STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[salsbst]

I think that is the reasons for the TuningDelay parameter, though I've not experienced this issue myself...

[salsbst]

Can anyone confirm that their firewire recordings are generally playable in Sage v6?

Mine mostly crap out. Sage support thought they had fixed in in build 6.0.16, but still no joy here. I'm recording from a Motorola 3412, Nvidia video decoder, Intervideo audio decoder.

Specifically, no firewire recordings can be thumbnailed by SageTVTranscoder.exe, and it seems that only the HD streams can be played back. SDTV recordings either hang SageTV, crash SageTV, or simply return you to the home menu of SageTV without playing.

Anyone?

[deria]

Hi,

I tried to get this all working last year and had quite a few problems. Yesteday I decided to try again, though. I was more successful. I can record shows through SageTV and watch them now, but I still have some problems:

1) I cannot seem to watch shows while they are recording. The playback display shows a giant negative number on the left of the scroll bar and won't playback the file. If I wait until the file is closed, it seems to work.

2) I can't switch to a channel that would require the STB from Live TV. I suspect that this is related to #1.

I am using SageTV in service mode. Is that a problem?

So, is this basically as good as it is going to get or is there something I can do to improve things?

Salbst: I'll try recording some SD content ths morning. All of my recordings iof HD channels have worked (and some of those were in the 4:3 format) but I'll try recording from an actual SD channel and see what happens.

[deria]

Continuing my above post, maybe it isn't working as well as I thought. I scheduled 4 recordings last night, and of the 4 only two worked. The first and third failed, apparently generating no file. Upon playback in SageTV, they just show an error message followed by a black screen. The other two recordings worked perfectly fine.

EDIT: Sorry, I said that the two failed recordings generated no file. That wasn't correct -- there is a file. Its just not playable in SageTV or Windows Media Player.

Any thoughts?

[salsbst]

When you say "apparently generating no file", is that because there is no corresponding file in your recordings directory/directories?

[deria]

Originally Posted by salsbst

When you say "apparently generating no file", is that because there is no corresponding file in your recordings directory/directories?

Well, that is what I thought at first but I did eventually find the files. They're there, just not playable. The error message I get says that there was a problem rendering the VIDEO portion of playback. The files look to be the right size, based on the duration of the show. I'm wondering if maybe they are somehow corrupt/need fixing?

Then again, I wouldn't have the first idea where to get a tool that scans mpeg-transport-streams and fixes them.

[salsbst]

It's possible that they're not broken, but that SageTV is. Are you using Sage v6? Are the files SDTV or HDTV? Are they recorded from a channel that you can view live using VLC? Do they play in WMP?

[deria]

Originally Posted by salsbst

It's possible that they're not broken, but that SageTV is. Are you using Sage v6? Are the files SDTV or HDTV? Are they recorded from a channel that you can view live using VLC? Do they play in WMP?

I am using 6.0.15 (upgrading to 6.0.16 right now).

They are both HDTV. One is 720p, the other 1080i.

They are both recorded from a channel that I do get and is not encrypted. To be sure, I just started a recording on channel 303 which is one of the channels that had a failed recording and its working fine.

They do not play in WMP.

[salsbst]

You got me, then!

[deria]

Originally Posted by salsbst

You got me, then!

Well, I downloaded a tool called Mpeg2Repair. Its a Windows based program that let me select the input file, the output file, and then have it "fix errors". It was really light on information about what it did, but it DID render the file playable for me.

Perhaps you should try the same thing on your unplayable files. I got it from:

http://users.adelphia.net/~mwilczyn/mpeg2repair/

[salsbst]

I might try it for kicks, but I'd rather SageTV play them like it did under v5! Thanks for the tip, though!

[deria]

Originally Posted by salsbst

I might try it for kicks, but I'd rather SageTV play them like it did under v5! Thanks for the tip, though!

Well, it worked on both of my defective recordings. I think it might be that my cable signal is weak on that tap (split any signal 8 times and you'll run into issues somewhere along the line).

I'll plug a stornger tap in I guess and see if that affects it. In the mean-time, I'm not soo sure what I can do about these recordings. I was able to fix them and then just rename them to match the original name, but doesn't that cause a problem for SageTV at some point? I seem to remember having shows vanish from the recordings list when I messed witht he files in the recording directory. Does that only happen if the filename changes?

