS -> PS conversion in my filter graph. I just have two filters, the Motorola tuner filter going straight to the dump filter. The file still ends up with a .mpg extension, but it's TS inside and 3.0.7 seems to deal with it pretty well.

[DFA]

I tried just TS dump and I believe eobiont has done that as well with no success audio wise with 3.0.7. I have read of others having intermittent audio with TS dumps (works sometimes / sometimes not).

DFA

PS: I use identical but different sourced EPG's for the PVR-250 and Firewire. That works OK but with one problem: conflicts can occur that Sage will not figure exist since it does not know that there is a common tuner involved for the S-video from PVR-250 and the Network encoder. Getting another STB will fix that but like most others, I don't want to do that.

I am going to put in for a relatively simple feature request to be able to advise Sage through sage.properties that specific sources can be flagged as a common tuner by simple number scheme.

Sorry to here about Comcast 5c'ing channels that up to now have been left alone by most other providers. I'm still in pretty good shape but that could change at any time just like the weather. While Firewire is great, it is also dicey as far as the future is concerned and may devolve into just a few HD channels at the end of the day. Make hay while the sun shines. I have been using FW for more and more SD channels just because of quality. Decoding at the STB and encoding again at the PVR-250 doesn't do anything good for PQ.

DFA

[Naylia]

Originally Posted by DFA

Decoding at the STB and encoding again at the PVR-250 doesn't do anything good for PQ.

Depends on whether you're pulling digital channels or not. For while I do use firewire to record, I can only do the OTA HD channels and the analog SD channels (2-71 for me). So now I'm in a debate between which is better, the encoder on a Moto box, or the encoder on the PVR-150. It would be interesting to compare the two to see how good a job the Moto does.

[Naylia]

Has anyone had problems with the firewire AV/C Panel driver and their Moto box?

I have a Moto 6205 (i think) and I get an error message when installing the driver that it can't start the device. Any ideas?

[jblust]

Originally Posted by DFA

I tried just TS dump and I believe eobiont has done that as well with no success audio wise with 3.0.7. I have read of others having intermittent audio with TS dumps (works sometimes / sometimes not).

Maybe the latest SGraphRecorder and dump filter are what have made it work for me. I never tried the earlier versions.

The only issues I have now are with seeking. Once a show is done recording, Sage 3.0.7 doesn't seem to be able to FFW/RW when you go to play it back. I've seen the same issues with TS files that were recorded from outside of sage and imported.

[timmmoore]

Originally Posted by Naylia

Has anyone had problems with the firewire AV/C Panel driver and their Moto box?

I have a Moto 6205 (i think) and I get an error message when installing the driver that it can't start the device. Any ideas?

Whats the PnPID for it?
Run the device manager, right click->properties on the device
go to details tab, if you click on the id, you can do Control-C to copy it.

[Naylia]

I only have a General tab and a Driver tab. I saw something somewhere about SP2. Do I need to be using WinXP SP2? SP2 gives me major headaches so I'd really prefer to avoid it if I can.

Oh and it's not a 6205 it's a 6200/2005 (probably just year built is my guess)

Any ideas?

[DFA]

Naylia:

Yes, it was implied and I was referring to capturing SD digital channels via firewire rather than PVR-250 S-Video involving a decoding (STB) / encoding (PVR-250) and final decode via nVidia decoder.

But for reasons unclear, not all digital SD channels are "good" from STB via firewire. Those remain on S-video.

DFA

[timmmoore]

Originally Posted by DFA

Naylia:

Yes, it was implied and I was referring to capturing SD digital channels via firewire rather than PVR-250 S-Video involving a decoding (STB) / encoding (PVR-250) and final decode via nVidia decoder.

But for reasons unclear, not all digital SD channels are "good" from STB via firewire. Those remain on S-video.

DFA

What problems? I haven't seen any problems with digital channels except when 5c=1. I have seen issues with audio on analogue channels. Motorola stbs encode analogue channels so they work over firewire, SA STBs do not.
However, some Motorola STBs encode audio at 32KHz rather than the normal 48KHz. This causes problems on playback - fast playback of audio and video. The only time I have seen people have this problem is with these STBs, using SPDIF. Changing SPDIF to use pro logic II has always fixed this problem, in every case I have seen it.