[mythtv-users] Firewire stops working -- and how to record twice?

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Tue Jan 13 09:10:12 UTC 2009


On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Brad Templeton
<brad+myth at templetons.com> wrote:
>
> I recenty caved and got a Comcast Motorola DCH3200 HD set top box
> with firewire/1394.   I want myth to be able to record HD cable
> channels and this seems to be the only way to do it, short of the
> more experimental wintv component recorder.

Same here.  There's some more info on this or a similar problem here:

http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/5278

> So what fixes it?  Reboot of the linux box.   Reboot of the STB or
> unplug/plug of the 1394 cable does not fix it.   firewire bus reset
> from firewire-tester does not fix it.

In my case, restarting the backend process (/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend
restart) usually fixes the problem.  I don't need to reboot the whole
box.

I'm struggling with all of the same issues you've described and don't
have any good answers.  (And my WAF has really taken a hit since I've
tried to go HD.)

What I can tell you is that turning off the "reset firewire bus"
option in the settings seems to help a bit.  Whenever that was on, if
it tuned to an encrypted channel, I'd lose the box completely and
could no longer even change channels.  With it off, the channel
changing always works, and sometimes I'll get the next recording.

I haven't had enough time to really dig into it.

The latest sources for mythprime/scanfw/mythchanger are here:

https://wiki.edubuntu.org/majoridiot

The thing I've noticed about scanfw is that it seems to be able to
tune to an encrypted channel and then recover, while the mythtv
cannot.  If I tune to one of the channels I know is encrypted using
livetv, then the mythtv connection to the STB will be unusable for
video capture until I restart the backend.

Eric Sharkey


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