[mythtv-users] Arris DCX3200M-P3 and firewire on Shaw - Update

[Jerome Yuzyk]

Just to follow-up for others with the same setup. 0.27.4 Fedora 22

On Tuesday, October 13, 2015 01:09:06 PM Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
> 
> Ack! It works! Yesterday I wrote a script to capture every channel I could get, minus music and PPV, and got 100% of 110 channels, about 20 of them HD. Today I dove into Myth and configured it all up with crossed fingers that it worked and I got the setup right: capture and channel-change over firewire, so far for one of the sports channels I wanted, and PBS. Now testing others. I didn't have to use Stuart's patches, just configured and ran as Glen did. Happy happy, at least for now. HDPVR sitting in reserve in case Shaw tosses everything.

A few days later, mixed results. Channel-changing is very solid, not a single failure for a channel I actually get. Recording not so much. When it works, it works great. When it doesn't work, it creates 0-byte files and/or crashes with something like:

2015-10-14 15:24:11.135097 C [30553/30553] CoreContext signalhandling.cpp:305 (handleSignal) - Received Segmentation fault: Code 1, PID 927826064, UID 32575, Value 0x00000030

Sometimes the recording can be re-tried and it'll work, like after the crash above. I happened to have the FE open to see it report the backend was lost and re-started the backend and it picked up recording. So I could see innings 4 and on of that wild Jays-Rangers game. Yay! The following recording of the KC-Astros game went off without a hitch on the same channel.  

On some channels, recording just doesn't work. I poked around to test some but not all. MythWeb still doesn't seem to honour "Forget Old" so fiddling things like P2P/Broadcast got old quickly.

Unfortunately for me, one reliably-failing channel is Comedy Central, so that started to ring the death-knell for firewire recording for me. There are a few other channels with earlier showings, some feeds from the east (e.g., CFTO), that would be handy but are iffy or unrecordable. 

I haven't used it since I started with MythTV nine years ago, but LiveTV was an interesting walk through my channels. Many crashes, back to the FE with "error opening jump program file buffer" at best, or requiring a killall mythfrontend. A few crashes to the FE with "Irrecoverable recorder error." Man, daytime TV is a wasteland.

I have not checked the Copy-foo status of each channel because it's a pain to do - anyone got a way to automate that? But, my feeling is that since I could record every channel with the test-mpeg2 utility, it's more that the firewire connection is not reliable than any copy-protection. Shaw seems to be rather loose about things, at least for my box - I've even been able to record off PPV channels.

So, unless someone has some ideas, and I'm open to doing some more testing, next up will be an HDPVR to capture component. I've Googled and re-Googled, read and re-read, and the only other avenue to pursue is one of the https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Firewire_Priming scripts, and my hunch is that's going to be a longer road to a likely dead end. Has anyone found priming smooths out most of the bumps for this DCX box?

Maybe I need some delay for channel-changing? I have a monitor fed by HDMI from the box and I've never seen a channel-change problem, but maybe some channels need to stabilize more after a change?

Would Stuart A's patches from the other day help any?

-- 
A little of Jerome's MythTV World: http://mythtv.bss.ab.ca