[mythtv-users] Serial STB Control oddness (directv.pl)

[jedi]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 07:33:44AM -0400, Mark Buechler wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:07 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >   I just recently put a recorder online that is attached
> > to an HD DirecTV. Box. For the most part it is an identical
> > setup to another box I have. Although the models are slightly
> > diffferent. They are both HD.
> >
> >   The peculiar bit is that I started having trouble tuning
> > the newer STB. So I beefed up my channel change script and
> > added some logging and it turns out that very frequently
> > I have to try twice to get the channel changed. Oh, this
> > script will be more persistent than that. Although I've only
> > seen that I need to retry it once.
> >
> >   Has anyone else experienced other serial control oddities?
> >
> >   Will MythTV retry on it's own if you generate useful error
> > codes?
> >
> 
> First try increasing the delays at the top of the script
> ($sd_hd_signal_delay and $clear_osd_delay). I believe I use .5 pretty
> successfully. Next try the retries argument. The default is 4, try 8.

    I already came up with something that works. I just try the whole thing
multiple times (directv.pl). If it fails the first time, I just keep trying.
So far I have come across a few occurences of needing to try twice.

    It's useful to log what's going on and to have better visibility on
the failures. It turns out I was having some failures with my first STB
but hadn't really noticed. The failure rate was lower and I was missing
a lot of the shows that had problems. I noticed the failures on the 2nd
STB because I was specifically looking for them.

    I already had a "wrapper" shell script for the perl script. I just
beefed that up a bit to log stuff and to look for failures and rerun the 
perl script.

    The individual tuning failures themselves seem like interesting datapoints.