Just a quick note to say that I have now successfully setup firewire capture and channel changing on a motorola 6200 and it works beautifully. Almost no configuration needed with R5A16 either.

Just don't do like I did and spend almost an hour wondering why your box is not showing up only to realize you had turned off firewire support in the bios. DOH!!

Other than that you just have to make sure the ieee1394 ohci1394 and raw1394 modules are loaded. I only had to load the raw1394 module which I did with modconf so it would load at boot thereafter.

then look in /var/log/messages to find out what the device settings are.

enter mythtv-setup add a firewire card with the appropriate settings that you found in the logs.

add a video source, in my case just the zap2it digital cable listing.

associate that source with the new card.

run mythfilldatabase

enjoy!

My cable box has two firewire ports, but I only have one cable at the moment, I'll be getting a second one sometime next week and testing to see if I can record two streams simultaneously.

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Xsecrets

Glad to hear this. I know that box is what my cable comany provides if I want to get HD channels. I didn't, however, know that it has dual firewire ports, and I obviously didn't think of the possibility of recording two shows from it at once.

Anyway, yes, do let us know what happens after you get your second cable.

-Aubrey

Xsecrets,
How hard did you have flog your cable provider (Comcast?) to get the good box? I seem to remember that you were battling a lot of BS from them...

well the phone guys were no help whatsoever. So I took it down to the main office here, and pointed to the plate where the firewire port should be and said I want one with something here. And they went into the back and came back up with a box that had firewire swapped them out with no problems. Trick is to just point don't mention firewire iee1394 or anything like that unless you want to see the deer in headlights look.

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Xsecrets

Darn, this is almost enough to make me want to sign up for digital cable... Of course first I'll have to get a new TV...

I just got a Motorola 6200 box from Adelphia with firewire outputs in the back, but I haven't had much chance to play with it yet. I'm wondering if anyone else has done so and could tell me just what channels can you capture via firewire? HD only? Digital only? Digital and Analog? Our cable has all three levels of signals (basic cable is analog 2-99, digital basic 100-199, digital premium 200-299, digital hd 900-999).

Thanks,
- Stealth Dave

I can capture all the basic stuff analog and digital and all the fta hdtv, however I cannot get it to record premium hdtv or digital so no hbo/showtime etc I could have sworn that it worked the first night I set it up, but it sure doesn't now. and I use comcast with the moto 6200. Can't hurt for you to just plug it in and try it. It is a breese to setup.

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Xsecrets

Xsecrets,
I have the same box, but I really only use the firewire for channel changing. I take the s-video out of the cable box, and into a PVR-250. This allows me to record ALL the tunable channels. If for some reason you can not get the premium ones back to recording, you can try it this way.
Granted HD will not be HD...

Ok not sure exactly what I did. I didn't touch the settings at all, but I got rid of my old oversized entertainment center and put everything in a rack and now I can record any channel I'm subscribed to through the firewire port. analog/digital/higdef/premium everything, well I admit I haven't tried recording any of the music stuff, or in demand stuff.

I actually have a fairly decent complement of highdef channels now. abc, nbc, cbs, fox, upn, tnt, espn, hbo, sho, max, tmc, discoveryhd, and a few other ones that I will most likely never watch.

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Xsecrets

What model is that rack?

Wow, X, that rocks! Now if were ME, I'd be inquiring about how much it would cost to add about five more HDTV boxes! Of course you'd have to add a couple of 300G disks to handle each day's recordings... I think this season I'm going to record more content than I can watch so I'll have something to see over the summer doldrums. I'm up to 3 tuner cards in my box, so getting content shouldn't be a problem. (Having good programs to watch, however, may be.)

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Yeah I'm going to for grins see if it will let me record on both firewire ports simultaneously. I doubt it, but I know that at least there dvr boxes (not what I have) can record two shows at the same time, so worth a shot. And yes not sure what the difference is, but hdtv from the box seems to be bigger than ota. I would definitely love to have at least one more working tuner card. Right now I have the firewire and a pvr250 doing analog. I would like to get QAM on my hd3000. I haven't even hooked it back up in the new house, cause of all the pain in the 4$$ that it is to tune the channels from OTA then still have reception problems, and renting I can't put up a big antenna. Another nice thing with getting it over firewire is that since the analog stations with comcast don't overlap the digital ones right now I only have one set of numbers to deal with. I have a 250G in there right now I think and we usually keep up with the recordings, but If I get to trusting the hdtv and record all the main shows with it I will probably have to get at least one more big disk and setup lvm.

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Xsecrets

Yea more info on your rack setup and frontends would be cool.
Liv2Cod, that is what I did for this summer. Very cool, just finished up CSI LV, NY along with a few other things I never watched all year long. Now FX is running new content that is OK, but having gobs of harddrive space to keep years worth of content is just silly fun.

To move this back on topic though. X, what kind of space are these firewire recordings eating up. Are you transcoding the content, or just using it for one off's that don't get saved very long.

size just depends I'm guessing on what format it's played at, right now I'm just testing, but I will be using it for recordings that probably won't stay on the box more than a week. here's some sizes.

172 - Discovery HD Theater Default Mon Aug 15, 2005
(11:03 PM) 57 mins 7.6 GB (this has to be 1080i)

176 - Home Box Office Digital Default Tue Aug 16, 2005
(12:19 AM) 2 hrs 31 mins 15 GB (this is hd not sure what format)

417 - CineMAX (Pacific) Default Tue Aug 16, 2005
(10:30 AM) 1 hr 45 mins 1.9 GB (standard def premium channel)

the hd is going to really eat up the space, and no I don't transcode. I guess you could, but just sort of seems wrong to go and transcode down a hdtv recording.

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Xsecrets

Hey X,

I am having some issues with my Firewire {and Comcast}...

Often my firewire does not record.

It is hit or miss... Its quite annoying now...

Sometimes my cable box shows up as node 1 then sometimes its 0...

Even if its correct in regards with Mythtv. Nada...

What works usually is reboot my myth box then unplug and re-plug the
firewire cable from the cable box.

BTW:I tried hooking two cables and it appears that two of the same device
cannot be on the firewire chain. Because then I did not see any devices
with the plugreport command.


Example on a good plugreport. The cable box is on node 1.
i.e.root@mythtv:~# plugreport
Host Adapter 0
==============

Node 0 GUID 0x01394051110003af
------------------------------
libiec61883 error: error reading oMPR
libiec61883 error: error reading iMPR

Node 1 GUID 0x0012c9fffebf84ab
------------------------------
oMPR n_plugs=1, data_rate=2, bcast_channel=63
oPCR[0] online=1, bcast_connection=0, n_p2p_connections=0
channel=0, data_rate=2, overhead_id=0, payload=376
iMPR n_plugs=0, data_rate=2


Any ideas?