[mythtv] detecting activity - not signal.

[Peter Hartmann]

My cable company has been in the habit of rebooting my cable box
literally every day.  As a result a lot of my recorded programs just
have a black screen.  If anyone has dealt with this could you help?
I've seen a lot of talk about detecting signal level in the archives.
I think that the signal level is strong while I'm recording black
screen, so I don't think that's the issue. If no solution exists, I
was thinking of running a script from cron to analyze a short sampling
from /dev/video0 and initiate the correct lirc code to turn on by
digital video cable box if the right information is gathered .    This
depends upon being able to sample  /dev/video0 while mythtv may be
recording.  Not sure if that's gonna work.  Anyway my ideal script
will either make use of some yet unknown spectrum analyzer or get
statistics from a an encoder log file from perhaps ffmeg. Anyone care
to comment?

Thanks,
Peter