9/12/2007
Struggling with Set Top Boxes
Currently I’m a Cox Cable subscriber and have their digital cable package. This means that over QAM256 I can get ABC HD (WCJB), CBS HD (WGFL), and Fox HD (WOGX). The other junk I get over QAM are about 100 advertisement channels for PPV or encrypted. This makes my pcHDTV 5500 card not really worth it. The only choice I have is to use the FCC mandated Firewire (ieee1394) output from my digital cable box. Well at first Cox gave me a Scientific Atlantic Explorer 8300, which is a HD DVR box but they disabled the DVR functionality. I couldn’t get anything over the firewire and searching around the common MythTV places, I couldn’t find anyone who did. So I returned the box and in return was hoping to get a Scientific Atlantic 3250, which is known to work and is fairly well supported in MythTV. No such luck, I was given a Scientific Atlantic 4250. I still can’t get any data over firewire from the box, other people I know with SA3250s in my area are able to successfully pull the same channels I am testing. It’s quite frustrating.
At the same time I’ve noticed that Firewire support for STBs really sucks. Each one appears to have it’s own custom channel changer and the code for each is just a copy and paste of a previous one with hacks. All the vendor and model IDs are hardcoded into each app and most of the apps don’t handle everything they need to. i.e. reseting the bus when it’s needed. This has resulted in a lot of wrapper scripts and “this works for me!” stuff going on. It’s really a mess. What I’m wondering is why no one has created a 1394.ids setup similar to pciutils and usb-utils. That should be the first thing. Then next a generic control app similar to what FreeBSD has done with fwcontrol. On Linux you have to use several apps from several different libraries and even then you don’t get 100% of the functionality. It would also be nice to integrate this into HAL since the HAL spec does define Firewire support. It looks like the new firewire stack will be a step in the right direction but more work is still needed there.
Filed under: 2 Responses to “Struggling with Set Top Boxes”
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December 21st, 2007 at 5:50 pm
In response to the article, I had to call Cox cable last night and demand that the firewire ports be enabled. Apparantely they are not enabled by default, which appears to be in violation of a 2004 FCC ruling.
The technical person I spoke to had to fill out a form and speak to a supervisor, but within about 40 minutes, the ports were active. they claim it will take 24-48 hours, but this really doesn;t appear to be the case.
So to cut a long story short, I am able to watch TV from the SA4250HDC STB via the firewire on my PC.
The last thing I am struggling with is getting the channels to change on the SA4250HDC.
January 12th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I purchased a SA3250HD box, thinking that I could use it without paying rental through the cable co.
My cable co will not activate the box for me, so I am not able to use it. It came with remote, SVid cable,Comp cable,& DVI cable. If you are interrested in getting a 3250, I paid 71$
Good Luck