STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[mangriotis]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

Thanks


mangriotis, here's the link

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...irewire+plugin


I'll have a go at this, this week-end.

You're right about the S-video encoded HD feeds being better than the SD feeds. They're also widescreen and since I have a widescreen TV, it's really a no-brainer as they say.

Also, coming from Britain, I can't stand the sight of broadcast NTSC SD, it offends my videophile sensibilities.

Based on that thread, it doesn't look to hard to set up, though I haven't had time to implement yet.

One additional point, when I record an HD channel over S-Video, it seems to record 16:9 but not the full screen, i.e. it looks like LB on an SD channel. One of my aspect ratio modes handles this quite well, but I would have thought it should record a full 16:9 image... any idea why this is?

[ishcor2000]

This is a great thread with great info, but i'm running into a problem I havn't been able to find a solution for and havn't seen anyone else (at least post) this problem.

Whenever I try to record or even view HD from my Motorola 6200 (firmware 7.15) to my SYBA PCI to Firewire 1394a 3+1 in my Athlon XP 2000 it only lets me record for about a minute or 2 before the CPU usage shoots through the roof. I can go back and view the short recordings, so I know the 2 are communicating.
I've used VLC media player, capdvhs, and graphedit (the graph used by spaceghost). After a few minutes I have to reboot to try viewing/recording HD again.

I've tried swapping out my SYBA PCI firewire card into my Athlon 3700 to see if my athlon 2000 didn't have the horsepower to properly record HD, but the 3700 CPU shot through the roof too.

The high CPU usage associates with whatever program I have running, whether it's just trying to view with VLC or record with either capdvhs or graphedit.

I'm wondering if anyone else had a similar problem like this.

The 3 long shot ideas I can think of are:
1) reformat another drive to 64k clusters
2) I'm running xp SP2 and i've read that sp2 messed up the firewire drivers so I can try using the SP1 drivers.
3) maybe Syba makes a bad firewire card?

[mangriotis]

Originally Posted by mangriotis

Based on that thread, it doesn't look to hard to set up, though I haven't had time to implement yet.

One additional point, when I record an HD channel over S-Video, it seems to record 16:9 but not the full screen, i.e. it looks like LB on an SD channel. One of my aspect ratio modes handles this quite well, but I would have thought it should record a full 16:9 image... any idea why this is?

Channel change setup was relatively easy, and worked without issue on a test... several recordings later this week should put it to the test. Any thoughts on how to capture the full image as described?

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by mangriotis

Based on that thread, it doesn't look to hard to set up, though I haven't had time to implement yet.

One additional point, when I record an HD channel over S-Video, it seems to record 16:9 but not the full screen, i.e. it looks like LB on an SD channel. One of my aspect ratio modes handles this quite well, but I would have thought it should record a full 16:9 image... any idea why this is?

That's the best you're going to get I'm afraid. S-video is an SD only connection. With the American TV standard that means that as well as being SD resolution (480i), it's also 4:3 geometry. The cable box just letterbox's the signal to make it fit. It's a shame that they don't use anamorphic widescreen like DVD players, and digital broadcast PAL does in the UK, but they don't.

[mangriotis]

Thanks for the response. The channel change continues to work great...

[PhillJones]

I'm having trouble with the stream being a bit stuttery after a channel change. Last night I was watching something on an HD channel and when 11PM rolled arround sage automatically changed the channel to record the daily show. I'd read that there were issue with changing channels when wathcing HD so was pleasently surprised to see it pick up the new SD stream from the cable box. Unfortunately, it kept stuttering with the sound going out and the picture going all jerky. It wasn't all the time, perhaps every 5 mins.

Is this just a known limitation right now or is there anything I can do to prevent it?

Cheers,
Phill

[jriskin]

So as a lucky charter customer I managed to a lot working. SA3250, 1394 channel changing, recording, playback, etc...

*BUT* I have 2 problems, one major, one minor. The minor one is as someone else mentioned there is some extremely low volumes on some channels and it would be nice to adjust it.

*MORE IMPORTANT*
Major problem is on the HD channels (SD seems to be fine) there are a lot of audio drop outs and video glitches and it stops recording after a random amount of time. Now I've checked the CPU usage and its never more than a few percent while recording and disk is working between 1-2MB/sec. So thats not a problem. I've also taken the firewire and plugged it directly in my 2ghz G5 mac and the channels play cleanly and fine with no problems. I've also tried playing back the files in VLC on both the PC and the Mac and they have the same problems.

So that rules out a signal problem, it rules out a CPU problem, it also rules out a playback decoder problem.

So it has to be the way its recording. My instinct says maybe something about SGraphRecorder or the dump.ts or something like that.

Setup:
SA3250
SGraphRecorder 1.09 from this forum (can't seem to get to his website)
Sage 4.1.12.84
XP2500+ 512MB w/PCI generic firewire card

Any ideas? Does someone have a working copy of the latest SGraphRecoder 1.10? I'd love to see if it helps any.

[jriskin]

After reading another zillion or so posts (this time on avsforum) it appears that a recent SA3250HD firmware change may be the source of my woes.

But this still sounds like a software issue on the PC side since the Mac OS X box doesn't seem to have noticed the change or any problems.

