Cable provider firewire stb capability questions

[mkenyon2]

This is a general question regarding anybody's experience and/or success with Firewire capable set top boxes from cable companies into GBPVR. Specifically USA Comcast folks.

What boxes work?

What do they provide? (Signal thru Firewire or just channel change.)

How'd you do it?

I'd love to step up the cable box abilities in my home.

[mikeh49]

I have captured via FW from a Motorola DCT 6412 box from Charter using the Graphrecorder plugin. Charter apparently does not encrypt any of their digital channels, as far as I can tell; probably different with other cablecos.

Playback has been so-so. GBPVR cannot play the TS files that I capture. Converting to PS has also been so-so; some channels OK and others not. Other programs (capDVHS and VLC) can capture from the box and make TS files that GBPVR can read, but I haven't gotten either of these working for recording from GBPVR. Look for posts by me and carpeVideo to get further information and links to the drivers you need to get firewire capture working. Channel changing works OK, but the Hauppauge blaster worked fine for me so I used that.

Good luck!

[observer_11]

I just got my Motorola 6416 DCT not too long ago so I am relatively new to the STB and GBPVR game, but I have had quite a bit of success so far:

• EPG channels from my STB integrated into GBPVR
• STB firewire drivers installed and tested with VLC
• firewire channel changing working from GBPVR using GraphRecorder
• STB TS stream (firewire) recording and playing back (but not smoothly)

The last point is where I am still at, experimenting with the best codecs, graphs, etc for both capturing and playing back the TS stream from the firewire connection. In fact at the moment the TS video format confuses me.

Couple things to keep in mind:

• you can only use one tuner (even for dual tuner STBs)
• for some providers certain channels remain encrypted (so no FW)
• time-shifted preview may work better than live preview in GraphRecorder

BTW I am in Canada and none of the channels from my local cable provider have that 5C encryption stuff.