Turn External Setup Box on from SageTV

[jrfollert]

Sage-TV turns channels just fine, but I want to leave the setup box off and have it only be turned on when sage-tv wants to record. Are there any settings? Its a AT&T U-verse service utilizing a Scientific Atlantic/Cisco IPN330HD

Thanks,

[Fuzzy]

what are you using for the IR blaster? You can probably learn a power on command, and use it as a channel changing prefix.. however, depending on how long it takes to turn on before it can accept a channel command, and whether there are seperate on and off commands, it may not work. I guess teh big question is, what are you trying to accomplish by having them turn off? In most cases, modern STB's never really 'turn off', so there's no real power savings in doing so.

[jrfollert]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

what are you using for the IR blaster? You can probably learn a power on command, and use it as a channel changing prefix.. however, depending on how long it takes to turn on before it can accept a channel command, and whether there are seperate on and off commands, it may not work. I guess teh big question is, what are you trying to accomplish by having them turn off? In most cases, modern STB's never really 'turn off', so there's no real power savings in doing so.

Well I am using a Hauppage IR-blaster and the reason I do not want to leave the box on all the time is there are other boxes on the network and if two are viewing HD, then another box cannot view or record in HD (a U-Verse limitation). Still looking for soem help or work around

Thanks

[paulbeers]

You can set a prefix to your channel changes and that can be anything (for dish Network VIP211's we have to use the select command). With that said (and as Fuzzy stated), you have to be able to give a delay between when that prefix is sent and when the channel change can occur or else your STB won't be up and running.

You might try using one of the external IR blaster programs out there. The Home automation folks have to send all kinds of crazy commands and as long as you use a the plugin that works with them then you could probably do it.

The other issue is that you will also need to issue a command to turn off your STB when it is done recording. That actually is the more difficult issue as I am not sure Sage has any triggers to do that.

[GKusnick]

Another problem you're going to have is that Sage won't have any way of knowing when the other STBs are in use. So there will be times when it will try to record something but the STB refuses to allow it. I'm not familiar with how U-Verse handles this case but I'm guessing you'll probably end up with an hour's worth of error screen instead of the program you wanted.

If you're going to stick with U-Verse, it seems like your most foolproof option might be to replace the U-Verse STBs at your TVs with Sage extenders and do all your TV watching through Sage. Then you could give Sage complete control over two STBs without worrying about powering them on and off to avoid STB conflict.