STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[pvr599]

Hey guys,
I'm really new to the whole firewire thing, but I'm learning. Here is what I have so far.
I followed both sets of instructions on how to setup Sage and Firewire.
I have an Explorer 3250HD box

Problem #1
I was able to get somewhat of a picture through VLC. This is where the problem starts. I get a picture, but it's very blocky. I saw a post once of what it looked like almost exactly, but I can't find it now. I tried to do a screen capture, but it always turns out to be just a black box.
Can anyone direct me to a post that might tell me what I need to do to get a clear picture? I am still trying to figure out what graphs do, so I might have done something wrong there.

Problem #2
I tried to change channels through the command method, but never get any picture at all. when I tune the box to an HD channel first, then open VLC, that's when I get the blocky picture.
Side question. Through this firewire method, is it normal not to be able to get the non-HD channels?

Problem #3
Also, everytime I try to close VLC after giving this another try, the computer freezes completely. The only way to get out of it is to hard reboot. This also happened as I was trying to change channels through the command prompt. (I'm staring at a frozen screen as we speak)

If I can't get HD to work through Sage, that's fine for now. If I could just use the HD tuner for SD channels that would be great since I gave up one Digital box for the HD box and if I want to change channels on the MVP, I have to go to the server to do it.

Problem #1,000
I swear I'm ready to give up on SageTV all together. I bought a Plasma recently and now I only watch tv through the HDSTB since that's the only place I can get a good picture. That's another story.

If anyone could help me here, I would really appreciate it.

[mhassman]

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

fyi.. i finally had a chance to try out the firewire hotfix: 885222.. set registry to 3 (400/800).. the pixelation is still there, but at least the refresh rate is better. So, the 88522 hotfix did not fix the problem with the newer 3250hd firmware.

-Mark

[jriskin]

I really wish someone qualified would spend the time to actually debug this one. I've tried two different motherboard/firewire combinations (same Windows XP install) with my 3250HD and have the same problems. Although, with the new one its only on HD channels vs. SD digital channels.

Its got to be some sort of windows firewire driver issue. Otherwise why would the hardware make a difference?

I also have a Mac which has NO PROBLEM AT ALL with SD and HD from the same 3250.

Although, at this point I think I would prefer someone at Sage to make the mac version work with firewire so I can ditch windows all together.

[sharpmat007]

I am currently using BTV4, but cant watch live HD from the 1394 unless I use an external program like videolan, but looks like Sage can. Before I take the time to get this working I wanted to know if there is a particular version I need to use?

I have read 2.2.4, but wanted to get all the features of the latest version.

[willgill]

Make sure you can get it to work in VLC. If it works there, it should work in SageTV. Also, check to see how many channels you can get. That may be discouraging. I seem to be pretty lucky. I live in Time Warner Digital Dallas country. I don't even have a tuner that does anything in my SageTV boxes, just firewire from the STB. All my SD and HD channels come through the Firewire.

[sharpmat007]

Yeah, I tested in VLC and all channels(SD and HD) come in fine. I am on RCN cable in DC.

Do you have any audio studdering when just using VLC? Or is that just my signal quality dropping. I only get it once in a while on select channels.

I am also curious if I can access to both tuners in my dvr cable box(motorola 3416). It has two 1394 connectors, but I dont have a second port(yet). I wanted to be able to watch one while another is recording.

[willgill]

You'll most likely see the same audio stuttering in SageTV. I don't have that issue, but then again, my signal is pretty good. I don't think you can use both tuners on the DVR but I don't know. I don't have a dual tuner STB. If you have another STB connected to a PC, you could make one an encoder and access them both from SageTV.

[weeber]

Hey all,

I just put my HTPC firewire setup together this weekend and things seem to be going OK. I can get it to change channels, record, and playback fine. Live TV seems to be an issue, but I'll keep playing with that. Couple of questions though.

1. From the setup guide I got from here (thanks to everyone who contributed), I get the impression that I can only record to 1 physical drive because that is all SGraph is set for. Is there anyway to record to more than 1 drive. I've never done a RAID setup before, but I assume a Raid configuration would allow 2 drives to be seen as one, thus solving the problem. But I really would like to do it without going to raid.

2. I thought I had HD content working fine, but I tried to record "The Company" last night on TNTHD. Unfortunately, when I try to play it back, I get a playback error. In addition, whenever I click on the file or try to open it, Windows Explorer crashes. This sounds to me like a corrupted file, but may it's too big at 14GB? Any ideas? I formatted the drive using 64k clusters.

[AndersNolberger]

There is no limitation on how many drives you can use with SGraphRecorder. The path you set up as a start in the graph is not by SGraphRecorder, it is only used there so that you can save the graph with GraphEdit. When Sage starts a recording it tells SGraphRecorder wath path to use and it gets changed before recording starts. So you can use as many disks as you like.

I do not know what is wrong with your HD recording. Have you tried to record HD with GraphEdit?

Anders

[weeber]

Thanks Anders, that's good to know.

As for my HD recording, yes I can capture just fine with GraphEdit and VLC. It's just this one program from last night. Just for grins, I started recording something on HD this morning, and it played back just fine. It also recorded some SD stuff last night that plays back fine.

This one program seems to be messed up though. I'm going to play with it some more and see what I can get.

[popechild]

I'm new to firewire, and just got channel changing working thanks to the excellent guides and a lot of searching, but I'll admit to have not read every single page, so I'm hoping someone can just confirm one thing for me. Is it still the case that there's no way to tell Sage that two separate sources come from the same tuner? (ie. no way to setup the firewire and s-video sources to use different channels without running the risk of Sage trying to record separate shows from both at the same time?)

