[mythtv-users] DCH-6416 Firewire capture
Brad DerManouelian
bderman at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 21:53:08 UTC 2009
On Jun 11, 2009, at 2:27 PM, Robert McNamara wrote:
> Hi Brad,
>
> Good to see you posting.
Thanks, Robert. After spending a week on this, I figured someone here
had run into it already and would have an immediate answer. Stuff in
my personal life has settled down a bit so I have some time to help
out on the list again.
> First thing you need to do is get the box onto a channel that is
> almost definitely not 5C. NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, etc. are good
> choices. Now you should test the firewire_tester with a variety of
> options. The ones that work best for me are (and here I'll use the
> example of your node 0):
>
> firewire_tester -n 0 -B -r 5
>
> That's the "Broadcast Stabilization" mode. The other options
> besides -B are -b and -p. I also use -r 5 to repeat the prime five
> full times. Sometimes if it's particularly tricky to get a good
> prime, the repeats are enough to get a good one. I have found that
> the plugctl voodoo from the firewire page on the wiki is useless and
> has never had any effect. If you are getting "Failed," that means
> there's no prime. If you get "(sync failed)", that generally means
> the channel is 5C'd. Try another channel and see if it gets any
> better.
>
> Once you've figured out the options that work for you, I would get
> the firewire_primer.pl script from trunk and cron it to run sometime
> after the normal program boundaries (5 and 35 after, for me). For
> me, I changed the firewire_tester line to:
>
> my $results = `$firewire_tester -B -P $guid_list{$guid}{host} -n
> $guid_list{$guid}{node} -r 5`;
>
> I also tend to run that script manually 10 or 15 seconds after I
> bring up the backend just to be sure. One other thing I needed to
> do was disable firewire bus resets in mythtv-setup. This might help
> you too.
>
> I hope this help you. I have not had a failed recording on firewire
> in a really long time, aside from the occasional program on a
> normally reliable channel that randomly has 5C turned on.
Very helpful! I got firewire_tester to work with those options and
installed the crontab at 5 and 35 minutes past the hour for one box
and 7 and 37 past the hour for the other. I'm excited to stop using my
HD-PVR boxes and simplify my setup a while bunch.
Thanks again,
Brad
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