STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[Bohica]

Hey guys -- I have the 3250HD as well -- cox in VA -- and indeed it is broken. I found a couple of posts on the net that said it was a recent firmware push by the cable provider... although the cable provider claims they did not enable 5c on everything -- they simply pushed the firmware provided by Scientific Atlanta. Cox has no other HD STBs except for their DVR... so I am out of luck as well. Let me know if anyone stumbles on a way to fix it. I would be willing to bet it will take Timmoore to update the firestb for a fix to happen...

[CanadianEh]

Dumb question (maybe not). If my cable company (Comcast, or as I like to call it, Comcrap.. it's craptastic!) encrypts all of their QAM stations, except the local network's HD stations, does this mean that I will gain nothing from trying to use the firewire port? (Meaning is the same encryption that is keeping me from seeing them clear in QAM the same one that will block me from viewing them over the firewire port)?

Thanks!

[Wheemer]

I can get one channel with firewire I cannot with the hdhomerun.

[CanadianEh]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

I can get one channel with firewire I cannot with the hdhomerun.

lol... so I guess that means I need to put more effort in and give it a try. All this for Red Sox baseball on NESN-HD.. doh.......

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by CanadianEh

Dumb question (maybe not). If my cable company (Comcast, or as I like to call it, Comcrap.. it's craptastic!) encrypts all of their QAM stations, except the local network's HD stations, does this mean that I will gain nothing from trying to use the firewire port? (Meaning is the same encryption that is keeping me from seeing them clear in QAM the same one that will block me from viewing them over the firewire port)?

Thanks!

My CC has the firewire port wide open. I get everything I pay for, including the premium channels.

Regarding QAM channels, I just get my locals, HD and SD, and just a couple other digital channels.

SO QAM encryption does not equal firewire 5C encryption.

[stewart710]

Originally Posted by CanadianEh

lol... so I guess that means I need to put more effort in and give it a try. All this for Red Sox baseball on NESN-HD.. doh.......

I'm in the same boat as you on the Cape. I don't have a HDHomerun, but I do have my Comacast HD box hooked up via firewire. Sagetv doesn't seem to get NESNHD. I was playing around with graphedit and set up a test graph coming from the Motorola tuner to the Nvidia and AC3filter codecs (this is the test graph that you use when setting up firewire recording). Pushing play in graphedit lets you watch whats coming over the firewire and I just started changing channels on the cable box itself to see what channels are not 5c'ed. It seems like a lot more than I can get through SageTV. I watched part of last nights Bruins game on NESNHD using this method. That doesn't help with recording it, but what I can't figure out is why SageTV can't use the signal, but graphedit can? That sounds like a SageTV glitch to me. The same is true for other various 200 level channels as well. I think I'm going to start a new thread about this problem.

[rebelBodhi]

Hello everyone,

First, a thanks to everyone who contributed to the development of this mechanism, it's really great.

I've got two issues that I'm hoping someone with experience in this area could help me iron out:

Regarding 5C-encrypted channels

• I'm under the impression that if I have an analog tuner in addition to the FW source, I can assign the channels that are not available over FW to the analog tuner (over S-video for example) so you can seamlessly browse all channels, through the best source.
• First, if this is indeed possible, what files/settings are used to assign channels in this way. For example is it done in a channel map xml file or something like that?
• And second, my eventual goal is to develop a program to automatically do these assignments in a "scan" or "autolearn" routine. So I would need some kind of API model to test for the presence of a signal on a video capture source.
  if there are any programmers here who know how to do this I'd really appreciate some help.

SGraphRecorder sporadically "encounters an error" and quits.
...for no apparent reason. It happens at an acceptable rate, but the problem is getting it started again. If I just run it again and restart Sage, it doesn't work--I need to do a full machine Reset to get things up and running again. Does anyone have an idea of what I need to do to get SGR and Sage going again without a full reset? Like are there processes that need to be killed that I'm missing?

I'm working on integrating some of these things into a helper app, I'll make anything I come up with available here; thanks a lot for any help!

