[mythtv-users] canceled recording (Recorder Failed) mystery

David Gesswein djg at pdp8online.com
Mon Feb 8 18:07:40 UTC 2010


I put a test copy of the script at
http://www.pdp8online.com/directv/directv_test.pl

> When changing channels watching live tv and attempting to change channels, I
> see "Irrecoverable Recorder Error" on the screen after it returns to the
> main Frontend menu. 
>
What I was wanting to see was the video out of the H21 while the channel
change in trying to occur. You can either do that by directly plugging a
TV into the box or it should work if you watch live tv on myth then run the
script manually from a terminal window.

With the current script the channel change is done by sending the channel
number as button presses on the remote like you would do it manually so
you should see that occur (rapidly) on the screen. Since it turns the OSD
off after sending the channel change it may be hard to see.

First using the current script and either by watching a directly connected
tv or manually running the script change channels until it fails then
see what the box says.

To run it manually run it with the same arguments you specified in your
external channel change command.
/usr/local/bin/directv.pl setup_channel #
where # is the channel to change to. I assume you edited the script to
set the default box type etc since you didn't have that on your external
channel change command.

Assuming that fails and its not obvious why then try the new script the
same way. The only change in this case is I increased the time before
turning off the OSD so you should be able to see whats going on better.
(I changed to $clear_osd_delay = 3.2;)

Assuming that fails and its not obvious why then you can try setting the
box_type to H21. The directv protocol has two ways of changing channels.
On some boxes the firmware doesn't process the direct channel change command
so the H20 setting is using the remote key method. The H21 setting will
now use the other channel change command. See how that works.

The last option is trying hardware flow control. 
First try the statserial command to see what your serial port control
signals are set to. (you may need to install statserial package)
statserial /dev/ttyS0 (or whatever port you are using)
if it shows 
CTS	 5    8      in          0   Clear To Send
the hardware flow control signals probably aren't set/hooked up so you
will likely just get timeouts.

Run the new script with the hardflow option and see if it works any different.
/usr/local/bin/directv.pl hardflow setup_channel #

Let me know what the results of these tests are. You can also add
verbose to the start of the arguments to see the data transfered which
may show something.



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