Firewire and recording HD?

[Tony414]

Ok. I have spent hours looking through tons of forums. So I decided to start yet another thread about this. Here is what I want to do. And I'm not sure if it can be done. Is there a way, tweak, hack, whatever you might want to call it to record HD in BTV through the firewire? I was looking at this thread High Definition players are on their way about the http://tvscheduler.net/. Is this something that can be used with BTV? Just a little confused...sorry

[DonK]

Currently there is no functionality to record over Firewire in Beyond TV.

[Tony414]

Do you think it's a good feature that SS would look into??

[optikhog]

They are, apparently:
Firewire HDTV Recording

[cat6man]

this has been an active topic on AVS forum and other places for over a year now.

yes, it is currently unsupported....but..

there are drivers for the settop boxes and a program to change the channels via firewire ('channel.exe'). what we need is some knowledgable pc person with
BTV4 to install the firewire drivers for their settop box and (hopefully) see that
it shows up as a tuner that can be selected. the channel.exe firewire channel
controller could (hopefully) be set up to change channels in the setup wizard
(as we do today with USB-UIRT)

if both of those work, then manual scheduling of recordings may be possible.
if the channels to be recorded are in the EPG, scheduled recordings could be possible (other EPG's may also work here....i don't know much about that side
of things).

i know the sageTV community was busy getting firewire recording to work ealier this year and their forum discussions could provide clues on how we can get to that point with BTV.

what we need is someone who knows their way about PC software (rules me
out) to see what does/doesn't work integrating the firewire drivers and BTV4.

[,red589]

I have been looking into this for a while and here is what I've concluded.

BTV can be set up to change channels over firewire, It works extremely well and I use it every day.

My cable box (motorola 6200) can record over firewire channels that are not 5c protected. The problem thats run into then is playing them back. Beyond Tv gained the ability to play transport streams when it began supporting HD. While BTV will play the files, on my computer the colors appear off, and a fix would need to be found.

The best solution to this in my opinion would be as follows.
1. Setup the cable box as a tuner in BTV, that way BTV can still handle scheduling. We then would need a program to detect when BTV fails to record (as it cannot render firewire and treats it as a standard tuner) and begin the recording proccess to a temporary directory.
2. Once the show is completed the program would then move the recorded file into a BTV folder.
3. That same program must tag the file with the appropriate attributes so BTV can display the details of the show.

I think it wouldn't take too much time to create and would make many people very happy.

[cat6man]

hi,

a couple of questions:

1. it sounds like you installed channel.exe as a channel changer for your STB in the setup wizard, and that it is a reliable alternative to USB-UIRT? is that correct, and if so, could you give details of the procedure?
2. are you recording from the STB within BTV or via a standalone program? if i read this correctly, you are only recorded STB/firewire from a separate program.
3. i can't figure out why colors would be off on a TS or TP file......can you make a short segment available and i'll see if my computer has any problems?
if you play the file in VLC media player or some other HD capable program,
are the colors off?
4. the sageTV folks had to make their own graph, i think, to get firewire recording going....BTV doesn't use/create any graphs that we have access to.

[optikhog]

Originally Posted by cat6man

1. it sounds like you installed channel.exe as a channel changer for your STB in the setup wizard, and that it is a reliable alternative to USB-UIRT? is that correct, and if so, could you give details of the procedure?

http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/show...0&postcount=22