On 9/13/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Yeechang Lee</b> <<a href="mailto:ylee@pobox.com">ylee@pobox.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I've posted several messages on my experiences with FireWire recording<br>over the past nine months. After several months of usually good<br>results punctuated by minutes or hours of sheer frustration, for the<br>past several months I'd eventually gotten my daisy-chained dual
<br>Motorola 6200 cable-box setup down to a science (or as close as<br>Linux's FireWire libraries and 0.19-fixes would allow):<br><br>* Tell mythtv-setup to look for my two cable boxes at port 0, node 1<br> and port 0, node 3, respectively, using point-to-point and 200mbps
<br><br>* Run the following script in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.<br><br> #!/bin/sh<br> plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=0<br> plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].bcast_connection=0<br> plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].data_rate=2<br> plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].channel=0
<br> plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=1<br><br> plugctl -n 3 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=0<br> plugctl -n 3 oPCR[0].bcast_connection=0<br> plugctl -n 3 oPCR[0].data_rate=2<br> plugctl -n 3 oPCR[0].channel=1
<br> plugctl -n 3 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=1<br><br>(Substituting, of course, the correct nodes as revealed by plugreport<br>after -n.)<br><br>* Quite often, mythbackend would, after rebooting the backend<br> computer. straightaway be able to record simultaneously from both
<br> boxes. If it didn't. "priming the pump" by running the above script<br> manually a few times (perhaps once or twice without any recordings<br> going on and, if necessary, once or twice right after entering Live
<br> TV) would *always* do the trick. My setup was so stable that I would<br> almost always only have to reboot the backend PC voluntarily,<br> anyway.<br><br>0.20 appears to have changed the rules of the game. Since upgrading,
<br>over the past 24 hours I have tried every possible combination of<br>FireWire configurations in mythtv-setup and variants of the above<br>script, with no luck whatsoever. And believe me, I know them all, from<br>back in the bad old days. (However, note that even back then it would
<br>*never* take me this long to get things running again!) Here's what<br>happens:<br><br>* When I enter Live TV, it may or may not start. If it doesn't, I get<br> the infamous "No Input in 15 seconds" message. More precisely, I see
<br> the following:<br><br>2006-09-13 00:30:38.045 FireRec: Buffered packets 8000 (32000 KB)<br>2006-09-13 00:30:45.065 TVRec(1): Changing from WatchingLiveTV to None<br>2006-09-13 00:30:53.151 FireRec: No Input in 15 seconds [P:0 N:1] (select)
<br><br>(The first two log lines are new in 0.20. Yes, it does seem like the<br>system gives up a full eight seconds before it's supposed to. That may<br>or may not be relevant.)<br><br>* If LiveTV works, switching to the other cable box may or may not
<br> produce the same dreaded "No Input" error.<br>* If switching to the other cable box works, jumping back to the first<br> cable box may or may not produce the same "No Input" error.<br>* If I can consistently and properly swtich between both cable boxes,
<br> trying to record from both at the same time (whether it be by<br> actually recording from one and running Live TV on the other, or<br> actually recording from both) always fails. End of story.<br><br>Here are some other clues:
<br><br>* I can pretty consistently get just one box to work by removing the<br> other one's entry from mythtv-setup. Not ideal, but that's what I've<br> resorted to for now.<br>* Remember how I said that priming the pump with the above script
<br> would always get things rolling in short order? Well, one of the<br> ways I can tell things were working fine was by plugreport telling<br> me that n_p2p_connections=1 for both nodes and these results staying<br> as such no matter what. With
0.20, even when LiveTV or recording is<br> working on one or both boxes, I see while the recording is occuring<br> that n_p2p_connections=1 more than whatever number I've assigned it<br> with my script. That is, if in the script I assign n_p2p_connections
<br> on node 1 the value of 3, it will start out at 3, go up to 4 while a<br> recording is occurring, then come back down to 4 once the recording<br> ends. (The only exception is if I assign with the scrip the value of
<br> 0; this does not change. The boxes still don't work, though.) Again,<br> I'm positive 0.19-fixes did not do this.<br><br>I've read the 0.20 releae notes but don't anything that seems<br>espeially relevant to my situation. Can a developer verify whether the
<br>FireWire code in 0.20 has been changed in some subtler, undocumented<br>way that might be resulting in this new behavior?<br><br>--<br>Yeechang Lee <<a href="mailto:ylee@pobox.com">ylee@pobox.com</a>> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US
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http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users</a><br></blockquote></div><br>I also have two firewire cable boxes (SA3250HD) and all of the sudden I am also having strange problems after it worked great for months. I don't know if my problem is related to yours but I am also poking around trying to figure out what is going on. I want my HD back :(
<br><br>Allan<br>