[mythtv-users] DTV switch means dealing with multiple STB's via firewire - HELP!

Robert McNamara robert.mcnamara at gmail.com
Tue Jan 6 18:01:07 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Tom Lichti <redpepperracing at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Joe Borne <joe.borne at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Feb 17th my cable company will switch to an all digital lineup. Wifey is
>>> pretty used to having three inputs to my MythBox in order to avoid recording
>>> conflicts (one via firewire, two analog). So obviously I need to find a
>>> solution before the switch.
>>>
>>> I currently have a 4 port firewire card in my MythTV system. I haven't
>>> really dealt with the issue of firewire since early `07 when I first set it
>>> all up. I recall that using multiple cable STB's via firewire was
>>> problematical back then due to the issue of ports being reassigned
>>> dynamically if there was a reboot or other reset event.
>>>
>>> I'd rather not have to turn another home system into a backend if I can
>>> avoid it. So my question for the guru's is this:
>>>
>>> Does anyone have a reliable solution for using several firewire connected
>>> set top boxes on the same backend? If so, can you describe the setup and
>>> hardware used?
>>
>> They are only shutting down analog OTA, if you have analog cable, you
>> should still be ok, AFAIK.
>>
>> Tom
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>
> Joe is talking about his cable company removing the analog lineup,
> something many companies are doing in various markets.
>
> Joe,  I have used multiple firewire boxes with now issues on a 4-port
> VIA chipset card.  No issues-- I got best results using a dedicated
> port per box rather than daisy-chaining, however.  Thanks to Myth now
> using GUID instead of port/node, a lot of the issues have disappeared.
>
> I also run a cron job at 5 and 35 after the hour to prime all boxes.
>
> Robert
>

And to be clear, it is the firewire_primer.pl script that I use (with
tiny customization as I prefer more iterations of the prime) and it
only primes boxes NOT in use so that it will not interrupt or cause
issues with any recordings.

Robert


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