This package (firewire.zip) supports channel change and recording (SD/HD) via firewire, integrated into MCE. Channel change only works with the Motorola 6200/6208/6412 STBs and the SA3250HD/SA8000/SA8300HD STBs, recording works with other STBs.

It supports 1 or 2 STBs/tuners.

It supports extenders, though HD records will not play back on extenders

It doesn't remove the MCE requirement for the IR blaster and analogue tuners.

The readme.htm attached goes into more details of what is required to set it up and includes a FAQ

Edit: 6/5/2005, this update includes a new tunertracker that is more reliable for multiple recordings. It also fixes a problem with SD records that have audio at the wrong speed with some mpeg2 audio decoders.

Edit: 6/10/2005, fixed the A/V with extenders. Added channel change support for SA3250HD STB.

Edit: 6/15/2005, fixes a few issues with tunertracker, Adds support for 169time.com STBs, adds support for closed captions

Edit: 6/18/2005, fixed a couple of issues with MyTray. Close button minimizes rather than closes. Package is a MSI installer rather than a .bat file. Included as an option is Cancan101 DirecTV support using tunertracker.dll

Edit: 6/29/2005, fixed issue recognising AverMedia tuners, fixed several issues with tuner allocation being wrong, support Watch/Record Order/Prefered, improved recording reliablity, updated DirecTV app

Edit: 7/02/2005, fixed firewire directory create, add checkbox to UI to enable moving MCE recordings out of Recorded TV, rename them so are removed from MCE listing

Edit: 7/23/2005, fixed few tuner tracking bugs, added support for SA8000/8300HD STBs, added delete MCE recording option

Edit: 10/2/2005, Beta (firewirebeta.zip): lots of bug fixes, support for R5000HD, MCE more programs configuration, rollup2 support, USB Sky controller support, S3 resume STB support, updated tuner allocation algorithm

Edit: 10/9/2005, updated beta (firewirebeta.zip): fixed some issues with MCE configuration tool, added BMC-9012 support, fixed issue with philips tuner cards, fixed MCE configuration tool when not in standard directory, recordings play in WMP with CC in recording

Download: http://www.accidentsworld.com/tgb/firestb.zip

thanks

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DVRMSToolbox, Recording Broker, LcdWriter, and more software
babgvant.com

First as a  DCT6200 let me say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

I will try this tonight

Now the usual questions....

Dual box support is not added yet but, will the second box default to IR? So then you could use IR for one box and Firewire for the other?

Are you close to getting dual boxes to work?

Will this interfere with recording TS across firewire?

 

 

Also if I remember correctly the DCT6200 had USB ports on it.... could those be used at all for second box control?

 

On a side note I recently grabbed a IR Blaster from an old 1st gen TIVO and hooked it in to my MCE IR Module and it works 100% better than the MCE one!

dual box support should be in and working, thats what I use at home. The issues I am aware of are with OTA HDTV, if you switch to an OTA HDTV channel it may confuse the tuner tracking of the 2 settop boxes.

If you have changed your tuner card then media center will still have the old tuner configure in its setting and I dont filter out the old tuners so it is likely to try and use the old tuner config rather than the latest tuners.

IR for one settop box and firewire for another should work fine. You will have to select in mytray which tuner (1 or 2) has firewire by selecting the firewire unique id for that tuner.

The change channel commands are specific to firewire so will not work over USB, also I think I saw somewhere that they are not enabled

I tried using capdvhs to record ts via firewire and using channel to change channel and it worked but you must follow the instructions to replace the meitape.inf with the one in the firewire.zip file otherwise it messes the device that capdvhs uses.

I didn't try changing channel while recording, I dont know what capdvhs would think about having the strema format changed like that. I was changing channel, starting recording, stopping recording, changing channel, starting recording, etc.

Oh wow! I completely mis read that and thought you said Dual STB was not working!!

 

Woohoo now I cant wait to get home! lol

I wrote the readme after the fact, so if you could check the readme as you are installing and correct any errors that would be very helpful.

Also when running media center you should see a file %temp%\tuner.txt that logs what the tunertracker.dll is seeing in terms of channel events and what tuner it is assigned to each channel.

This is incredibly encouraging.  The fact that you were able to get this to work seems to imply that it might be possible at sometime to deliver the Video and Audio content via firewire, no?  The reason I ask, is the delivery and recording of HD content through an STB into MCE would be an incredible leap, nearly making the long awaited Cablecard support not as important.

Is there any way of taking this one step further and use the firewire interface to deliver A/V content, including High Definition digital cable?

 

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Ghostlobster
Very happy convert to SageTV! Finally, watching ESPN-HD in real HD on my HTPC without having to deal with the CableCARD fiasco!

The method this is using, video should already be coming over firewire, just a matter of capturing the stream. Might be just a matter of expanding this to a fake tuner driver that can launch windows media encoder for the capture.

real time hd content over firewire takes some serious power. even on my dual xeon editing station, I have to capture hd tapes slower than real time so nothing is lost.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

This brings up a question I have, there are utilities out there that convert a dvr-ms file to mpeg, are there any utilties that convert a mpeg file to dvr-ms that media center will handle?

Most interesting...anyone feel like taking this one on? 

Damn, I wish I knew what I was doing with coding...unfortunately, the only time I tried code developing, my "Hello World!" application ended up saying "Goodbye A$$hole!"  From there, I realized my skills must lie somewhere else!

 

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Ghostlobster
Very happy convert to SageTV! Finally, watching ESPN-HD in real HD on my HTPC without having to deal with the CableCARD fiasco!

What I have been thinking about is monitoring the start/end recording events, capturing the A/V from firewire in a way similar to capdvhs into a mpeg file, when the recording finishes convert the file to a dvr-ms file  and replace the dvr-ms file that media center recorded.

However, the Stephen Toub article on position changer makes me wonder whether the filter graph for recording is in the ROT as well as the playing filter graphs that Stephen uses. If the recording filter graphs are accessible it may be possible to modify the graph to take from firewire. I need to put graphedit on media center and have a look around

 

 

thanks for the AVC panel drivers - working very well. There are still some errors with certain numbers not working - any chance making it configurable the delay between digits so that the accuracy can improve?

ie, sometimes 910 becomes 90 or 91 because certain digits are dropped. 922 becomes 92. 0 seems to be the worse culprit.

I tried issuing as a batch file: 9, 2, 2 which works a bit better but can't issue "0" by itself.

incidentally - your program works great with SageTV for capturing firewire HDTV straight off of stream from the box.

I'm just reading through this and am not quite clear just what has been accomplished here. Does this method only support the changing of channels on the STB, or does it allow MCE to record HDTV using the STB as a tuner?

 

Thanks,

Scott