STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

[AJ Bertelson]

?

I remember there was a FCC ruling stating that cable co's must supply a 1394 box to the subscribers. Currently I have two cable boxes one hd and one sd. My billing is $5 for each box and an additional $5 for the HD each month. I went in to exchange the SD box tody for a 1394 box and the only ones that charter has are the HD boxes, so they want to charge me an additional $5 on top of what I am paying. I told them I really didn't want to do that because I am allready paying for the HD service and I should have to pay for an additional box.

so yeah its me against city hall but what can you guys advise for this? Can I get an HD box without the HD channels?

[kmp14]

No luck getting firewire working in Win7 with a DCT-3412.

I can get the drivers loaded:



But when I setup the filters in Graphedt and try to output the stream, I get this error:



Won't play in VLC either.

Dang! Anyone got firewire tuners working in Win7?

[dcardellini]

Tough one. My only recommendation is: don't give up prematurely. One angle: don't assume that the VLC and Graphedit problems are related (alhough they likely are).

I would focus on VLC as a first problem. Hey are some ideas:

Try uninstalling, rebooting, and reinstalling the STB again.

Did you run "channel -v" from the command prompt and see the tuner and panel listed? Note the ID number of the device (shown in both tuner and panel items).

In VLC, did you go to "open video capture device" directshow, refresh video device list, drop down and choose the TUNER?

When you hit ok, does the VLC window open up or stay small?

Is the STB box in a state where video is actually playing...i.e. is it tuned to a channel and outputting video? Might want to confirm by hooking to a monitor. Those devices take a while to boot up (even though firewire port may light-up early on), and may start off in a non-channel tuned state. Try entering a known channel number through stb's remote.

Are you sure that all your channels are not 5C'ed? Have you verified clear 5C flags when STB hooked to monitor using the special sequence to get to service menus?

Barring any success here, again, assume two different problems, and that maybe just VLC is broken in this regard in Win7 (and you don't need VLC).

Moving on to Graphedit, did you register it and register proppage.dll?

When you inserted the STB filter from video capture sources, and when you expanded the video capture device for motorola, do you see the same ID number that you saw in channel -v?

When you inserted the SBDArecorderdump directshow filter, did you create a filename like dump.ts?, and you linked the motorola source with this destination file?

Lots of stupid obvious questions...but often I spend hours trying to fix something that ultimately was a missed step or something...just trying to help.

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by reggie14

...... I picked up a different firewire card with a different chipset in hopes that that might fix it. My question is, can I easily swap out firewire cards without basically having to go through the whole setup and configuration again? (again, so long as I'm using device IDs?)

I think you will have to reconfigure.

Within a firewire controller card (1-2-3-4 ports), I have found that the unique id's of each STB box stay the same regardless of the port plugged into.

When I recently added a second firewire card (see above post for why I did this), the unique ID for that same STB changed, breaking the installation.

However, changing this is not that difficult...you do not have to go back to painful square one, and the steps are the same if your STB ever fails and you have to exchange it.

You only need to do two things. First, the graphedit file has a video capture source filter that is linked to this unique STB ID. In Graphedit, you need to delete that source filter, and re-add the STB source with this new ID.

For channel changing, you need to change the unique ID in the channelw.exe command line in sgraphrecorder.ini.

That should do it.

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by renebour

I was able to get my rig working with Sage and a Moto 6200. I have 4 other Hauppage tuners in the box and all is good. Channel changein between firewire and Haup devices works fine.
I have tested the channnels comming out of the moto and have only found one that is 5c, and I stay away from it.
My question is sometines when I change channels on the 6200 I get the spinning circle and then nothing. I stop the feed (with the stop button on the remote) I re-tune the channel and get it fine. Is this normal behavior or am I missing a timing setting somewhere? basically takes two tries to get the channel.

Thx
R

This happens to me too at times. Sometimes, I have to go to a different channel, then back again. I have also missed a few recordings due to this.

A couple of things I need to try: Adding a delay to each digit send in channel changing (the channel.exe command has option parameters to do this). Also, I do have tuning delays set in sgraphrecorder.ini:

TuningDelay=6000
UnloadGraphOnStop=1
UnloadGraphOnSwitch=1

...but I thought I read about some settings in sagetvclient.properties file that may solve this.

Have to investigate and play one day. Too many other higher priority things today.....so if you have success, please post.

[UgaData]

I remember there was a FCC ruling stating that cable co's must supply a 1394 box to the subscribers.

I believe the FCC ruling states If a 1394 (firewire) port exists on an STB it must be functional. My experience with the cable company (Comcast) is that no one even knows what 1394 or firewire is.

