Difference between revisions of "Motorola DCT-25xx"

Revision as of 19:50, 4 April 2007

Here's how I added a Motorola DCT-2524 (from Comcast) cable box to my RedHat Fedora Core 4 MythTV system. I have two PVR-250s (one connected to the cable box, one to 'standard' cable) and an HD5000 for OTA HD broadcasts.

I am controlling the DCT-2524 via its serial port.

First, make sure your distribution recognizes any installed serial ports (I can't imagine any modern distribution doesn't):

$ ls -la /dev/ttyS*

you should get something like: crw-rw-rw- 1 root uucp 4, 64 Jun 7 14:22 /dev/ttyS0

I am using the script included in MythTV (currently using 0.19) to allow MythTV to change channels at /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.19/contrib/channel_changers

To unpack and test:

$ cd /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.19/contrib/channel_changers
su
# tar -xjf dct-channel.tar.bz2
# cd dct-channel
# make
# ./channel 12 (make sure the channel exists!!)

This should have caused your cable box to change the channel to 12.

To install:

# make install

I received the following error, which I ignored: "install: cannot create regular file `/usr/local/man/man1': No such file or directory"

I changed the permissions on the serial port so that users other than root can use it:

# chmod 666 /dev/ttyS0

Go to labs.zap2it.com and log-in. I added an additional lineup to my existing account using a different nearby zip code to differentiate between my standard cable lineup and my digital cable lineup.

To add the new line up to my system:

 # mythtvsetup (may not need to be root, I do or my HD5000 doesn't show up, not really needed for this...)

• select new video source
• name it something descriptive (eg comcast_digital)
• enter your zap2it username and password
• select retrieve line-ups
• select the correct new digital line up (the one with a different zip code)
• go to input connections
• select the input connection it's connected to
• change video source to whatever you named your new digital source (comcast_digital)

For the external channel command, type in:

 /usr/local/bin/channel

you probably should set the tuner to 3 or 4 based on whatever your cable box is set for (I had difficulty with this for some reason, I ended up having to leave it blank to get it to work... go figure)

• select finish
• exit and run mythfilldatabase

I then went to: http://your.mythtv.box.ip.or.dns.name/mythweb/settings/channels and unchecked the 'visible' box for all the channels I don't get or don't care about...

Hope this helps someone!! --Displacedtexan 22:22, 7 June 2006 (UTC)