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by rebelBodhi

I'm under the impression that if I have an analog tuner in addition to the FW source, I can assign the channels that are not available over FW to the analog tuner (over S-video for example) so you can seamlessly browse all channels, through the best source.

AFAIK, that is not possible at this time. Sage would view the FW input as one source and the s-vid'ed input as a second source. Sage could schedule 2 shows at the same time, one from each input.

As of now, there is no way to tell Sage that your STB is a single source with 2 tuner inputs. Sage does understand that a single tuner may have multiple sources, but not the other way around.

[rebelBodhi]

Thanks for the response. Well, that's no good.

So if I'm not the only one with this problem, what is the approach to dealing with those 5C'd channels? if there is any?

I don't know how far this has been pushed, but is it not possible to develop a solution to this limitation you pointed out? What happens when you have 2 tuners (ie FW and an analog)? Can you browse both tuners from one EPG? If you can do that then all you need to do is deal with overlaps, correct?

Also, how customizable is Sage? Is there even a channel map xml file that maps EPG channels to tuners that would make this possible? Thanks.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by rebelBodhi

Thanks for the response. Well, that's no good.

So if I'm not the only one with this problem, what is the approach to dealing with those 5C'd channels? if there is any?.

Basically, you dedicate one STB to get the non-5C'd channels over FW and a second STB for the 5C'd channels over s-video. YOu setup a specific EPG source for each STB, and only enable the channels on each source that your want that STB to tune.

I don't know how far this has been pushed, but is it not possible to develop a solution to this limitation you pointed out?

AFAIK, It would have to be a design change in the core to be able to setup one source to be able to split over 2 inputs correctly.

What happens when you have 2 tuners (ie FW and an analog)? Can you browse both tuners from one EPG? If you can do that then all you need to do is deal with overlaps, correct?

Multiple tuners is no problem at all. I'm currently running 8 tuners with 3 different EPG sources. It all shows up in the main EPG just fine. Sage takes care of the overlaps automatically and shows each station one time (ie. Discovery channel may be listed in 2 different EPG sources as 67 & 125, Sage will display it once in the EPG. It may be listed as 67 OR 125, it depends on Sage. It will only show up once, but Sage knows that it has 2 tuners that can record Discovery and will schedule accordingly.)

Also, how customizable is Sage? Is there even a channel map xml file that maps EPG channels to tuners that would make this possible? Thanks

Not sure what you mean here? If you are in the US, you shouldn't need to run any XML EPG importers, the built-in Sage EPG sources should be just fine. You will need multipe EPG sources, one for each tuner, if you are going to record different available channels, but you may be able to use a neighboring city's EPG sources if need be.

[CanadianEh]

Okay,

So since my SA8000HD isn't active, I went to a friend's house who has a SA 3250HD box. I plugged my laptop into the firewire port, and it found the devices.

Yay!

However, tuning to stations, I see the video, however it's partially garbled. On all channels. I've only installed the FireSTB drivers and was viewing through the newest version of VLC. Is this normal? Is this something I can fix?

I may go pick up a 3250 from Comcast tomorrow if things look promising.

Edit: I just read about the post-SP2 hotfix for firewire... would that be the culprit?

[Wheemer]

That would be the result of the encryption... wouldn't it?

[CanadianEh]

Not sure.... it almost seemed like the firewire card wasn't able to keep up with the full bandwidth. I'd say 2/3 of the screen was clear, but the rest was pixelated off and on...

[ToxMox]

Just curious. Anyone have this working in Vista x64? Or know how to do it?

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by rebelBodhi

Thanks for the response. Well, that's no good.

So if I'm not the only one with this problem, what is the approach to dealing with those 5C'd channels? if there is any?

Tell me about it. The point has been raised several times and more than one person has asked for it to be added as a feature but sage say it isn't supported and that's all there is to it. They say you should get a second cable box but to my mind that's a ridiculous solution as you may as well just get a cable pvr and be done with it.

I'm getting a weird problem right now. If I let a recording play to the end, sage tunes the cable box to the channel I recorded the programme from.

