MythTV installfest...

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 09:04:19AM -0800, Matthew Godycki wrote:
> Lennart, could you provide a bit more detail whether you've had to do anything
> special to record HD with that box?  Just the box hooked up to a tuner/capture
> card via firewire?  What card?

Just connect the box with a working firewire cable (the first one I
bought didn't work) to the firewire port on my motherboard, and then
mythtv practically autodetected it as a SA4200HD (the 4250HD is just a
newer version).  It was actually really trivial.

No tuner card involved.  No IR blaster.  Just one firewire cable.

Of course I then had to go through all the channels to weed out the ones
I don't subscribe to from schedules direct, and then I had to go through
from mythtv to find the ones that have firewire copy protection enabled,
and weed those out.  In the end I have around 200 digital channels,
with a fair number of HD channels available.

Very low cpu use too since it simply dumps the raw mpeg2 stream rogers
is delivering.  No encoding or anything needed.

> I tried several years ago when I first set up my HTPC but with the box I had
> I was unable to get it to work.

It was a pain in the past, especially while the kernel firewire stack
was transitioning to the new stack.  Now everything seems to work fine
with the new stack.

I did learn that the nforce2 firewire port is very broken and won't work.
Other firewire controllers seem fine.  My laptop has a Ricoh, the mythtv
box has a VIA, and I have an NEC pci card.  They all work fine with
the 4250HD.

Mythtv does seem to have a flaw in that it doesn't wait long enough after
sending a channel change command before it starts to capture the stream,
and occationally this makes it lock on to the old channel's stream and
then the capture dies when it switches to the new channel's stream.
It really should wait 2 or 3 seconds for the box to finish changing
channels.  Also sometimes rogers seems to change whether a channel has
copy protection set or not, in which case it stops working with the
channel of course and you end up with 0 byte recordings.  So far this
has happend to TSNHD.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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