Dish channel changing Re: [mythtv-users] Feature Suggestions (Tivo)

[Kevin Hulse]

Quoting Steve Bower <sbower at cisco.com>:

> >>>>> "Kevin" == Kevin Hulse <jedi at mishnet.org> writes:
>
> Kevin>      Also, the DishTV set top boxes have this nasty habit of
> Kevin> putting you in a deadend condition if you select the wrong
> Kevin> channel. This is a problem with Tivo since it neither detects nor
> Kevin> routes around this problem. The Dish box is basically expecting
> Kevin> human interaction contrary to the automated responses from the
> Kevin> Tivo.
>
> Kevin>      Tivo wants to spit out full channel numbers and the Dish box
> Kevin> wants to only get chan-up or chan-down. The end result is a bunch
> Kevin> of trashed recordings.
>
> Kevin>      I was wondering if Myth has any "crash detection" or any
> Kevin> other methods to route around this sort of problem?
>
> Kevin>      For the Dish boxes, I suppose adding a chan-up command as a
> Kevin> prefix to any explicit channel input would suffice as a
> Kevin> workaround.
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> I did this for a while with my mythtv/dish setup, but it ran into the
> same issue when the chan-up put me onto a PPV channel...
>
> I've been focusing my efforts more on hdtv lately, so I haven't been
> fiddling with it much recently.
>
> Can you access the guide from those screens?  If so, that might be a
> "works everywhere" thing.
>
> Or, we could always grab a still picture of the channel-change banner
> and OCR it to see if it matches the channel we want to be on.  Or
> compare the picture with the "bad channel" screen?

    Why not just see if the screen image has changed in a given period
of time? At that point, a "fail-safe" procedure might be called that could
systematically send remote commands to the set top box to get it out of it's
deadend state. This might include turning the settop box off entirely.
    This would be more general purpose and might catch other sort of error
conditions not originally accounted for.

     This would also be a nice check for recordings so that they could be
automatically validated. Cleaning up after one of these deadend channel
changes can be a bit of a pain in the ass.


--
        Negligence will never equal intent, no matter how you
attempt to distort reality to do so. This is what separates         |||
the real butchers from average Joes (or Fritzes) caught up in      / | \
events not in their control.


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