[CanadianEh]

Originally Posted by mhassman

I've just arrive back home after a few months of travel to find a previously working and happy sage-tv system with HD via firewire is no longer happy.. all is well except the firewire-based channels - they all look like the screen pic above - tested them with vlc-player.

There have been no changes to this system.. just idling & recording favorites. I've checked old recordings from firewire channels - they show the same issue. I don't know when the problem started (older HD content has cycled off with disk space usage), but it's been at least a few weeks. I too have a 3250HD receiver (cox cable in virginia). It's definitely not the computer hardware since nothing has changed.

I'd put money cox pushed a new firmware to my receiver and broke firewire - there's a reference in the diag screens to hbo-vod software package which wasn't there before. Unfortunately, I don't have a vcr with firewire port to test against. I did check the 3250hd's info screens.. no changes to 5c encryption on the channels - still have ~12 unencrypted channels.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix? Seems like a number of people with 3250HD receivers have this new problem.


-Mark

Same deal here.... I have a SA 3250HD and am getting the same results as above, even with SD. I am just trying to set this up, and well.. I'm giving up for now, I guess.

I'm using Comcast (formerly Adelphia) in Colchester, VT.

[abasu2003]

I actually looked over this thread just to make sure it wasn't addressed previous:

I have been recording with firewire and everything was working fine for the last 6 months until very recently when I wasn't able to watch Live TV anymore without horrible stuttering from the get go. Recorded TV works fine. I guess what's frustrating is that the problem came out of nowhere and the only thing I can think of that's changed in the last few days on my system is a Windows update. I looked over some suggestions from people having this problem of disabling service mode but that doesnt' seem to be helping either (and its not the ideal solution). I've looked over my Graph but its the simple dump.ts and I would think the graph is fine if my recording is ok. Any other suggestions, ideas?

[gplasky]

Go into your add/remove programs and check the box "show updates" and roll back from that update. One came out recently that played havoc with certain sound and NIC cards I believe. If that fixes it try the updates again because they replaced it with a fixed one.

Gerry

[UFGrayMatter]

Just rebuilt my HTPC and I'm having some problems - don't know what it is.

SGR ini:

; Port is the port number that this network encoder will listen to commands
; from Sage on. Use this when setting up the network encoder in Sage.
[System]
Port=6969

[Graph]
FileName=TS.grf
TuningDelay=5000
UnloadGraphOnStop=1
UnloadGraphOnSwitch=1

[ExeTuner]
UseExeTuner=1
ExeTunerPath=C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller\channelw.exe 2

I can test from command line using channelw.exe 2 XXX and the channels change on the box.

In sage when I go to watch a show the box doesn't tune - and I get "no signal." I can change channels very rapidly - it's not waiting to tune to anything.

Any ideas??

Ryan

[UFGrayMatter]

Originally Posted by UFGrayMatter

Just rebuilt my HTPC and I'm having some problems - don't know what it is.

SGR ini:

; Port is the port number that this network encoder will listen to commands
; from Sage on. Use this when setting up the network encoder in Sage.
[System]
Port=6969

[Graph]
FileName=TS.grf
TuningDelay=5000
UnloadGraphOnStop=1
UnloadGraphOnSwitch=1

[ExeTuner]
UseExeTuner=1
ExeTunerPath=C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller\channelw.exe 2

I can test from command line using channelw.exe 2 XXX and the channels change on the box.

In sage when I go to watch a show the box doesn't tune - and I get "no signal." I can change channels very rapidly - it's not waiting to tune to anything.

Any ideas??

Ryan

Ok - I think I solved one problem - I think Sage is loading before SGR so there is no control when I boot. If I close both, start SGR and then Sage, then channel changing occurs.

Now on to playback - there isn't any. Fox - the channel that came in the best for me before rebuilding the PC now gets "No Signal" as do many other channels. That picture is back to being crap again AND it has crashed the system twice now.

Ummmm...where do I start.

First - my graph looks like this:
Tuner -> dump.ts.
That's what it looked like before the rebuild and it worked well.

The only question i have with that is that I'm using MPEG2Dump filter. Is that correct? Is TS an mpeg stream?

Any other suggestions?