[mythtv-users] DCT2224 Digital Cable Box

[Stephen Mowry]

Ian,

I apologize for my *stupid* comment and meant no offense.  I did do my
homework before posting and my frustration was born out of the hours of work
poured into researching this (primarily combing through repeated and
unhelpful data).   I *had* read your HOWTO (and very much appreciated it)
and was unsuccessful in getting channel changing to work.  My reference to
"coherence" earlier was based upon the unavailability of an exhaustive
howto.  Nevertheless, I have a couple questions:

1.  Which digital box do you have?  I have a DCT-2224 and your instructions
for determining firmware on my box would not work.  There was no option off
the menu accessible with the remote that I could locate.  After reading
through threads on the tivocommunity site, I found that I had to hit the
power button (to power off the box) and quickly hit the select button.  Then
a diag screen would appear and I had to arrow down to #6 to see my firmware.

2.  It's been a while since I tried your python script, but if I remember
correctly, it didn't provide any logging options (I could be wrong and
missed it somewhere).  For instance, the other DCT Serial solution provided
in the contrib dir has a verbose option which gives me error messages
relating to communication with the DCT box (i.e. it received no response
from the box or something similar).  This logging helped me isolate which
area I needed to focus on (assuming that it's loggin was accurate).

3.  I'm leaning towards the fact that my serial port is most likely
disabled, and I have been alternating calling the cable company (COX) with a
friend of mine, attempting to convince them to enable it (he is in the same
situation).  Your blurb about being creative with them is by far an
understatement :) ; It must be a work of art in social engineering (which we
have yet to accomplish).  Something that has been helpful for us to at least
get past the initial (We don't support that etc, or the typical No way in
hell) was to:
        a. try and bypass customer support and go to technical support
        b. let them know that you are not trying to get support for your
"Tivo" but that you are only interested in getting the DCT serial enabled.
        c. they will tell you that it is impossible to enable it, but a
technician DOES have the ability to enable and disable this feature
*remotely*.
        d. A cable technician who posted on the tivo forum mentioned that if
you are able to see the diagnostics menu (mentioned earlier) then that is an
indicator that your serial port is *disabled*. I do not know if this is true
or not.

Good luck to everyone else working with their cable company.  If any of you
have Cox and was able to get their serial port enabled PLEASE let us know
what you did...

Thanks




-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org [
<mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org>
mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of ian at duckland.org
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 11:15 PM
To: Discussion about mythtv
Subject: RE: [mythtv-users] DCT2224 Digital Cable Box


On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Stephen Mowry wrote:

> I know this leaves out a lot of details, but since I don't have it
> working, I'm not yet ready to write a detailed HOWTO on all the steps
> for enabling and troubleshooting DCT2XXX serial cable channel
> changing.  There are an incredible number of people using these boxes
> and I think it would be great if someone (who's gone through all of
> this already) could compile their knowledge into a *GOOD and USEFUL*
> HOWTO with more detail than the few paragraphs in the Myth docs.

Oh bloddy hell.  I wrote a HOWTO on this *months* ago.  If you've got
mythtv on a machine at home, you have a copy of it on your machine.  Look
in the contrib directory and you'll see TWO sets of code for changing
channels on a DCT2000 series box.  One is a set of Python scripts where
*no-one* has complained about the README.  The newer piece of code is Jim
Paris' C code that works faster, has better error checking, and also has a
README file that *no-one* has complained about.

>
> MythTV is pretty much USELESS without channel changing, and it's
> completely stupid that there isn't any more coherent documentation
> supporting the DCT2XXX series... or try finding docs on getting the
> default DISH Dish Pro 301 (that another few million people have.)

You should do some more homework before calling situations stupid. 
Attitudes like the above aren't very productive on this list.

        -Ian



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