I picked up a Motorola DCT6200 digital cable box from Comcast. Connected it to my Myth box via FireWire and it works great. By compiling 6200ch.c located in the "contrib" directory Myth is able to change channels on the 6200. You of course need to compile Myth with ieee1394 support which is dependent on several ieee1394 libraries. libraw1394 and libiec61883 are two libraries you need that I can think of off the top of my head but there may be more. Anyone know any more? Also, you need ieee1394 support compiled into the kernel. Once I got all the libraries compiled and installed and the kernel compiled with ieee1394 support it was a simple matter of plugging in the 6200. Amazingly it just worked! Your milage will of course vary depending on which distro of Linux you're running as to the ease of getting dependencies installed. I use Gentoo and because of their Portage package manager found it fairly easy to get things compiled, installed, configured, and running.
The nice thing I've found about running FireWire from the digital cable box is that since there's no need for an analog to digital conversion the hit of the CPU is very small. On the p3 733 I run Myth on capturing video uses roughly 3% of the CPU. I assume the same is true for capture cards but having never used one I can't say for sure. I can run MythFrontend on Mac OS X and watch live or recorded TV over my network as well as change channels by typing them on the keyboard. I also created a Samba share for the directory Myth save the video to whick allows me to copy recorded progams to other computers. Very slick. >Having just gotten my myth box running using analog cable and a pvr >350, I'd like to now bring my digital cable box into the fold. But, I >don't want to deal with lirc if at all possible. So I'm wondering >about the viability of using firewire. How easy is this and what's >the prognosis for supporting channel changing over firewire via myth >in the near future? _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
