Control Cable Box from Firewire

[noodleNT]

Is there anyway I can have BTV control my cable box through the firewire port? I found on the AVS and Greenbutton forums you can control it with a little EXE that some guy wrote. Is it possible to take advantage of it with BTV?


http://www.thegreenbutton.com/commun...52&TopicPage=1
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...0&pagenumber=1

[jdiff]

I found this thread, but the plugin is old; no one has gotten it to work with 3.5. But it is exactly what we are looking for.

EXE File Tuner Plugin

[flavius]

See this My BTV Trial - Firewire DV

[TV Scheduler]

Originally Posted by noodleNT

Is there anyway I can have BTV control my cable box through the firewire port? I found on the AVS and Greenbutton forums you can control it with a little EXE that some guy wrote. Is it possible to take advantage of it with BTV?

There are some tuner dlls that can handle command line apps. I would use one of those. I added the code for using Tim's channelw.exe to my recorder apps so I don't even use HE Remote to change channels anymore.

I've two computers with eight recorders but I've never used more then six. I've been getting good results with my little recorders. The computers have been up for a couple of days now without any problems and the HD recordings are great.



Bob

[jdiff]

Bob,
Other than the tuner dll in the thread I linked above (EXE File Tuner Plugin ), can you point me to other tuner dlls that can run command-line apps? I searched the forums but haven't found any. In that thread optikhog offered to try updating the plugin for 3.5, but if there is a working one which will do the equivalent, we could save him the effort.
Thanks!

[noodleNT]

Bob,

How are you getting BTV to use these DLLs?

Are you capturing the HD over firewire too?

[TV Scheduler]

Originally Posted by noodleNT

Bob,

How are you getting BTV to use these DLLs?

Are you capturing the HD over firewire too?

I think the tuner dll that I wrote so BTV could use HE Remote is a command line type dll.
Something like this in the tuner ini file should work.
PreChannelString=-t200 -v 2
AppPath = C:\channelw.exe

I can't test it, I don't even have BTV installed right now. I had created some problems that I just couldn't get cleaned up, so I have to flush everything and reinstall Windows. I haven't even reinstalled C++ so I can't do any dll work.



Yes, I'm capturing HD over firewire. I can only capture two firewire recordings at a time on one computer. I use a real simple graph. I just connect the Motorola source filter to a filewriter filter.

My PVR software isn't marketable and without a profit motive I'm not going to do much more. I added a blue dot to my program guide when a show is in HD and now I want to add that to my other lists but beyond that I don't see anything else I need.

Bob

[optikhog]

Originally Posted by TV Scheduler

I think the tuner dll that I wrote so BTV could use HE Remote is a command line type dll.
Something like this in the tuner ini file should work.
PreChannelString=-t200 -v 2
AppPath = C:\channelw.exe

Wow, this would be awesome if it did work - I assume that your .dll's worked with HE Remote in 3.5.x?

[noodleNT]

Snapstream....

Please offer TV Scheduler a job to develope this HD over firewire stuff. I want native support in BTV.

[jdiff]

I've been playing around with this for the past two hours and here's where I'm at.

I installed the drivers and executables from timmmoore. The channel.exe program does indeed work. Changing the channel on the STB from the command line is 100% accurate so far with the default 50 ms delay.

I installed Bob's HERemoteTuner.dll and HERemoteTuner1.dll and ini files. I edited the ini file to read as follows:

PreChannelString = -v -t1000 2
PostChannelString = Enter
AppPath = C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller\channel.exe

Not really knowing what they do, I left off the Pad and BackgroundMode lines, and also determined that the PostChannelString is not needed.

I am actually running channel.exe and not channelw.exe so that a window pops up and I can see what's going on (that's also why I set t=1000).

What I have found is that no matter what channel I try to tune in BTV, the STB gets tuned to channel 2. By looking at the command window that pops up, I can see that the channel.exe is sending 002. What I can't figure out is why channel.exe is getting 002 as an argument. Is BTV sending HERemoteTuner 002, or is HERemoteTuner sending channel.exe 002?

This happens whether I use HERemoteTuner or HERemoteTuner1 (I don't know what the difference is or if it would affect this.)

I am using BTV 3.7RC1 but I don't think they changed the tuner or plugin architecture in this update (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

My current plan is to update to BTV 3.7RC2 since I need to anyway, and try again, and if it still doesn't work, I will try SSexetuner from that old thread.

Jason

[jdiff]

Update:

I found HeRemoteTuner1.log and it reads:

sent 2 2 0 7 Enter

(the first 2 is the argument for channel.exe to point to the right device, 207 is the channel I am trying to tune)

I think I am getting to the root of the problem.

When I run this command:
channel.exe 2 207
it tunes the STB to 207

When I run this command:
channel.exe 2 2 0 7
it discards what it perceives as extra arguments (the "0" and the "7") and sends "002" to the STB.

So it appears that HERemoteTuner.dll is sending spaces between the channel digits, which is causing channel.exe to ignore anything after the first digit.

Tuning other channels results inn behavior consistent with this hypothesis. Tuning channel 60 in BTV causes the STB to tune channel 6. Tuning channel 8 or 80 (or 81...89) in BTV causes the STB to tune channel 8.

It appears that HERemoteTuner.dll sends the command line argument as separate digits with spaces in between, while channel.exe expects a single argument consisting of one or more digits without spaces.

[jdiff]

Update 2:
Installing SSExeTuner exactly as described in the readme and setting appropriate registry setting to point to channelw.exe WORKS!
For some reason it is not 100% reliable, it seems to miss a digit occasionally, but it is not very frequent. It happened to me when I was trying to make a channel change very soon after I just changed the channel, so maybe I was overloading it or something.
I am sure the code could tweaked somewhat to make it more reliable, and to use an ini file instead of registry settings, but otherwise I think it's pretty good. I am going to set up several recordings overnight to test it out and I'll report back tomorrow.

[TV Scheduler]

You're right HE Remote tuner won't work without some changes. Sorry I wasted your time.

This exe tuner plugin sounds interesting. I can offer the source for my FireWire and ATI HDTV Wonder recorders. They are simple apps written in VB6. The FireWire recorder uses a dll to set the filename in filewriter filter. (VB has its limits.)

Off the top of my head I don't think the tuner plugin will be enough. You will need a recorder plugin.

You'll need a start recording event from BTV, a stop recording event from BTV, a channel and a file name.

I would assume that BTV will be adding the program information to it's database. If not then you will need to do that too.

The next problem.... I don't know if BTV can play the files. They are transport stream mpeg files. BTV filters created a problem for the audio recorded by my ATI HDTV card. I use a CyberLink audio filter. There are several source filters that will work. I use the DVBPortal HDTV TS Pump filter.


Bob

[optikhog]

Originally Posted by TV Scheduler

Off the top of my head I don't think the tuner plugin will be enough. You will need a recorder plugin.

Yah, unfortunately, recording programs from within BTV over the firewire interface is not a reality yet. The next best thing is pulling 480P programming over the S-Video interface of the 6200, which many have claimed is almost as good and obviously works with BTV. But getting channel changes over firewire is a big win!

[crush157]

Any update if this worked on the recordings jdiff? I will need to do the same thing since comcast is moving scifi to a digital channel and it will not be available on the analog cable.