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

nice! pvrblog had a little snipppet about the tivo series 3 being showed at ces. tivolovers has a longer post with some pictures. there’s the ability to add an external sata drive for expanded storage, but internally it’s still using pata. there sounds like there will be 6 tuners overall but you’ll only be able to record from 2 inputs at the same time. i’m sure hd will kill off any hope of a decent ratio between shows and storage. i don’t have an hd capable tv so i still won’t have to worry about that for awhile anyhow.

i wonder if tivo will continue to be as hack friendly as they have been.

i love my tivo series 2, i upgraded the 40gb harddrive to i think a 120gb or something harddrive. there were some limitations to the kernel that the series 2 was using, but man is it nice to see a consumer product that is well executed using linux. i’m sure there’s plenty of crap at ces that i’m gonna be blowing my cash on.

the only thing that’s going to keep me from continuing to use tivo will be some mac pvr implementation. we’ll see what happens at the 2006 macworld expo.