STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[mohanman]

Apologies for the repeat posts, this is just very exciting stuff for me. I got the Mac pro working! It was a vista versus xp issue I guess.. I don't know why.. maybe the wrong drivers. Anyway, I started experiencing issues with channel changing. It would hang and then crash when changing channels (only the HD ones). I then read over the posts, I had to set my Sgraphrecorder tv tuner delay to almost 12000 to get it to work without flaw. That is a long time to wait for tv channel to change, but hey its worth it for those few extra HD channels!

The mac pro so far is a great server. It has slots for 3 additional hard drives, just slide them in, is quiet. I will miss the mac os, but thank god I have a mac mini!
Yippie!

Mo!

[delgross]

I've been using Sage for years and have long wanted to setup firewire support.
I was very interested when I someone say how easy it is with a Mac.
So I went ahead and installed it per the instructions somewhat earlier
in this thread. It seems to work but I must be mapping the drives
wrong in config.txt.

Unfortunately, I had already installed leopard so netinfo was out of the
question. As I already use UNC paths for all machines I thought
I would be able to get around this, but apparently not.

Lets say video is being recorded on \\HTPC\Sage One. How would
I express that in the config file under OS X.?

Thanks,
ED

[mohanman]

Does anyone have a good fix for the occasional channel (HD) via firewire that doesn't get a signal going because the picture is all scrambled? Is there a way to make it time out so that sage just returns to the guide, and then I could relaunch the channel and see if it actually works again? Right now if it doesn't pick up a signal it gives me a circle for a few minutes before I can use Sage again.
Thanks
Mo

[guho]

I uploaded a new version of SageTVFirewireNetworkEncoder. I was experiencing glitches on many recordings and narrowed it down to the code that writes the recording and made it more efficient. All my HD glitches gone. I get flawless HD on all channels! Also added a .command file that you can drag to login items to make sure it runs upon boot. And added some Leopard instructions to set up mounts via command line.

See http://hugolyppens.com/SageTVFirewir...rkEncoder.html.

Delgross, this should address your question as well I hope.

[KJake]

Please excuse me for not reading 70 pages...just wondering if anyone has a solution for me. I have one STB, and I can get about 5 premium channels from it via firewire - you might say that 5 isn't worth it, but they're HD channels (not the locals), so I'd like to use it. The thing is that I'd like to record all the other channels from the s-video out. I have these two things setup, but how would I keep Sage from running into itself here? It thinks it is two different video sources, and could very well change the channel on the STB and start recording when one of the other sources was in-use.

Any way to prevent this with special channel line-ups and/or encoder merits?

[ke6guj]

AFAIK, there is no way to use one STB and have two separate inputs setup to record from it. You would need to be able to tell Sage that both inputs are actually from the same device and that only one of the inputs could be used at a time.

[sharpmat007]

Ok...lets think logically here. You know you cant record two different shows at the same time with that setup. And the last statement isn't really correct...in the end Sage will think you have two tuners...one on the sgraphrecorder and one on Svideo from your tuner card.

You will then configure the channel line ups for the hd tuner to only have the 5 channels and the svideo to have all channels minus the 5 hd channels.

Once you have that setup...this is how it will work.

Sage will record as normal from the tuner that a show is coming on. I would recommend telling sage to record from the HD channel as preferred.

In the rare instance that Sage tries to record two shows...one from S video and one from HD...you will end up getting two recordings of the same show. One in HD format and one from the Svideo.

If you want the ability to record to different shows...then you need to different tuning sources...no way around it.

[KJake]

Yup, that is the same conclusion that I came up with. I was basically looking for a way to tell sage, don't use this tuner if x tuner is in-use, because I want to do what you said here:

If you want the ability to record to different shows...then you need to different tuning sources...no way around it.

[pez]

KJake,

This has been a problem for at least 2 years (see post). Though I don't think it has ever been reported as a bug or a feature enhancement.

Also, the single EPG data source is now definitely a bug since there are many users with HD and SD programming. Most HD systems have SD cards too and are often mutually exclusive on what they can record.

Maybe we should all request this as a feature enhancement.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by pez

KJake,

This has been a problem for at least 2 years (see post). Though I don't think it has ever been reported as a bug or a feature enhancement.