[hydro123456]

So I finally got my drivers installed properly and I've tested the channel.exe program and it changes channels, but I can't get sagetv to change channels through firewire. Do I need to install girder even if I'm not using a IR device?

Edit

Never mind I figured out how to get it to change channels, but it will only change channels on the firewire tuner. Is there any way to change channels using firewire on my s-video source?

[optiic]

Hello,

I just moved into a new house and have "upgraded" to a Moto 6412 dual tuner HD STB. I've read through most of this thread and it seems people have had some luck getting firewire channel tuning and recording to work but I don't see any mention of using both tuners on a dual tuner box. Can I pull two steams off this thing and have Sage see it as two tuners? Also has anyone had any expereince with this model of stb? How well does it work with Sage?

Thanks!

Edit:
Just found out the tuner output is tied to one tuner only... that sucks. Thanks anyway!

[salsbst]

Originally Posted by salsbst

Can anyone confirm that their firewire recordings are generally playable in Sage v6?

Mine mostly crap out. Sage support thought they had fixed in in build 6.0.16, but still no joy here. I'm recording from a Motorola 3412, Nvidia video decoder, Intervideo audio decoder.

Specifically, no firewire recordings can be thumbnailed by SageTVTranscoder.exe, and it seems that only the HD streams can be played back. SDTV recordings either hang SageTV, crash SageTV, or simply return you to the home menu of SageTV without playing.

Anyone?

I worked around this by unregistering tssplitter.ax from sagetv\common, so that the Nvidia Transport Demux kicks in instead. All my firewire recordings play back now.

[UFGrayMatter]

Originally Posted by UFGrayMatter

Ok - new problem.

I got this successfully running on one machine. Trying to get it on mine.

I select 1394 - Then select Realtek AC97 Audio (only available) - when I go to watch LiveTV - i get this:



SA 4200HD Box -> PCI Firewire

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ryan

nobody?

[ke6guj]

Has anybody figured out how to capture the CC closed captioning stream and save it into the video file, and then get Sage to display it.

[pez]

I tried to get my laptop connect to an SA 3240HD via firewire last night, (just to test out the concept before I deploy it to my server.) I followed the document in post 831 but could not get windows to use the driver.

Does any have a 3240HD working? I thought I might be able to modify the register to change the 3250HD to 3240HD but couldn't find a reference to it. I also tried adding it to the INF and reinstalling; it also failed.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
pez

[appelm]

I've been following this thread on and off for the last couple of months with the intention of eventually giving this a shot. I will finally have some time next week to do it. I have a few questions:

1. Will my Pentium 4, 3ghz, 1gb Ram, ATI 9700, server box be up to the task of capturing 2 tuners via firewire? I have gigabit lan and switches throughout the house so not worried about that side of it.

2. When capturing standard video via firewire, will the video have sidebars? I currently capture via svideo and then stretch the image to fit my 16:9 screen. I'm happy with the stretch quality using FFDshow's non-linear stretch. Can I continue to use that with standard video over firewire?

3. In addition to my main HD plasma connected to a HTPC with sage client running, I have 2 wired MVP extenders connected to two tv's via svideo. Will the HD material play over the extenders without problems? obviously it will be only svideo quality.

4. Finally, I'm in Westchester NY using cablevision and have two 4200hd. Anyone have experience doing this in this area?

Thanks,
Marc

[salsbst]

Originally Posted by appelm

1. Will my Pentium 4, 3ghz, 1gb Ram, ATI 9700, server box be up to the task of capturing 2 tuners via firewire? I have gigabit lan and switches throughout the house so not worried about that side of it.

Capturing is relatively easy. The first place to worry about bandwidth, in my experience, is disk I/O.

2. When capturing standard video via firewire, will the video have sidebars? I currently capture via svideo and then stretch the image to fit my 16:9 screen. I'm happy with the stretch quality using FFDshow's non-linear stretch. Can I continue to use that with standard video over firewire?

SDTV streams will be in a 4x3 aspect ratio, and if the content is letterboxed, the top and bottom bars will be encoded into the video. To play these on a 16:9 screen, you can zoom in to get rid of the dead space on all four sides. In our home, we don't stretch truly 4x3 content (non-letterboxed, that is) on our 16x9 screen, instead we float it back and forth using the video orbiting feature of Sage.