I think you're out of luck on the charges.

Why would/should someone have an HD capable box without the HD service as well? (I know, I know, just being devil's advocate)

I'm sure the cable companys could allow customers to have an HD capable STB and not it to tune HD stations. However, they don't have to if they don't want to.

[kmp14]

dcardellini,

Thanks so much for the input! I worked back thru all of your questions, confirmed everything, and unfortunately, all my answers are yes, but still no luck:

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Did you run "channel -v" from the command prompt and see the tuner and panel listed? Note the ID number of the device (shown in both tuner and panel items).

Results of channel -v:

C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller>channel -v
Firewire STB channel changer V1.0.15, by timmmoore
1 "FireBus MPEG2TS Tuner Subunit Device"
'Motorola AV/C Tuner Device'
"@devicenp:\\?\avc#motorola&dct-3412&typ_5&id_0#91841bfeff9a1500#{65e8773d-8f5
6-11d0-a3b9-00a0c9223196}\global" 0
2 "AVC Panel Device"
'Motorola AV/C Panel Device'

UniqueID '91841bfeff9a1500'
VendorID '159a'
ModelID '34cb'
VendorText 'MOTOROLA'
ModelText 'DCT-3412'
"@devicenp:\\?\avc#motorola&dct-3412&typ_9&id_0#91841bfeff9a1500#{65e8773d-8f5
6-11d0-a3b9-00a0c9223196}\global" 1
No device selected
Calling CoUninitialize
Called CoUninitialize

Originally Posted by dcardellini

In VLC, did you go to "open video capture device" directshow, refresh video device list, drop down and choose the TUNER?

When you hit ok, does the VLC window open up or stay small?

I do choose tuner, and it does not open, it stays small.. Here is what it looks like when trying to play the tuner stream:

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Is the STB box in a state where video is actually playing...i.e. is it tuned to a channel and outputting video? Might want to confirm by hooking to a monitor. Those devices take a while to boot up (even though firewire port may light-up early on), and may start off in a non-channel tuned state. Try entering a known channel number through stb's remote.

Are you sure that all your channels are not 5C'ed? Have you verified clear 5C flags when STB hooked to monitor using the special sequence to get to service menus?

Video is playing on the STB. I have confirmed that the channel being played is not 5C'd.

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Moving on to Graphedit, did you register it and register proppage.dll?

Yes, both registered.

Originally Posted by dcardellini

When you inserted the STB filter from video capture sources, and when you expanded the video capture device for motorola, do you see the same ID number that you saw in channel -v?

When you inserted the SBDArecorderdump directshow filter, did you create a filename like dump.ts?, and you linked the motorola source with this destination file?

Yes

[dcardellini]

Too bad on the win7 problem. There are five chunks of code at play to make this work, and six that you have used:

1) Firewire controller card device drivers
2) STB box device drivers
3) Directshow-Graph execution (part of windows)
4) SbaRecorder
5) Channel(w).exe
(6) VLC player

SBARecorder and Channel.exe haven't even been in the equation yet. As VLC is not needed for the graph stuff, it is out of the equation. As the graph stuff is not needed for VLC, graph execution is out of the equation.

Looks like big chance that the Firewire controller drivers or the STB firewore drivers are either not right, or the directshow interface code to these drivers is not right. I'd put my money on the drivers not being right.

[dcardellini]

Looks like it is the Firewire controller card drivers (IEEE1394) that are broken in Win7. It looks like you can reinstall a legacy driver to make this work:

Read this thread:

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/6...px?PageIndex=2

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Looks like it is the Firewire controller card drivers (IEEE1394) that are broken in Win7. It looks like you can reinstall a legacy driver to make this work:

Read this thread:

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/6...px?PageIndex=2

Success!! dcardellini, you rule. The legacy 1394 driver did the trick. Duh! I should have thought of checking out the green button.


I am 90% there....

Edit: 99% there! Guide data works. Some channels not working. Maybe 5C?

Thanks!

[dcardellini]

excellent kmp14!

You are down to the final touches.

What could be confusing at this point, is that sometimes a channel will not tune the first time in Sage (it may not be a 5C thing....see recent post above).

What you should do is definitively find which channels are 5C'ed. I have all channels free where I live, but bizarrely, a few odd channels are 5C'ed (PBS???).

Here is the real easy way to do it:

Kill Sagetv, sbdaRecorder, and just run VLC.

Use your STB Remote control, start at the lowest channel, and press up-channel one at a time, and the VLC session should keep playing the new channel after a few seconds without any intervention. Write down the channels you cannot get (the STB display should flash the actual channel right after change before returning to time display), and make sure to disable those in the Sagetv setup.

