Talk:FireWire

this is all technically not needed. Motorola boxes should be set up with broadcast connection and 400mbps. If channel tuning fails, use the 6200ch in the contrib folder and specify the "new" method.--Steveadeff 22:22, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry Steve, but I've been using 6200ch since you recommended it and still have had to fiddle with the plugctl script at least once to restore connectivity with one of my two cable boxes. (Sadly, the number of (infrequent, but still annoying) failed channel changes hasn't gone down, either.) YLee 16:35, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

YLee, you need to set it to Broadcast/400mbps, shutdown the mythbox, unplug the cable box and then turn them all back on. This should fix any issues with streaming data from the box. As to channel tuning, I can't understand whats wrong unless your not passing the correct parameters to 6200ch. It has two possible methods, one is how Myth changes channels internally, the other is a different method only found in 6200ch. If neither work and your setting the node,etc correct then all I can think is that there is something wrong with your box.--Steveadeff 14:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that 6200ch isn't an entirely out-of-the-box solution, anyway; you still need to specify the node with -n in a multibox situation. You don't actually have more than one FireWire cable box, do you? If you did I bet you'd run into the (for example) "both boxes can't be on broadcast" issue.YLee 16:37, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the update SlicerDicer. I got this working last night, then it went to ashes. I still have no issues whatsoever using test-mpeg2 -r 0 >file.mpg and simultaneously running mplayer file.mpg. This works perfectly! Every once in a while, mythtv will work perfectly, too, but it eventually just starts showing me all sorts of mpeg2 decoding errors (invalid motion errors, others about specific types of frames, etc.), playback glitches, and the machine's load goes through 7 or 8 with near 100% cpu use. The only configuration I have gotten this working for any period of time with is using kernel 2.6.16.9, custom-built to compile in the options you show in this page. It is worth noting that I cannot get firewire capture to work, even with test-mpeg2, if I leave out ethernet over firewire. This is sort of annoying because I use modules for my regular ethernet devices, and ethernet over firewire being built into the kernel becomes eth0, forcing me to renumber my regular ethernet devices. At this point I am beginning to suspect a timing issue within mythfrontend that is chewing cpu and degrading interrupt handling (ultimately creating problems for the firewire transfer). I'm seeing enough reports from others on mythtv-users about high cpu usage I believe something else is going on here. In fact, I am unable to get back to a configuration where I can play 720p without consuming 97% cpu, which is absolutely crazy, since the AMD64 hardware I'm using is much more capable than my old Athlon XP k7 hardware, which could play 720p without breaking a sweat. --mmead 13:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Mmead, this is due to a bug in the kernel firewire driver, 2.6.16.9 may have a fix for this, I haven't kept up to date on their progress in fixing the bug.--Steveadeff 14:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)