I would try to troubleshoot this more and uninstall the HD card and see what happens then. And which firewireSTB are you using? The original or the beta? Try the other version as well and see what happens. I am not an expert in this but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Seriously though I have years of Senior Level Dial-up techsupport under my belt. I would try things in different configurations and see what happens. Post the results so others can see what you tried and did and maybe Tim (if he ever shows back up here) or some other tech minded person might be able to work a fix in or something.

So I found a pattern wiht my problems.  1080i streams record, but 720p do not.  I managed to fix my problems with CBS and NBC, which are 1080i.  Fox and ABC don't record.  This is with 5C off.  Even in CapDVHS I don't get any info when I try to record 720p and the resulting mpg is blank.  Anyone else see this problem with the 6412?

guy's, here an email from tim!!!!!!  HE IS ALIVE and not locked in some dark MS dungen....  lol

No, work suddenly turned very busy and between it and home stuff I had no
time at all.
I thought work was only going to be 2-3 weeks but it ended up being a lot
longer that that. I have a couple of issues to complete but this time it
should only be a couple of days.
I started looking at the firewire stuff again this weekend but I found it
broke when I upgraded from the beta visual studio 2005 to RTM and ended up
spending the weekend fixing it rather than doing anything new.
I dont look at this email account very often, ************* is the
best way to get hold of me.

Tim

>From: "Shane M Woodward" <celicagt1993@msn.com>
>To: <timmmoore@hotmail.com>
>Subject: you still alive, or has MS put a stop to you...  lol
>Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 22:39:52 -0600
>
>you still around, I've seen you pop on here and there....  did MS make you
>stop your work?

Wheee! There is a god! Glad to find out Tim isn't dead, or completely abonded this project.

Our patience will surely no doubt pay off.

Whew...that's the best news I've heard in a long time!  Thanks for sharing it!

ghostlobster.  I am having exactly the same troubles as you, except I am using a Linksys Extender.

Now Tim seems to risen from the dead maybe we can get this fixed.  FYI I am using the Beta vesrion.

Tim.  Let us know how we can help test out anything new you develop.

I would also like to talk to you about integrating this tool into a package of tools that I want distribute with new Media PC systems.  Let's talk.

Maybe set this up on Sourceforge to help it gain some momentum and you some donations  

Converting firewire-saved DVR-MS files to WMV?  I've tried several tools that convert DVR-MS files to WMV.  NONE of them work with the DVR-MS files captured with Timm's tool however.  The captures play just fine, but I can't convert or edit them.  I've successfully used this tools on non-firewire captures several times.

Am I just missing something or does this just not work?  If it doesn't work, why doesn't it?  It kinda sucks to have to choose between good quality recordings with commercials and bad quality without .

I've tried DCut, DVR2WMV, and DVRMSToolbox.

Let me know,

Thanks 

Use VideoReDo. Guranteed works, absolutely an amazing app. Well worth the money.

www.videoredo.com

Cheers,

Tuner not recognized with beta in MyTray

Uninstalled original firewire sw.

Installed firewirebeta.zip

With the beta channel changing on STB works with channel.exe but MyTray does not recognize either tuner of my Hauppage 500 card.

Had been working, sporadically, with the original firewire.zip.

Tips, pointers to other parts of this long (and difficult to search) thread?

Thanks in advance,

Ken

editing/converting dvr-ms: VideoRedo... I tried every single freeware software available to do this and unfortunately, VideoRedo comes the closest to actually working good. I found that with saving as a .ts and maintain the ac3 audio stream MCE doesn't like the file. The same file can be streamed to my Avel LinkPlayer2 and it plays just fine. But then again, I could have had some driver conflicts. I just reinstalled MCE and have yet to set VRD back up to check and see... I will let you know.

To Tim: Glad to hear you are around still. Maybe you could look into an earlier suggestion and see about building the FireWireSTB into a fake tuner for MCE? I could definitely see how this could work. And I for one would be willing to send a 'donation' for this freeware. And if I found it on the net as ShareWare, I would definitely purchase it

 

I don't save them as .ts for just that reason. I use the Nvidia PureVideo Decoder since I have a 6600GT (wicked good HD acceleration only about 30% CPU) and they actually have a specidifc KB article saying that .ts playback is hit n' miss with MCE 2005.

What you can do, and it's what I do, is just save them as .mpeg's... completely playable in MCE (no issues whatsoever) and they are still HD w/ their original AC3 audio.

