[olug] MythTV and firewire control of Cox digital cable tuner

[Benjamin Watson]

Now I'm curious as to whether or not you can feed that FireWire out to
some other stream recorder (e.g. configure another "tuner" in Myth)
and record directly from the box.  Any *nix software that can record
directly from FireWire?

Ben

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Brian Roberson <roberson at olug.org> wrote:
> Will Langford wrote:
>>> From reading the Motorola manual for the DCH3416 (my decoder box), it touts
>>> the FireWire and HDMI as being the two preferred digital HD ports for
>>> connecting a TV.
>>>
>>> I walked through the cable box on-screen setup menus but couldn't find
>>> anything referring to FireWire/1394 (but I'm sleepy and could have missed
>>> it).
>>>
>>> Tomorrow I'll call Cox and open a ticket, and tomorrow night I'll play with
>>> the MythTV side to see if it can see anything on the other side of the
>>> cable.
>>>
>>> Dan
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> Just a quick side note.  If it does spit out data via firewire, I believe
>> it's still in an encrypted Transport Stream 'file' (since Cox encrypts
>> everything, I imagine they'd tell the box to encrypt the out going firewire
>> as well).  Not too useful without something to decode it... which doesn't
>> exist afaik.
>>
>> Secondly, yes, you might be able to at least change channels with it.  Do
>> you really wanna blow $30 on a firewire cable just to have faster channel
>> change times as compared to an IR blaster ?.  And be severely limited in
>> cable length?
>>
>
> I have used the firewire port many times before - It is a straight MPEG2
> stream (no encryption)
>
> If you couple this input and a little IR trickery for channel changing,
> you can litterally use the cable box as a tuner card.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>