[mythtv-users] Firewire and encrypted channels advice

Michael Rice mikerice1969 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 20 22:31:46 UTC 2008


I have a firewire tuner running on running on svn 16479 (from just
before qt4 work started) and it is running nicely without any external
channel changer or priming.  It works great except when it encounters
an encrypted channel which causes the tuner to fail until I restart
the backend.  Unfortunately for me the set of clear channels changes
from day to day or hour to hour.  So to remedy that I've recently
added an external channel script to check whether the channel is
encrypted (using scanfw).    I've noticed that when I change channels
with an external script the recording doesn't work so I modified myth
to run both the external script and also change channels internally.

The script looks something like this for anyone interested:

/usr/local/bin/scanfw -i /usr/local/bin/allchannels.txt -c $1 -p 2 |
grep '1 clear channels'

ENCRYPTED="$?"
if [ "$ENCRYPTED" = "1" ]; then
  echo "Channel $1 is encrypted"
  exit 1
else
  echo "Channel $1 is not encrypted"
  exit 0
fi

I've made the firewire tuner lowest priority so it is only used when
the others will be busy.
This works fairly well.  If the channel is encrypted the recorder will
fail but future recordings
on clear channels will record ok.

The biggest problem here is the scheduler isn't aware of this.  It
might think a recording can be recorded later on firewire but at that
time the channel could be encrypted and the recording would fail.  I
am guessing this will cause me to lose a few recordings I'd otherwise
get.

Anyone have advice on how to improve my situation?


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