[mythtv-users] Firewire issues; default LiveTV tuner

[Bob Sully]

Greetings:

My combined BE/FE box has two pcHDTV 5500 tuner cards plus a Firewire
input from a DCT6200 STB.  I'm running 0.20.2 from packages (approx. SVN
14486).

Interestingly, the tuner cards come up as Tuners 1 and 3, and the Firewire
input as 5.  This, however, isn't the issue.  When I try to watch LiveTV,
it always tries to start up with the Firewire tuner.  Most of the time, it
times out (even though it's tuned to a viable (non-encrypted) channel on
the STB) and drops me back to the menu.  It doesn't work on the 2nd, 3rd,
4th attempt, either.  Once in a while it is able to lock onto the 1394
signal and all's well.  Most of the time, however, I just get a black
screen, and it usually won't let me change tuners, then it drops back out.
 I've tried changing the timeout in setup from about 5 seconds to 10;
still doesn't work.

I tried using Steve Adeff's script and it not only doesn't work any
better, it sometimes causes a segfault, and I need to restart the backend.

Firewire_tester shows that the connection is OK.  I'm also doing this as
an hourly cron job to keep it alive, if that's possible:

firewire_tester -B -r6 -n2

If I can't get it to reliably come up in LiveTV on the Firewire input, how
can I get it to use one of the other tuners as the default?  I saw one
thread in the archives from about 8 months ago, in which the OP was
basically told that there was no option for choosing a default tuner for
LiveTV.

I'm sure I'm not the only one having this problem.

Thanks - Bob
-- 
________________________________________
Bob Sully - Simi Valley, California, USA
http://www.malibyte.net
http://www.malibyte.com