Connecting Digital Cable Box through FireWire

[bigbus01]

Anyone tried this with a Scientific-Atlanta 3250HD. I can change channels but can't record HD or SD. It either locks up my PC or just quits (for CapDVHS and VLC). Also, I get a zero file size.

Thanks,

Bigbus

[wtg]

If it's locking up your PC, it sounds like the driver problem.

[bigbus01]

I messed with Comcast HD on demand and got that to record (for about 15 seconds). Looks like it is encrypted channels.

Bigbus

[philljones]

I'm thinking of moving over from sage to GBPVR for a couple of reasons but inadequate digital cable support is one of them. Having said that firewire HD is quite mature over at sage and they have an optimized way of recording that doesn't use VLC but graphedit, which I believe uses less overhead and is, at any rate simpler to use.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/forum...1132588727

Skip down to the section on testing HD capture. You just build the worlds simplest graph: cable box to dump file and push play. Then playback the resulting file in media player of your choice. There's a widget called sgraphrecorder, which seem a little like ubu's external recording program which runs the graph and pipes the data from the dummy HD capture file to a file of the right filename.

Can GBPVR be used with graphedit or ExternalRecording be made to run and stop a graph? I think this might be a simpler, more robust and more elegant solution than using VLC.

One reason I'm getting fed up with sage is that for some channels, there's 5c encryption which prevents firewire capture. For those, it is of course possible to record over S-video but then you have to set up two 'sources' inside sage. There's no way to tell sage that the two sources are actually the same cable box so it won't resolve recording conflicts and will try to record two shows simultaneously if one is on a firewire channel and one on a s-video channel. Is this problem resolvable in GBPVR?

[dark_half]

There's no way to tell sage that the two sources are actually the same cable box so it won't resolve recording conflicts and will try to record two shows simultaneously if one is on a firewire channel and one on a s-video channel. Is this problem resolvable in GBPVR?

I may be wrong but I do not think you will be able to solve this in GBPVR. As far as I know you would still have the same problem you are describing. At this point I think you would be better of buying a dedicated qam tuner like the HDHomeRun or OnAir USB HDTV GT.

[wtg]

STB's output some channels over firewire that are otherwise encrypted, so there's still an advantage to firewire recording.

For instance, my TNT-HD channel is encrypted over QAM so I can't record it with my HDHomeRun but it's unencrypted over firewire, so I can still record it this way.

[philljones]

Oh, well it was worth a try.

I don't want to buy an external tuner as I don't know which channels are QAM unencrypted and renting a second STD is more expensive than renting a DVR from comcast, which makes it a silly solution.