STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[ke6guj]

whats the specs of your system? What video card? What MPEG2 decoder?

[jpaddock3000]

I have a dual core 2.4Ghz w/ 2GB of Ram. Video card is Radeon X1300. I have the NVidia decoders and Cyberlink as well.

I don't watch TV on my server, only on my extenders. Also, I can only have smooth air TV. All of a sudden I'm now able to see QAM and HD, but it is choppy.

I saw on a different post about a Microsoft fix for firewire. I applied that and rebooted. Still no luck. I also recorded a show in QAM thinking maybe it wouldn't be choppy if it was just playback. No difference.

[ke6guj]

OK, if you are using an extender, video card and decoders have nothing to do with playback. Have you tried to play those QAM recordings on your server, or another computer? What you need to do is determine if the recording process is causing the stuttering, or if the stuttering happens during playback.

Looking at your other postings, it looks like you are using an MVP extender. Those only play SD MPEG2 files natively, all others such as HD recordings have to be transcoded during playback. Take a look at your CPU load and see if a core is maxed out. That could definitely cause stuttering.

Also, are you recording to a drive formatted with 64k blocks?

[jpaddock3000]

What I meant to say was that I normally watch shows on my extenders, but I have the same issue on the server as well. The CPU load is very minimal. Only 3-4% used. My drive is 64K clusters. Something else that I have discovered is that I think my STB isn't transmitting the data out fast enough. I have the NVidia decoders and when I have a video in graphedit being shown on the video renderer, I get a little NVidia icon in my task tray. I open it up and the bitrate keeps jumping around from 0-4 Mbps.

[shadeblue.com]

Originally Posted by snapdaddy

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

Hi Robb, Thanks for this tip. I ran into this exact same issue when trying to channel change on a SA 4240 HDC. Both '-a0' and '-a6' are working for me for not '-a4'.

channel -f -a0 <Device Number> <Channel Number>
channel -f -a6 <Device Number> <Channel Number>


Thanks, rrsavage

[Qusix]

Anyone have the firestb.zip. I am unable to download from the the first link.

[Humanzee]

I know its probably covered somewhere in these 1500 posts, but its a bit hard to search though. My old box died the other day, I exchanged it. I can view video and audio through 1394 via VLC from the new box. I can change channels in sage when the device source is added. But on the same channel that I can view in VLC I get "No Signal" in SageTV. Yes VLC is closed. This was all working with the old box just fine. Where should start to troubleshoot? SageGraphRecorder is running before the service starts. I don't know what else to check.

Also, Before the old box went bad, I was noticing that on some channels you couldn't tune, but if you tried a second time it would work. I.e. when there would be no channel change it would work. Is there someplace that you can set a delay from when the channel changes to when we start trying to capture from the 1394 tuner device? I think an extra couple of seconds might solve this issue.

[Humanzee]

Looks like it was a corrupted sage graph, Somehow the new set top box removed the path between the captuer device and the dump file. Rebuilt and seems ok now.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Qusix

Anyone have the firestb.zip. I am unable to download from the the first link.

If you haven't found the firewire drivers yet, check the links in this post.

- Andy

[jbuszkie]

I'm having issues with Sage using the firewire to record. Like some other on page 70 or so.. I've got everything to work except for play back in Sage.
I get the no signal.. but the show is recording. If I take the file it creates and play it in PowerDVD... It plays! (albeit choppy) I tried the Cyberlink and purevideo codecs with no luck.. anywhere else I should look?

It seems like a couple others got theirs to work after correcting a spelling error in the ini file.. but since I'm getting the file to show up, I'm assuming that my setup is correct.. I just can't get Sage to play the file..

Jim

[jbuszkie]

ok.. I'll reply to my own message!

I think I fixed it.. I too had an old version of dump.ax One of the earlier posts sid the latest that was in firestb.msi had the latest. It's not there.. it was in the SRG kit. Some how when I installed the kit I just copied all the files except dump.ax and the bat file to register it.

While working remotly... I can confirm that don't get the "no signal" error
VNC doesn't show an actual picture so I can't tell for sure. But my guess is it's fixed.

No on to my next question..

[jbuszkie]

What are you guys using for the graph?

Is the STBDecoder -> Dumpfile enough? I've seen some complex graphs in earlier posts that have parsers and demuxes and muxes in them.

Are those necessary or is the simple one good enough!

Jim "Now I get to see what channels I can really get!"

[evilpenguin]

Those graphs were from back in the day when Sage didn't support transport streams very well so they had to use filters to convert from transport streams-> program streams on the fly. Now days you can just dump the untouched transport stream and be just fine, hense the much simpler graph.

[jbuszkie]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Those graphs were from back in the day when Sage didn't support transport streams very well so they had to use filters to convert from transport streams-> program streams on the fly. Now days you can just dump the untouched transport stream and be just fine, hense the much simpler graph.

Gotcha! Thanks! I can't wait to go home and see if it's choppy or not!

Jim

[Taddeusz]

Ok, I'm ecstatic. I got firewire tuning working on my SA 4240HD. Tuning is much faster than when I was using the USB-UIRT. One question though. How do you insert a leading 0 into the numbers? Tuning is great if it's a three digit channel but anything below 100 has to wait for the STB to decide that no more digits are going to be entered. In SageTV it's set to use 3 digits but I don't think it knows what to use as the "filler" digit. Any ideas?

[Taddeusz]

Never mind. I just tried changing channels on the command line including a leading 0 and apparently it gets dropped somewhere (i.e. 049 is entered on the command line but 49 shows up on the screen as being what was entered). So if it changes to a 3 digit channel number the change will be immediate but if it's a one or two digit number it will wait for further input before changing channels. Kind of stinks. But it's still nicer than with the USB-UIRT. Less cabling as well.

[gplasky]

Can't you set it so that you can input just 1 or 2 numbers and then "Enter" so that the change is immediate?

Gerry

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Can't you set it so that you can input just 1 or 2 numbers and then "Enter" so that the change is immediate?

Gerry

It could work that way if you're using an IR blaster but I don't know what the "Enter" command would be or if the channel.exe utility can even send it. I'm using the Timmore utilities and drivers. As an example my command line would be as follows:

channelw -f -a6 2 49

Even if I put "049" in there for the channel number it seems to strip the leading "0" out and sends only the "49". I don't know if there is a way to send an "Enter" command to change the channel immediately or to force it to send the leading "0". I looked at the options for channel.exe and it doesn't appear that there is any way to do either.

It's entirely possible that SageTV is already inserting the leading zeros but it's getting stripped out afterward.

[Humanzee]

Any comments on this?

Originally Posted by Humanzee

noticing that on some channels you couldn't tune, but if you tried a second time it would work. I.e. when there would be no channel change it would work. Is there someplace that you can set a delay from when the channel changes to when we start trying to capture from the 1394 tuner device? I think an extra couple of seconds might solve this issue.

[Opus4]

I don't believe there is any setting for that kind of delay currently.

- Andy