I only get a few HD channels that aren't 5c'd that I don't already get OTA, but one of them is ESPN2, which I'd love to record in Sage. I can't justify getting an entire separate STB just for this one channel though...

Thanks in advance!

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by popechild

Is it still the case that there's no way to tell Sage that two separate sources come from the same tuner? (ie. no way to setup the firewire and s-video sources to use different channels without running the risk of Sage trying to record separate shows from both at the same time?)

Nothing new has been mentioned to fix that problem.

[popechild]

okay, that's what I figured. Thanks!

[weeber]

OK all,

I've got my firewire-STB hookup working great for the past couple of weeks. It's been recording everything I ask it to and playback is great. It has a few quirks, such as tuning live HD feeds as has been mentioned in this long thread, but I've been able to work around them.

But I do have one question. Has anyone been able to get two firewire-STB connections to work. I know it's crazy, but it is kind of annoying having the STB busy when I want to watch another show and I have another firewire port available. I've been forced to used the QAM tuner on the TV for this. My other option would be to get a Hauppauge 1600 QAM tuner, and get it to tune digital channels that it can receive, but leave the STB for the required channels.

[fyodor]

I think that you'll need to rent another cablebox or get a QAM tuner to alleviate some of the overlap (I recommend the hdhomerun). The firewire output is supposed to be a video output, which shows what the cable box shows, just like the DVI output. Basically, at some point the government had the idea that HDTV over cable would work by having cableboxes transmit their video via firewire, so as far as I know, it's just a dumb output.

Originally Posted by weeber

OK all,

I've got my firewire-STB hookup working great for the past couple of weeks. It's been recording everything I ask it to and playback is great. It has a few quirks, such as tuning live HD feeds as has been mentioned in this long thread, but I've been able to work around them.

But I do have one question. Has anyone been able to get two firewire-STB connections to work. I know it's crazy, but it is kind of annoying having the STB busy when I want to watch another show and I have another firewire port available. I've been forced to used the QAM tuner on the TV for this. My other option would be to get a Hauppauge 1600 QAM tuner, and get it to tune digital channels that it can receive, but leave the STB for the required channels.

[tawpgk]

Originally Posted by UFGrayMatter

Just Upgrading my STB's from 4200 to 4250.

The AV/C Tuner was able to install using Timmmoore's drivers but the AV/C Panel won't...

Any ideas?

Hi,

I just upgraded to the 4240dhc since the 8300 would go into power save more and the people at cox couldnt disable it. I cant get any of the drivers to install - windows recognizes A/C Tuner device but the driver doesn't get found/installed even when you force it to look at timmmoore's drivers. and then it gets the 2 unknown devices.

Anybody get this to work? I'm tired of traveling back and forth switching boxes. It's a nightmare.

Any way to debug this? Thanks for any help.

Tom

[tawpgk]

Originally Posted by tawpgk

Hi,

I just upgraded to the 4240dhc since the 8300 would go into power save more and the people at cox couldnt disable it. I cant get any of the drivers to install - windows recognizes A/C Tuner device but the driver doesn't get found/installed even when you force it to look at timmmoore's drivers. and then it gets the 2 unknown devices.

Anybody get this to work? I'm tired of traveling back and forth switching boxes. It's a nightmare.

Any way to debug this? Thanks for any help.

Tom

Well after a bit of digging around I was able to get my new cablecard HD box (SA4240HDC) to work.

After tracking down the device id for the box in windows device manager, I saw that it was presented as a model 4300.

I updated the TimMoore's driver inf file to accept that additional device id and the driver installed in windows perfectly. The panel and the tuner are set but there are 2 unknown devices that you can disable instead of the one noted in the documentation.

I was stoked when I saw the tuner and panel devices when i went into DOS and did the channel -v command to list all of the devices. Voila they were there. Unfortunately when I put in a channel number and device number it said it was an unsupported device. Long story short I was able to change the channel with the command flags -f and -a4.

I've attached the inf file I edited to get the drivers to install. Unzip it and replace the one in TimMoores directory (back up the old if u wish) and reinstall the driver pointing to that directory. Then go into regedit and update the EXETUNER key to have the -f and -a4 flags, e.g.

channelw -f -a4 2 %CHANNEL%

(my panel device is number 2)

That should get it going, it did for me. Looks like im a little late for UFGrayMatter, but maybe it will help others.

[naughtyusmaximu]

I need a bit of help (and/or advice). I have Sage up and running fine w/ a PVR500 PCI Card. I've just purchased a Motorola 6412, and have (to the best of my knowledge) followed the instructions to a letter.

I can use VLC to view video coming from the stb over firewire, and can use channelw to change the channels without error. I've copied the text into my sage properties file, but when I go to add the STB as a video source in Sage, I run into some problems.

On the screen where I 'Select the input on SGraphRecorder on 127.0.0.1:6969 device', once I choose '1394', a preview never loads. The debug info in SGraphRecorder just repeats the following about 2x per second:

"GET_FILE_SIZE
C:\TV\SGraphRecorderon12700169691394-0.mpgbuf"

I can force the screen through, and complete the setup, but the source still never works properly.

I've tried reading as much as I can on this thread, but after ~30 pages worth I haven't been able to find something that obviously relates to my problem, so any assistance would be appreciated

[guho]

For those of you who, like me, faced the situation that a cable box (such as SA4200HD) would produce bad recordings when using it with Windows and Nolberger's SGraphRecorder, while firewire captures work perfectly using a Macintosh, I've developed a SageTV network encoder for the MAC. It takes requests from SageTV and passes them on to an attached firewire device to tune, start and stop recording. It handles mappings of file names from PC land to MAC. Just posting it here to gauge interest. If there is any I will put it up on the web somewhere. It's working perfectly for me.

[jriskin]

Please, I must have it now!