Hope that helps,

Question for those using firestb with Seattle Digital Comcast:  Are HBO/HBO-HD encrypted over 1394?  My expectation is yes, but I thought I'd check anyway. 

Thanks.

Hi all, long time admirer of this process, and just got set up myself tonight!

KeithL: I recorded a bit of that Bryant Gumbel sports program using firewire tonight off of HBOHD (549) using Seattle (Bellevue, actually) Comcast, over the firewire port.  So, that program, at least, is not 5C.  I don't know about movies or other programs, but obviously not all of HBOHD is 5C encrypted, and possibly nothing is.

Whew!  With Ghostlobster's help, I've managed to get up and running.  Right now, I'm just using a single tuner, with a single HD set-top box, over firewire.  Seems to be working well, even using my Xbox360 MCX (except I can't watch 'fire' recordings until they've completed - probably only an annoyance until I get a sufficient backlog of recorded television, or until tim fixes it ).

For those of you messing around with the DVR-MS toolbox, I managed to get the "commercial skip" portion of the package working.  All it does is post-process a file, determine where the commercials are, and then write out a tiny XML file that marks the commercial start/end points.  It does not re-encode, or actually remove commercials. 

But you can use the commercial skip addon (even over MCX) to skip past commercials, either automatically or manually.  I prefer manual, as automatic will skip you ahead even while rewinding , and my test of tonight's Daily Show proved somewhat imperfect at commercial detection.  However, it was still very impressive.

Now, I was unable to get the DVR-MS toolbox to properly post-process the firewire recordings (the program barfed on the file), but I was able to get it to post-process the analog one (it took about 3 minutes to run through the daily show).  Then I manually renamed the XML commercials file to match the firewire recording name (added 'fire ' at the front of the filename), and voila, the firewire recording was skipping commercials!  (Even over my 360 MCX!)

Again, it isn't actually editing/scanning the firewire recording, but you can still get commercial information from the analog recording -- and the information should be identical (or close enough for govt. work) in both recordings.

Upcoming tasks:

• get a second STB from Comcast
• dual tuners / dual firewire (and probably turn off firewire channel changing for now)
• get commercial detection up and stable (and automatically copying over the "fire" version of the commercial XML file)
• tuck the whole ugly, kluged mess into a corner somewhere
• bug tim to get HD MCX working, now that he's back

Good luck to everyone trying to get this up and running.  The future is very bright around here!

DCut works great for .dvr-ms files recorded via my analog tuner hooked up to STB via S-Video...it does exactly what I want...I can edit out the commercials and save to a WMV...which saves me a lot of space over dvr-ms or mpg.  It however, throws an exception on firewire-captured video with the following error text:

 

"1/18/2006 6:27 AM: Begining work for file F:\Recorded TV\Fire Ben Franklin_HISTP_17_01_2006_23_58_00.dvr-ms, Job ID 76c6d725-40af-4cce-8046-5d1ec3aea77d

So this tells me that not all dvr-ms files are created alike.  I've had similar results with DVRMSToolbox and DVR2WMV as well. I also see that the non-firewire dvr-ms captured at 6.4 GBs versus 2.7, so again, they're obviously not created equal (not sure why the firewire version would be so much smaller, especially since it's actually a nicer picture than analog).

My questions:

• What's different about the firewire capture .dvr-ms from the analog S-Video captured .dvr-ms?  Why is the firewire one so much smaller?
• Can I edit the commercials out of the firewire-captured one with some product (I know I can on the non-firewire captured ones)?
• Can I convert the firewire one to mpg at least (as I know I can convert from mpg to wmv) with some product?  Maybe VideoRedo will at least do this for me.
• Can I convert the firewire one to wmv (preferred option as it's significantly smaller) with some product?  DCut converts non-firewire captures fine, but pukes on firewire captured ones.
• Am I stuck with just having the DVR-MS firewire file as is, not being able to convert or edit it? 
• Has anyone used "PowerCompress"...maybe that would do the trick?  I'm certainly not averse to paying for a tool, I just want to find one that does what I want.

 

Any help appreciated.  Thanks!

The firewire recordings are only smaller when you're using a digital SDTV source, this is because they are encoded more efficiently than what a consumer level MPEG encoder can do right now. When you're recording via firewire, there is no encoding/conversion going on, the data is just streamed to your hard drive, so your quality should be identical to live DTV. This is probably related somehow to the fact that you can't edit them.