Motorola Firewire Freakout

[scoful]

Yesterday I noticed that some of my HD recordings were just a black screen. My first reaction was that my cable company must have blocked the firewire on some of the channels. A quick look and it appeared that my local channels were working, while HBO, Cinemax, UHD etc. were not.
These channels were working on component output.

Then I tried to switch to FoodHD - which had an infomercial on. I was shocked to see that it too wasn't working. Further investigation proved that merely changing channels seemed to cause the problem.

I loaded up graphedit and every channel played fine (actually better than it ever does in Sage for that matter).

I'm not sure what's going on here and what might have changed. I presume that if I can watch it in the graph it should record.

Anybody else having this problem?

[scoful]

Should have mentioned - Sage is version 6.3.159.

[scoful]

After experimenting late last night into early morning I have found a workaround for this. It appears that my cable company has performed a software update on my STB at some point. I am not sure when this happened - since I don't usually see the normal STB output.

What I found was that if I sent the channel change request twice in a row it seemed significantly more reliable. I created a batch file to send the channel change command twice and set my sgraph.ini to call the batch file instead and dump the graph on channel changes. A small delay is required between the channel requests or it gets confused. I found that adding another delay after the second channel change request and it seems to work every time, every channel. I ultimately ended up using Paul Sadowski's command line tools as follows:

MIN
CHANNELW -v 2 %1
SLEEP 1
CHANNELW -v 2 %1
SLEEP 1
EXIT

The big downside is that channel changes are significantly slower than they used to be.

It appeared from my sgraph debug that sgraph was doing everything it was supposed to do but that the graph itself was failing. The channel would change and the output file would be created but would stay at 0 bytes. The graph itself seemed to have problems creating the dump file sporatically when I ran it manually. I did try different graphs with no change in results.

Hope this helps anyone else.....