STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[mikesm]

What cable markets are you all in, and what channels are available that are not 5C'd?

A lot of people where would go for a 1394 tuner solution if they knew a lot of channels were available in their markets...

Thanks,
Mike

[ke6guj]

nobody can say for sure if you'll get 5C'ed or not without testing. I've heard that it can vary from headoffice to headoffice what they have set up. 2 towns next to each other with the same Cable company can get different results.

The best thing is to just go get a firewired STB from the CC and try it. If it doesn't work, take it back. No contracts with the CC.

[btrcp2000]

well, i'm all up and running finally. Time to sit back and watch some hd, and wait for them to throw the 5c switch, at which point the r5000 people will get a bunch of my paycheck, as will some satellite co.

To those of you using the stb for recording, do you simply leave the stb powered on all the time? Seems wasteful, but I don't see how to send a command via firewire to power it up for recordings.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

To those of you using the stb for recording, do you simply leave the stb powered on all the time? Seems wasteful, but I don't see how to send a command via firewire to power it up for recordings.

I just leave it turned on all the time. Compared to the rest of my electronic equipment, I figure it doesn't use too much power. I guess I need to throw the kill-a-watt on it to see how bad it actually is.

[mikesm]

BTW, the R5000 can turn the STB on before recording and off afterwards. I suspect you can do the same thing via 1394, but the code hasn't been written to do it yet.

Note the box doesn't actually get turned off when you send a power off command to it, it just goes into a standby mode, still talking to the cable system, updating EPG's, responding to commands from the headend etc.... Just all the customer facing outputs get turned off. I'm not sure this saves a lot of energy, but it is possible to do.

Thanks,
Mike

[btrcp2000]

Good info, thanks. I have a kill-a-watt somewhere, so I'll do some testing and see if it makes a difference, then post results in case anyone else can use them.

[weeber]

I'm interested in seeing what you find BTRCP. I leave my STB on all the time too. I haven't given it much thought to the power it consumes doing this as I also leave my wireless router and cable modem on all the time too.

[jriskin]

Originally Posted by mikesm

BTW, the R5000 can turn the STB on before recording and off afterwards. I suspect you can do the same thing via 1394, but the code hasn't been written to do it yet.

Note the box doesn't actually get turned off when you send a power off command to it, it just goes into a standby mode, still talking to the cable system, updating EPG's, responding to commands from the headend etc.... Just all the customer facing outputs get turned off. I'm not sure this saves a lot of energy, but it is possible to do.

Thanks,
Mike

The Mac network encoder for sage that this guy wrote does exactly that. It works flawlessly on my SA-3250HD.
http://www.hugolyppens.com/SageTVFir...rkEncoder.html
I bet his software is just using the built-in MacOS SDK though, so it would have to be done in a windows equivalent method.

Although I DOUBT seriously that it saves much power, if you put your hand on it its wasting just about the same amount in heat on or off.

[guho]

To those using my Mac firewire network encoder:
- The NetInfo manager has been deprecated so now I am not sure how to mount the recording directories as nicely as in 10.4.x
- SageTV placeshifter runs really poorly on my mac mini under Leopard. Full-screen is a slideshow and it freezes easily

Bottom line: recommended not to upgrade to Leopard until Apple releases a decent service pack.

[zr0]

My STB is a 4240HDC. I can open the stream in VLC, but most of the image is garbled -- the part that isn't garbled looks gorgeous. Of course, the stream looks fine coming out of the S-Video interface into my TV. Also, this is for all channels, SD and HD. Does anybody know what the cause could be?

[gramzee]

Originally Posted by UFGrayMatter

still no luck on this - two different HTPC's two different Cable boxes - still no answer.

I can get here:
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/4...4errorslq2.jpg

But I get no signal after.

I want to change channels using FW - but I don't see any instructions on that? Could that be the problem. I DO NOT have girder installed.

hi all

I'm ew to this community and this setup. I'm having the exact same problems as UFGrayMatter had above. I've performed the setup as per these instructions here:
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...5&d=1191087675

Everything works perfectly fine until I reach Sage, and it never shows the preview. I followed through the setup as suggested in a later post to the one above and still nothing.

This is the second time i've tried this and it won't work. First was lastnight. After coming to the conclusion I wasn't happy with MCE and my Hauppauge HVR-1800, I decided to try the FIRESTB/SageTV route. Upon going through this once and it not working for me, I reimaged the PC this time pulling the HVR-1800 out of the equation figuring it was messing something up. But now i'm still running into the same problem. Channel changing works fine through SageTV and Firewire using the method in the instructions in the above link.

Here are the details of my setup.

