[mythtv-users] Firewire Success Stories?

[greg at nodecam.com]

> This thread doesn't give me a warm-fuzzy re: firewire.  Is anyone else
> having success?

Yes.

I'm on Shaw cable in Saskatoon with a Motorola 6200, and I get almost
every channel that I subscribe to over firewire.  There are a couple of
caveats though.

1) I added "firewire_tester -n0 -P0 -B" to my mythbackend init script
three times - this "primes the pump" so to speak.

2) Sometimes when I reboot the machine, my 6200 gets picked up as node 1
instead of node 0.  When this happens, I either have to unplug/replug the
firewire cable, or reboot again and hope it comes up right (depending on
if I'm physically near the machine or not)

3) When a channel that used to be free and clear becomes 5C=1, any
scheduled recordings on that channel will fail (no surprise there) AND the
firewire_tester program will need to be run again once the channel is
changed away from the offending channel.  I recently had a couple of
channels become 5C=1 on me, which caused some lost recordings.

4) If Myth changes to a channel that you don't have access to, you have to
manually change the channel on the box - Myth can not change the channel
away from the "You are not authorized to view this channel" splash.  This
happened to me when my initial 3 month free preview expired, and I lost a
couple of channels that I apparently tried to record stuff off of.

5) The capture is glitchy for me, with bunches of frames being dropped
seemingly at random, with bad macroblocking.  I think this might be
related to the firewire cable I'm using, but I haven't bothered tinkering
with it yet - I don't record much HD because my main viewing platform is
SD still.

But yes, it's very stable for me, and works quite well - I just use it as
a second tuner, and to watch semi-live sporting events.

Greg