STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[Opus4]

I'm only changing channels via firewire.

- Andy

[Brent]

If I can ever get back to this project I'll be using mine for channel changing only - to work with the HD-PVR eventually.

[ke6guj]

changing and capturing via firewire.

[m1abrams]

I have not attempted to use firewire to change channels for my STB. I actually just recently got Eventghost to do the channel changing for me via IR blasters. IR blasting channel changing has always been very reliable for me, probably because I tape the transmitters to the STB and cover them with black tape.

My question is beside reliablity are their any other advantages to using firewire? Is the channel changing any faster?

[morikaweb]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

I have not attempted to use firewire to change channels for my STB. I actually just recently got Eventghost to do the channel changing for me via IR blasters. IR blasting channel changing has always been very reliable for me, probably because I tape the transmitters to the STB and cover them with black tape.

My question is beside reliablity are their any other advantages to using firewire? Is the channel changing any faster?

I am in the process of switching from Satellite to Cable, and have just finished testing the firewire control of my new box's. I'd have to say that yes it is allot faster. With IR it took at least 2-3 seconds before the box register's and began changing channels. With firewire it is almost instantaneous. This makes sense when you consider with IR it has to capture the single, decode it, then issue the command to the tuner. With firewire it goes straight to the tuner with no middle man as it were.

[snapdaddy]

Originally Posted by Opus4

[*]As mentioned in my previous post: using channel.exe did not work, at first. After trying the -f -a paramters listed above my previous post, I Googled the 4250HD & found that the colon should not be part of the parameter. This works for my 4250HD:
channel -f -a4 <Device Number> <Channel Number>

- Andy

I just wanted to note that Wide Open West decided to update the cable card firmware in both of my 4250HDCs last night, and FireWire channel changing stopped working. After about an hour of being convinced that the update turned off the ability to change channels, I determined that I just had to change my command line. Instead of "a4", I now have to use "a0". (Using a4 still returns a success code, but the channel never changes.)

channel -f -a0 <Device Number> <Channel Number>

So, they did break something...but at least I was able to fix it.

Robb

[jpaddock3000]

I'm using the 4240 HD cable box. I'm using Cox as my cable provider.
I can't get anything but basic cable. If I use the pdf document on post #355 I can get channels 5-11. If I use the pdf document on post #835 I can only get channels 5 and 6. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Also, I'm able to change channels via firewire via the command line, but can't do that via Sage. What is the trick to get that to happen. I make sure that SGraphRecorder starts before Sage.

Any help is appreciated.

[j2storm]

I finally slogged through this yesterday and now have sagetv tuning 3 different 4250HD STBs via firewire – 2 connected via svideo to a pvr500 and 1 to a pvr150 svideo. I’d like to thank a ton of people who provided a lot of great information and recaps within this thread.

There is one issue I came across which I did not see in any post (sorry in advance if I overlooked it, someone has already pointed it out, or I got it wrong). All the documentation/postings so far points towards using the device number for the panel interface on a 4250HD STB when changing channels. I.e.,

channel –f –a4 <device_number> <channel>

I don’t believe the device numbers for the panel interfaces are statically assigned though. Aren’t they assigned on a first come basis as the ieee 1394 devices are detected? Since nothing guarantees that the STBs will come back in the same order every time during a power off/on (or that all the STBs will even come back), the binding order of the device number to a particular STB may change. It’s not an issue if you’re capturing video over the firewire as well, but if you are tuning via firewire for analog capture via svideo this could be a big issue. I’m not 100% sure of this and didn’t have time to test it because in the end I found another way.

Instead of using the device number for the panel interface Timmmoore’s channel/channelw commands also support the use of a unique name. I.e.,

…..
2 "AVC Panel Device"
'Scientific-Atlanta AV/C Panel Device'

UniqueID 'd8209fea1c00'
VendorID '1cea'
ModelID '10cc'
….

Instead of using the device number 2 you can use the UniqueID.

Channel –f –a4 –n d8209fea1c00 <channel>

[Opus4]

Has anyone had the device numbers change after a reboot? Mine haven't, so far. The only time they changed on my system was after I connected a 2nd STB via firewire.