Also, the single EPG data source is now definitely a bug since there are many users with HD and SD programming. Most HD systems have SD cards too and are often mutually exclusive on what they can record.

Maybe we should all request this as a feature enhancement.

The line up thing bugs me too, I have a non-digital line-up for my analog tuners, a digital line-up for my STB via s-video and then I use the OTA line-up for my HDHR and remap everything. When I added the firewire, I added yet another line-up from a different cable company and then remapped the channels I wanted...pretty annoying.

There is a rather simple fix too. Allow a line-up to be reused, but unique per tuner. If you have two or more tuners that use the same line-up, there should be a prompt when setting up the tuner that you want to use the same line-up as X tuner and that will be the end of it. Any updates to the original line-up is reflected to the other tuners, and any other tuner has its own unique line-up. Not sure if I explained that right...

Then, it would be nice to have some sort of exempt property like the merit property. You could just set the exempt property to the mmc/encoder id of the tuner you want to exempt so that when the tuner is in use, the exempt one is not available for recordings. This also makes sense to me...

Agreed? If so, I will use this text for a feature request.

[thomaszoo]

I have Firewire recording working well with one problem. It seems as though the file being recorded is locked and I can't watch it until the recording is done. This prevents me from watching live tv. Is this common or is there something I didn't configure correctly?

[pez]

KJake,

That sounds good, but you might want to change "exempt" to "exclusive". You could call it Recorder Exclusive Mode or REM for short. That way the other channels can sleep. (sorry i just had too.)

[pratt733]

I recently got this configured and it's working very nicely. I was having trouble with 1080i content stuttering very slightly every 10 seconds or so, so I decided to upgrade my client PC to an AMD 4400 Dual Core, with 2GB of Ram. Also added an NVIDIA 8500GT. I'm still getting that stuttering on 1080i, so I now think it's a recording issue. My server is a regular Pentium 4 2.5 with 1GB of ram (7200RPM IDE and SATA hard drives formatted NTFS with 64k blocks). Any ideas what could be causing the problem with the recordings?

[pez]

Does it play smoothly in VLC?

[pratt733]

Yes it does, even with the video card on the server (NVIDIA 5200).

[pez]

FYI, I just want you to know I currently don't have Firewire recording working. I gave up on it for this reason, but now Cox has the 4240HD so I'll try again. But here are some of the things i tried. I did see these same issue when getting HDHR working and it ended up being drive performance issues.

Ok, I wasn't specific enough. With VLC are you playing from the stream or from the drive (via a file after its recorded)? If you can play fine from the drive, then its a playback issue. However, if it not fine from the drive it is a drive issue.

If its a playback issue you may have to check your decoder. Can you enable it for HW acceleration? I believe nVidia only supports HW acceleration with their PureVideo decoder. I use the PowerDVD (ver5...it old) and I've tested that it playbacks HD content on two different laptops: one with an ATI x1400 and an nVidia 7400 (i think).

If you can only get the stream to playback fine, then there's an issue with your system. It might be the disk or it might be Windows. Check the windows event viewer to see if there is anything obvious. You might also want to run a disk check with a tool like HDTune or HDTach. You can also check you disk for erros with one of them.

[frontlinegeek]

Here I am getting ready to move stuff to new hardware and...

I can't see the SBDARecorderDump filter in GraphEdit. This is on the new system. Everything is still fine on the old system.

Anyone know how to get Graphedit to show the SBDARecorderDump filter if it is not there?

[KJake]

I seem to recall a .bat or .reg that you needed to run to register the filter. If you've done that already, then a reboot may be required.

[frontlinegeek]

Ya, there is a register.bat file to run and a manual registration of a DLL.

I have done, undone and then done it again with many reboots in there.

[frontlinegeek]

Just finished doing some digging and I found the issue...

If anyone cannot find the SBDARecorderDump filter in Graphedit, it is because your version of the DUMP.AX file is the wrong and likely older version.

The DUMP.AX that comes in the FireSTB.msi package is the right version to be using.

To fix the issue, unregister the "bad" file, copy the good one over any copies of the "bad" file and then reregister that one file... Poof, problem gone!!!