Win7, HD PVR, SA3250HD and FireWire oh my

[MacDaddy]

I thought I would share some of my adventures in setting up a new Win7 SageTV machine so that others could benefit from some of my "self inflected educational moments". I don't have the eloquence or style of Brent, so please bear with my wandering.

The primary objective was to take my new system configuration and layer on Win7, SageTV and associated capture devices. In this case, getting my SA3250HD setup cable box to play nice with firewire channel changing and the HD PVR capture. I still have some HDHRs to go, but I'll take a crack at them in another post.

To do this properly you will need some basic tools: screwdrivers, needle nose pliers, nerve juice (I prefer Patron tequila).

Step 1 - put the bits togther. I haven't had the build too long, but I can recommend it to anyone wanting to follow in my footsteps. Celebrate this step by taking some nerve juice.

Step 2 - load the OS. If you're going to use firewire channel changing, then you are trapped with 32bit Win7. It's a basic vanilla loading process, however one thing to remember if you happen to be loading on a SSD is the 100MB System Reserve. I've tried to leave a little wiggle room for the stuff going on the SSD. I have a Seagate 1TB drive that will hold all my transient video recordings. By allowing the System Reserve to be on the conventional drive you can get an extra 100MB back for your SSD. I decided to turn off UAC to avoid potential hiccups with future software installs. This is a dedicated Sage machine with no surfing that I felt minimal threat, but do so at your own risk. Take some nerve juice.

Step 3 - install firewire. I chose a MB without onboard firewire. I thought a cheap little adapter would do the trick and most came with multiple ports in case I got the itch to control more STBs in the future. The good news in Win7 is you get a nice new enhanced firewire driver by default. The bad news is most of the STBs (and certainly my SA3250HD) don't habla the new firewire. See this post on how to get the firewire driver in Legacy mode to make your channel change work. Now's a good time for some more nerve juice.

Step 4 - install firewire drivers. There are a good number of options out there, but I stuck with the firestb-vistarc1 (not the XP flavor) from the Tim Moore work (look for it in the Downloads section). The ExDeus drivers are an alternative to the Tim Moore drivers and have a good write-up to show the general approach for Vista (only I did not have good luck using their driver set under Win7). Make sure to disable the two entries that show up under the Other Devices entry. Just install drivers for now. We'll come back for the rest in later steps. Don't forget the nerve juice.

Step 5 - STB/channel changing configuration. You should have a channel.exe installed in the Tim Moore directory. Bring up a CMD box and run it according to Meinmaui's write-up to discover the specifics on your STB. Now is a good time to bring in SageChanger if you want to have some enhanced power abilities. I put SageChanger in the same timmmoore directory with the others. I had to use the "-f 2" option for my particular SA3250HD. YMMV. You should be able to see channel numbers show up on your STB display when you run channel/SageChanger. Nerve juice intermission.

Step 6 - HD PVR setup. I use TME for a number of things outside of Sage. To get to the latest upgrades, I had to start with my original HD PVR install disk and let it go through the upgrade cycle. I had trouble with the latest WMC driver 1.5.7.0 on the Hauppage site (bad capture on high bitrate stations with Dolby 5.1) . I used the 1.5.6.1 from SHS with excellent results. Make sure you are plugging in to a high speed (not full speed) USB 2.0 port. Connect your component cable to the STB and fire up TME to see if you can get a good capture (you can even start a CMD box to run your SageChanger for the channel to watch). If you made it so far, some nerve juice is in order.

Step 7 - ExeMultiTuner plugin. Meinmaui's good write-up from the STB/Channel changing step is used now. I kept SageChanger in the default MCE 2005 directory from the Tim Moore driver install. My registry entry looked like "C:\Program Files\Timmmoore\MCE 2005 STB Controller\sagechanger -n 8c0abc921600 -c %CHANNEL% -f 2 -p" which is a little different from the standard approach. Make sure you set up the right *.ir file for the device number of your STB. Mine was device 2, so I had to make the changes to StubDevice.ir file and move in to the SageTV/Common/EXEMultiTunerPlugin directory. If you are doing a clean install of Sage, then it will be easy to spot the ExeMultiTuner in the sage.properties files. If you have a few capture devices installed already, now is the time to look at sage.properties and find all the "mmc" entries. Make note of all the existing encoder numbers. Free your mind with some more nerve juice.

Step 8 - SageTV HD PVR config. At this point I was on a clean install of Sage, but YMMV. I selected the HD PVR Capture Device Component + SPDIF as my source. When it asked about the tuner control I selected the EXEMultiTunerPlugin. Complete the channel setup and then save the source and exit SageTV. Follow Meinmaui's instructions to modify the sage.properties file for the newly added encoder in the mmc section. Look for mmc/encoders entry that has device_name=StubDevice. This is where you replace "StubDevice" with the number of the .ir file created earlier (2 in my case). Save the sage.properties file and restart SageTV. You should now be able to select from the program guide and watch the selection. Change the channel to see if channel changing works. Celebrate with some nerve juice.

Step 9 - Wake up. Remove your drooling face from the keyboard. You've had too much nerve juice and the beeping is annoying the cat. Get some sleep and come back later for the HDHR adventure. Nerve juice optional.