- Andy

[MeInMaui]

My STB's were attached to my old server via firewire for about 1.5yrs with weekly scheduled reboots and never changed. So far the same is true on my new WHS server, though I've only rebooted it a few times.

Aloha,
Mike

[j2storm]

I noticed the behavior as I was mucking around with booting the 4250HDs, moving them and out of bypass, etc… As long as the STBs are up and not in bypass as the drivers load, the device numbers will most likely be the same (based on some algorithm?). But if the STBs are in the middle of their power recycle while windows is detecting them, hum? Or, if the STB with the lowest panel number does not clear the boot cycle and gets stuck in bypass … all the other panel numbers will de-increment by 1, causing havoc with sagetv’s mapping of video capture source to the control of a particular STB.

If I get a chance today, I’ll do some testing. I did go back and look through some of Timmoore’s documentation and yep … there it is. Guess I missed it the first time through …

From http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/firewire/readme.htm
“If you are controlling channel.exe or channelw.exe from another program you may want to use the –n parameter and replace the Device number by the UniqueID. Adding or removing devices will not affect the UniqueID but will affect the device number.“

[j2storm]

OK – I had a couple minutes to play around with this further. STBs in and out of bypass mode do not affect device numbers (that makes sense as it’s still an active ieee 1394 endpoint). But, with the three STBs active, if I kill(PO) the first one the other two panel device numbers are immediately renumbered by -1. If I leave the first STB powered off and reboot windows, the two STBs are assigned the lowest device numbers accordingly. When the first STB eventually gets powered back on, it preempts the two existing assignments and everything gets reordered.

So the potential of non consistent device numbers is limited to the addition and/or removal of AC/V units, be it power issues, hardware fault, or equipment addition/deletion. The last case is somewhat palatable (although a pain) since it just requires an edit of the properties file to rebuild the mappings. But the power and hardware issues, be they infrequent as may be, could really muck things up with sagetv’s mapping of video capture source to STB if the binding is done via the device numbers. It seems better to just start out pointing towards the device’s unique name rather than the OS runtime assigned device numbers.

[Opus4]

Thanks for the info about using the unique ID -- since I was taking time to daisy chain the STBs together rather than using a firewire hub, I also switched to using the unique ID instead of the device number and all is still working within SageTV. I know from my curiosity testing that sending the wrong device number will send Windows into BSOD, so using the unique ID sounds safer to me & requires no renumbering if a box is ever removed or added.

- Andy

[jpaddock3000]

Does anybody else have Cox for their cable providor? Are you able to view any channels via firewire except the OTA equivalent channels?

[Brent]

Well, I'm finally back at this and still having some trouble.

I tried

C:\Firewire\Channels>channel -v -f -a4 2 33

And at the bottom of the results it showed:

Response (0x09 (ACCEPTED)) received 7 bytes
09 48 7c e7 04 00 21
Calling tranport release
Called tranport release
Calling CoUninitialize
Called CoUninitialize

Notice this time it showed "accepted". Unfortunately the channel on the box did not change.

So I tried

C:\Firewire\Channels>channel -f -a0 -n 263452ea1c00 33

And get the same result. Any suggestions?

[Opus4]

Just guessing... Have you tried the other -a parameters? Or, see if there are better firewire drivers you can use -- the first drivers I tried wouldn't even install completely & I ended up using the ones from the 2nd site I posted above.

- Andy

[othy]

Originally Posted by jpaddock3000

Does anybody else have Cox for their cable providor? Are you able to view any channels via firewire except the OTA equivalent channels?

I'm on Cox in Phoenix and was not able to capture anything via firewire. That was about 8 months ago and I haven't tried since, so YMMV of course.

Channel changing works great though.

Tim

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Just guessing... Have you tried the other -a parameters?

Sorry in advance for this silly question... What are the other -a parameters?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Brent

Sorry in advance for this silly question... What are the other -a parameters?

Just run 'channel' or 'channel -?' (I'm not at that PC right now) and it should show you all the allowable parameters.

- Andy

[jpaddock3000]

OK, so I'm finally able to have Sage see shows on the digital box, but everything is choppy. Is there any way to smooth that out?