i’m trying another last ditch effort to figure out if it’s possible to capture tv via firewire on the scientific atlanta explorer 4250HDC that i have.

checking the mythtv twiki i don’t find anything for 4250, but i do find something for the 3250:

New Feature(Fire Wire Capture)
Myth now supports capture of MPEG-TS streams via Fire Wire from Fire Wire-enabled cable boxes. It has been tested on set-top models DCT-6200 and SA 3250 thus far. libraw1394 version 1.1.0+ (www.linux1394.org) and libiec61883 svn revision 49+ (svn://svn.linux1394.org/libiec61883) are required to use this feature. Only external channel changing is supported at this point, but most everything (livetv/recording/ff/etc) else should be working. [ here ]

i also found a searchable mailling list archive for mythtv-users @ gossamer-threads.com where a search for 4250 bring up a few hits… there’s also a mythtv googlegroup. there’s all the places to look for help, time to start stepping through the firewire howto’s at the mythtv wiki & ubuntu community documentationt.

Note: Fedora 7 and anything running kernel 2.6.22 or greater uses the new firewire architecture that is INCOMPATIBLE with MythTV, please check the end of this section for a way to compile the old drivers [mythtv wiki]

sweet…. i’m really not liking the 2.6.22-14 kernel that’s coming with ubuntu 7.10. first issues w/ the 2.6.22 kernel & the scheduler and now my mythtv box isn’t able to do stuff an older ubuntu distro could do. hrm….. step #13 has instructions on compiling libraw1394, but my makefile looks pretty much like the example so i don’t think that’ll work in my case.

hrmph. i guess it’s time to switch out the mythtv system drive and pop in a spare. i’m going to have to think about what distro to go with since i’ll probably rebuild the current box as a mythtv only box vs the workhorse it currently is. i do have a few older kernels sitting on the box that i might try to revert to. one of them hopefully has working firewire support.

$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep ^title | grep -v recovery | grep -v memtest
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-386
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.20-16-386
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.17-11-386
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.17-11-generic