Good luck, and once you have everything set up, please let me know if you get 100% reliable channel changes in sagetv....as that is my remaining problem.

[kmp14]

Well, after a few days, things are not looking good gettting reliable firewire recording in Win7. I have had 3 separate times where the SgraphRecorder recorded has just died, and then Sage detects that, and flags future recordings as conflicts. One other time, SgraphRecorder was still running, but sage still flagged the recordings as confilcts. When SgraphRecorder does stay alive, and sage records a show, the resulting recordings have been hit or miss. Some will play, some won't. There is always a file there, but when I go to watch the show (on HD200) the HD200 gets funky. Slows down, won't play the show, and even shutdown once.

I have gone thru every channel using VLC, and only added the ones to sage that I could tune in VLC. I have also tweaked the tunning time setting in the .ini file, and sage.properties for the tuner. The channel changing has been 100% as far as I can tell.

EDIT: Removed uneducated assumption on my part!

I have not tried to play the offending files on the server yet, but even if they play, it wont help me much since I am 100% HD200's on the client side.

I will keep at it and provide updates......

[dcardellini]

I would do some searching for sgraphrecorder and windows 7. Also, guy who wrote sgraphrecorder is Anders Nolberger...try to track that down.

Concerning timing entries, I only added stuff on my sgraphrecorder.ini file.

What entries did you make in sagetv.properties?? thx

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Concerning timing entries, I only added stuff on my sgraphrecorder.ini file.

What entries did you make in sagetv.properties?? thx

There is a setting for each tuner called "delay_to_wait_after_tuning". I see that it is used a lot with the HDPVR. From what I understand, it tells sage to wait the specified number of miliseconds after tuning the channel to actually start recording it. Seems to me that it would help the issue of sometimes the channel not tuning on the first try when attempting to watch it live. Anyway, I have experimented with it, but I am not 100% sure it is doing anything....I cranked it up to 20000 (20 seconds) but the channel tunes quicker than that. The good news is that I do not have the tuning problem usually.

[kmp14]

Well, I am giving up. I can't get firewire to work reliably. The tuner just seems to drop off, and then I get confilct warnings for any recordings scheduled. No errors, sgraphrecorder stays running, but the tuner just no longer works in sage.

Restarting the sage service will enable it for a while, but eventually (within a couple hours, usually) the tuner no longer works.

Not sure if it is Windows 7, the box (Motorola DCT-3412) or something else, but it is just not working for me.

[dcardellini]

You may be at end of line, but since your head is still into it, you could try to see where in the chain things are getting broken to at least narrow down source of problem.

You could run VLC on and off for a few hours to see if you can still keep tuning different stations. If you lose it there, then either firewire controller driver or STB driver is dinked.

You could start a graph with Graphedit dumping to a file, and keep playing (watching file grow), starting and stopping on and off over a few hour period. A problem here could point to graph execution/directshow problem.

Could be something with sgraphrecorder.exe....but not sure how to try this. This is a generic program for tying in network encoders, so there is probably some other way to test it independent of everything else (firewire).

Just some thoughts. Depends how badly you want it. Others will benefit from your pain.

[jimbo67]

Please do not give up, I need firewire for Win 7 very much



I am cheering for you!!!

[kmp14]

I am not working on it at this point. Just don't have the time. I may get back to it at some point.

[nyplayer]

I was able to get this going in windows 7 ultimate.
make sure to Install the legacy driver for the firewire card. Reboot if necessary then you have to recycle the power on your STB box. It is important that you recycle the power after installing the legacy drivers.

1.I installed the vista drivers for my firewire drivers.
2.I downloaded the grapedit and the SGraphRecorder1.0.10.
3. I replaced the DUMP.AX in grapedit from the one from SGraphRecorder1.0.10.. also copied over the RegDumpFilter.bat
4.added "regsvr32 proppage.dll" to the register.bat in graphedit... ran it.
5. ran RegDumpFilter.bat from the grapedit directory.
6. Ran RegDumpFilter from the SGraphRecorder1.0.10.
7 created my grf... this time it created with no errors.
8. Was able to view in VLC.
9. Setup in sage all is fine.

[kmp14]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I3. I replaced the DUMP.AX in grapedit from the one from SGraphRecorder1.0.10.. also copied over the RegDumpFilter.bat

I am still working on Win7 myself. It works, and now it is running stable, except....about 10% of the recordings won't play. They get recorded, the file size is consistent with the type/time recorded, but the file is not a valid MPEG.

I did not see an instruction (that I remember) to replace the DUMP.AX file with the one from SGraphRecorder. Maybe that is my problem? Will give that a try.