Q6600 on Intel DG33L w onboard X3100 video
2GB KVR 800
WD 500GB with seperate partition for video in 64k clusters
(graph and Sage are both set to point to this directory)
NO seperate video card at this time
NO CAPTURE DEVICE seperate from using FIRESTB method.
Trial of SageTV 6.2.10.152
Vista Home Premium Edition with latest updates as of this writing.

I've tried to get everything i can think you guys might want to see without dumping on the thread. If any of you can point me in areas to look at i'd definitely appreciate it, or if you want me to provide you with details of any other files.

[btrcp2000]

I don't think I ever saw the preview work, I had to go all the way into sage to pick a channel from the guide. I have two FW boxes up and running, moto dch6416 and dct6200 (kinda guessing on the model numbers, i think that's right). My fix was change the tuning delay in SGR properties. The 6416 has to be at least 7500, the 6200 can get away with 5000 ms. Works great except when the boxes get turned off, because I have been too lazy to change my harmony remote settings.

[gramzee]

That didn't work either. I went all the way into Sage, and still no source for TV or audio. I can switch channels with no problem. Even when I am on a channel, the time tracker at the bottom starts to move even though it's not displaying any video.

Is there a problem because a) i'm running the trial, b) Sage was never properly configured with a seperate tuner card first ? I basically setup Sage to only ever look at the FIRESTB setup.

[btrcp2000]

I would definitely suggest putting a regualr tuner in it to at least rule out other things. Firewire is hard enough, why not rule out the basic issues first? You could have video card issues.

Are you running full screen or overlay? You didn't specify, so can you capture video with capdvhs over firewire? If that doesn't work, it's probably not a sage problem.

[mohanman]

Hi guys, I too could use some help. I got as far as able to get VLC to play firewire correctly. It is pretty neat because I am getting a lot of channels through firewire. I followed the directions exactly, made a graph or whatever, and edited that sgraph. Then I launched that, but sagetv does not pick up the tuner whatsoever. I have the ports right, copied and pasted the exact mmc/encoders thing from the directions, but I can't get stb to show up. It is also a pain in the butt dealing with vista and every second it asking me if I really want to do this and really want to do that.. jeez i hate vista!

Mo!

[gramzee]

i haven't tried capdvhs, but am able to capture via VLC.

seperate note .... i was going through this thread at work (should've earlier) it seems alot of people have come across this issue at one time or another, but no one really ever says what they did to fix it; ie. what did you play with to get it working?

i'm going to go read around some more. i'm thinking it's something to do with the sage.properties file. some of the older posts suggested that the mmc/encoders lines that are in one set of instructions don't work as well as a shorter version of instructions found elsewhere. that elsewhere s what i need to find.

hopefully if i can isolate what this stubborn little problem is i can offer up the fix.

[gramzee]

ok i got it working, now the next few days will be all about tweaking it. i suspect i probably need to start reading up on codecs and decoders to see if i can get it setup a little better.
there was an error that popped up but i'll research on that one before posting on it.

so to answer those who are wondering "why after following all the instructions does it not work for me?" well this is what i found out but it might not be your problem.

i think the issue is in HOW we follow the instructions. i realized that in my sgraphrecorder.ini file i had accidentally used the following (most lilely from cutting and pasting the text straight from the setup document)

Graph]
FileName="C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller\sgr1\sgr1.grf"

When I created my SGR1 folder, i did as the instructions say "Create a directory under the FireSTB install folder called SGR1" I interpreted this as creating my folder as "C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\\sgr1\" which is clearly not the same as the path in the instructions.

Defintiely not saying the instructions are wrong, but if any of you are a slow adult like myself you might want to pay extra attention to those paths. i know it was my problem.

now onto getting this rig tweaked!

[mohanman]

So you simply fixed the paths, now everything is working again?
Man.. I went over it like ten times, I don't think I missed anything. It would be sweet to get this to work, there are so many channels available, plus many HD channels!
Mo!

[mohanman]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I finally got it to work! It was the spelling of the .grf file. I changed the delay, it is going to take some tweaking I think.. but at least I know it can work!

Mo!

[mohanman]

Hey guys I had a couple questions about firewire. It is really strange. I can get it to work on mac mini using vista boot camp. But I can't seem to get it to even play in VLC player using my Macpro with xp boot camp. Do you think the firewire ports are different or I should just put Vista on the Mac pro.

Also, I didn't really want to use the mac mini as a server, since I don't know if it could handle it. But do you guys think it could handle HD video if I was just simply using it as a server and using the new HD extenders coming out to stream to? I mean it wouldn't require that much CPU from the mac mini right?
Thanks
Mo