Is anyone even still messing around with this stuff? =)

[Bohica]

I seem to be having issues recording and playing back HD content now. Troubleshooting... it seems that I can still watch live HD - but if I record HD - nothing will open the file. VLC, WMP, sage, nothing. The file is there - but if I try to play it back in sage it gives me the spinning icon of death -- and I need to reload sage. Anyone else having this?

The only thing that has changed has been the upgrade to 5.01 and 5.02. I get this spinning icon hang on both the server and the client...

[mangriotis]

I have a strange problem that only affects content recorded via this method. When a show fades to black, the video is cut out, stutters (audio on my receiver seems to lose the digital stream and reconnect multiple times) and eventually gets back to normal, when the black scene or fade out is over.

Two shows I record in HD are 24 and LOST. Both of these have extensive black frames between commercials. Has anyone else seen anything like this?

[Bohica]

Well after several reboots, a general cleaning of the server, I am now recording HD programs again. It seems that for over a week, every HD show recorded left full length unreadable mpegs. I dont know what is wrong with the files, because nothing will open them. They hang sage, VLC and WMP will not open them, etc. Dont know what fixed it.

I did notice now that the latest drivers for the 3250 provided by timmore require Microsoft MCE, and will not install on XP. Dont know if the older ones are available anymore. Perhaps we should reach out to timmore and ask him to make them available for XP users...

[matterw]

The last I played around with this was Dec/2005. It looks like the results are mixed at best.

Quick question --> Why isn't there a capture card that accepts component inputs from the HDTV cable box like my TV does?

[blade]

Originally Posted by matterw

Quick question --> Why isn't there a capture card that accepts component inputs from the HDTV cable box like my TV does?

I think they make them, but they cost major $$$$$$$.

Most (if not all) HD cards can tune unencrypted HD channels from cable, but they only work with the software that comes with the cards. The manufacturers don't provide the necessary driver support for 3rd party software like Sage to use their QAM capabilities.

We don't have consumer level capture cards for HDTV because the powers that be don't want us to have them. There's no reason why we couldn't have capture cards using cable card that could tune encrypted HD channels directly without the use of an STB. The technology is there, we're just not allowed to have it.

[duwrt]

New to HTPCs but I've been reading thru this thread for a few days and this is an awesome collaboration.

I apologize if this is a repeat question, and I know the thread is geared toward MCE 2005, but has anyone looked at making the setup work on XP.

Thanks
duwrt

[gplasky]

What makes you think this is geared towards MCE 2005?

Gerry

[duwrt]

Originally Posted by gplasky

What makes you think this is geared towards MCE 2005?

Gerry

When trying to install the firewire drivers and tools from the green button thread (http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/44138.aspx), I got a message stating that the install required MCE 2005.

And from what I can remember, there were some comments in the "how-to" instructions that stated an MCE baseline.

If you know of a work around, please let me know.

Thanks
duwrt

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by duwrt

When trying to install the firewire drivers and tools from the green button thread (http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/44138.aspx), I got a message stating that the install required MCE 2005.

And from what I can remember, there were some comments in the "how-to" instructions that stated an MCE baseline.

If you know of a work around, please let me know.

Thanks
duwrt

The original thread that explained in detail how to record with firewire is on the avsforums back on 5-19-2004.

How to record via IEEE 1394 (Firewire) to Windows XP

As you can see by the title it had nothing to do with MCE. The Green Button forum is totally devoted to MCE hence the instructions you found.

Use the instructions in the link I provided in addtion to the thread here in the Sage forums.

Gerry

[wado1971]

I posted this question in the hardware section without response - hopefully it's more relevant here.

I've got the firewire HD working Very excited / thanks to all - now a question.

I have only one (1) STB and have two (2) outputs (one firewire and one S-Video-to-pvr150). Channel lineups are from different cities which works well. Now the problem is that sagetv doesn't realize that the two inputs are from a single source and will change the channel on the STB (s-video) while recording via firewire - or vis-versa.

Is there a way to tell sage that 'IF' the pvr150 is recording 'THEN' make the firewire busy? How is this issue dealt with?

thanks

[duwrt]

Originally Posted by DFA

It's the new dump filter that may help the most. ...

EDIT EDIT: The new dump filter after registering will appear under Direct Show filters by the name of "SBDARecorderDump".
Regards,

DFA

I'm having no luck viewing the SBDARecorderDump filter in GraphEdit and I've looked under the DirectShow a million times.

At this point, I've followed the steps to register dump.ax and proppage.dll and I recieved success messages.

Is there anything else I can do to ensure the required filter is registered and useful.

Thanks
duwrt

[jriskin]

So I got a new SA 3250HD cause my old one was being a bit flakey and tried reinstalling everything and ... same problem.

So I was messing around in GraphEdit and if i'm tuned to a SD channel like HBO its fine, change the channel to HD HBO and a couple frames of picture and freeze...then it throws up this error

The graph could not change state.
A Device attached to the system is not functioning.
(Return code: 0x8007001f)

Any advice? I wonder if newer drivers would help, but i tried meistb.zip and its now requiring MCE 2005 to even install anything...

Any help?