Firewire STB Tuner support

[dmeglio]

From reading these forums, I gather that a large portion of the userbase is not from the US/Canada. While it means you've made some great strides in the DVB area, it means us North Americans have been left out to dry in the HD world! While MP supports OTA HD, there are two other methods of capturing HD available in NA: Clear QAM, and Firewire. Clear QAM, in my mind, is limited utility since you only pick up a few channels (broadcast, pretty much the same as OTA), Firewire, however, sometimes lets you get dozens. I have read that some cable companies even let you record premium channels such as HBO.

Reasons why Firewire tuning should be supported:
1.) No other PVR software I've found natively supports it, they are all hacks (unfortunately I can't even find a hack for MP).
2.) In the US, EVERY STB has to have a functioning Firewire port as of April 1 2004. This means it is a method available to almost every digital/HD cable subscriber in the US (and I assume since Canada uses the same technology, the companies ship the same boxes to the US and Canada).
3.) Even if we can't capture the stream (some cable cos encrypt it), we can at least use firewire as a great alternative to an IR blaster.

Hopefully at this point I've convinced some of the developers out there to give this feature a look. There are already drivers out there to get most of the common STBs communicating in a language you can work with. That language is the AV/C Panel and AV/C Device.

The former allows tuning. Meaning, instead of using an IR Blaster, we can tune over Firewire. Think of it as the end of the delay between IR message and acceptance, and of IR signals that are missed leading to recording the wrong channel. This, I consider, to be step 1 of Firewire support. Essentially, when I setup my connections, I should be able to specify an IR blaster, or a firewire AV/C panel device to associate with the connection.

Step 2 is more formidable. Firewire actually streams the digital content in all its glory (full HD resolutions, surround sound, etc.). If MP could capture this, it would open HD cable up. Plus, this gives us another benefit. I have a dual tuner card. Right now tuner #1 is analog (splitter), #2 is s-video coming from my STB. If you supported Firewire tuning, I could have #1 and #2 analog while #3 (firewire) is its own independent tuner for my digital/HD content.

Hopefully at least someone out there on the development side will respond to this. I've seen a few posts on these forums about the feature, but nothing really came of any of them. This is the one thing that is really preventing me from giving MP a chance. If I can't record digital/HD, it's pretty much useless to me when the alternatives (MCE, SageTV, and BeyondTV) all have a (hacky) way of letting me record my digital/HD content over Firewire.

[frodo]

>it means us North Americans have been left out to dry in the HD world!
Not completely true. For our NA friends we have added
- support for ATSC
- support for NA DVB-S

Besides this the MCE blaster is nowin SVN to remote-control STBs

Now about firewire tuning.
I guess the reason why no application supports it is simply because there is no (developer) documentation available on how to make it work.
At least i dont have a clue how it works and how we can support it from mediaportal. I also didnt see any documentation, sdks, apis or whatever which tells me as a developer how to make this happen.
Without such documentation we cannot add support for it.

Frodo

[dmeglio]

Not completely true. For our NA friends we have added
- support for ATSC
- support for NA DVB-S

Well I guess you're not from NA. ATSC is great... if you live in a city. Where I live, I don't receive a single (analog or digital) over the air. The vast majority of land in the US is rural, not city. I assume there are many millions of people in the same boat as I am. DVB-S... from what I've read it's only supported by 1 of the 2 sat companies here, and most people in the US use cable, not satellite.

Besides this the MCE blaster is nowin SVN to remote-control STBs

That's great... But Firewire is 10x better. There is a command line program by Tim Moore to channel change by Firewire (FireSTB). Perhaps I'll try to make a plugin to call his exe. But there must be a better way. He figured it out, so there must be an API somewhere... I know the channel changing is an IEEE standard, maybe I can find some info. But I know he has drivers for most of the STBs out there... Perhaps we can figure it out from his website (I'm willing to do as much of the leg work as I can). From what I've read the FCP protocol is used to change channels.

At least i dont have a clue how it works and how we can support it from mediaportal.

There are numerous products out there that capture the stream. CapDVHS is one (Firewire STB output works on the DVHS protocol from what I've read)

If there is at least interest in this from the developer side, I'd be glad to do what I can. I've never done much programming with hardware interaction, but I'm very familiar with C# and I'll provide as much support as I can. I'm guessing by your response, if I find the info that makes this feasible you guys will definitely consider it!

[dmeglio]

I did a little more homework. The 1394TA has defined a specification for the features that enable channel changing:
2002009 AV/C Panel Subunit Specification 1.21

I've yet to find a copy of this document on line, but http://1394ta.com/technology/specifi...s_by_title.htm lists a contact person. They have all of the AV/C documents listed there, but I'm unsure which one would allow firewire recording. But, I think, if possible, channel changing would be a great first step. MP would be the first media center app with builtin firewire tuning. I can assure you that this alone would grow the US/Canada userbase.

[dmeglio]

Well I think I may have figured out how to do the channel changing. I might try to hack up a dirty plugin. But I doubt it will be clean since I know almost nothing about MPs plugin interface. Hopefully if I get my part working someone can clean up the plugin/find a way to integrate it into MP better. First though I need to get my cable co to activate my firewire port!

If anyone is interested, I intend to use the Firewire drivers that Tim M Moore distributes with his FireSTB. Then I'll use DirectShow to send raw AV/C commands to the device. Libavc1394 (linux) happens to have a list of all the commands that I need for the Panel subunit so I think this is doable. I wanna give it a try but I have no DirectShow programming experience. So if someone out there wishes to do it first, feel free!

[edraven]

I'm very interested in this as well. There is a way to get it going for MCE, but it's very very hacky. It also causes my machine to freak out and start changing channels all over the place and recording distorted video about once a week, and that's when it works at all: http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/firewire/readme.htm

[dmeglio]

Yup, that's the program I'm talking about. I'm about 60% confident I can at least get Firewire channel changing working. Recording will be more difficult. First I need to get my cable co to give me a working 1394 box!

[mvaughn]

Hi dmeglio, are there any new advancements on your firewire experiments?

[dvdfreak]

Originally Posted by mvaughn

Hi dmeglio, are there any new advancements on your firewire experiments?

A few weeks ago I started on an ExeTuner plugin for TVE3 that allows you to run a command-line tool whenever a channel-change is required. This makes it extremely flexible to control any kind of device, as long as you can find/make an EXE or BAT to change channels.

It's more or less done, but I did not find the time to test it all out.

But if anyone wants to try it out, I can upload the source to the forum? And if the plugin works as it should it could be included in SVN.

[and-81]

I've already made & uploaded a plugin to do this some time ago ... TV3ExtChannelChanger is in the download section and in plugin SVN, check it out.

Cheers,