[mythtv-users] HD hardware: what next?

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Mon Jun 26 16:38:50 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 12:08 -0400, Daniel Kristjansson wrote:

> If you get HDTV, they are required by law to provide you a working box
> upon request.

True. But they aren't required by law to provide you with a working DVR,
and there are lots of horror stories out there about the DVR function of
the 6412 boxes. Mine has only occasional problems (where FF stops
working and it requires a power reset to get FF working again), and I'm
afraid that if I swap boxes, it might be worse. It's also a pain in the
butt to swap boxes because I have to undo all the cabling, take it in,
get a new one, and recable it. I'm certainly willing to do that, but not
unless I have at least some reason to believe it might help. Since
nothing else has worked, I may try it. But I will have to use the FF
problem as justification, because it will be too easy for them to point
the finger at my non-RIAA-approved setup if I just say the firewire
doesn't work.

>  The box should not require DRM for over the air channels.

There are non-OTA HD channels that I also want access to, such as
ESPN-HD and the INHD and INHD2 channels. They are not required by law to
provide those via firewire, but (rare) previous occasions on which
firewire has worked show that these are available unencrypted, as does
the usual procedure of powering off the box and hitting OK to get into
the diagnostic menu. All but the premium pay channels have 5C=0. I have
been able to find some, but not all, of these channels through the
HD3000 as well (choppy as the picture is, I can usually identify what
channel it is if I get a long enough snippet). But I think all those
channels that are 5C=0 will eventually be found by the DVB scans as well
if I can ever clear up the picture quality problems.

> > > but instead PCI timeouts causing the problem. 
> > You obviously know much more about that sort of thing than I do,
> > but how did you determine that?
> By setting the PCI timeouts and getting things to work :)

I was afraid that was going to be your answer :-)

> lspci and setpci are the tools you need. Sometimes the
> BIOS also gives you some control over the latency timer.

I may play with this some, because it's my only lead at the moment.
Thank you.

--Greg




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