Controlling an STB

[harrijay]

I am having one last issue with my sage setup which is for me to get Sage to control my Motorola DCT2500 STB.

My First Option is to configure Sage to contol the STB with a serial cable just like it can do in the windows version. I would like to have the same functionality in linux but I am unable to make or find a .so file that will do this for me. I found the code on Mythtv's site to do this in linux but it makes an EXE but if I run the exe manually it does control the STB just fine without issue. If someone knows how to get this to work I would love to have it work this way.

My next option is that I have a Media Center Edition remote control with IR blaster. I have gotten irsend to transmit the correct codes to my STB and it all works but I am unable to get this to also work in Sage. Not quite sure where to go with this since once again it looks like there is not .so file that I can put in to get this to work.

If neither of these issues can be worked around than I have possibly considered having another machine run the windows version of sage and that controls the STB. I have another machine that is going to be a client in another room but if it has to be a network encoder i can do that. I did try to get this setup and functional The server recognizes the other machine but whenever I try to setup the video source it gives a sage.playbackexception. Kind of stumped on how to get this one working also but this is really the last option and I would not like to go this way if I can have the server do all of the work.

This is really the last final hurdle that I need to get through to have this being my one and only PVR. Other than this one problem Sage is awesome in Linux and very rock solid.

[harrijay]

I take it either no one has any idea on how to do this or any desire to do this?

[_Demo_]

If you can provide the protocol and are willing to test I could probably add support for those.

_Demo_

[harrijay]

I would be more than happy to provide the protocol for these for the DCT serial control executable here is what is included when I get help on the exe

valid channels are 1 - 999
Usage: ./channel [options] [channel]
-p, --port port serial port (default: /dev/ttyS0)
-f, --force keep going after communication errors
-o, --ok send OK after channel number
-b, --blind send keys blindly and ignore returned data
-n, --nopower never attempt to turn box on
-t, --timeout scale scale all timeouts by this much (default 1.0)
-q, --quiet suppress printing of channel on exit
-v, --verbose be verbose (use twice for extra debugging)
-h, --help this help
-V, --version show program version and exit
Interfaces with a DCT-2000 series cable box over RS232.
Changes channel, if one is supplied, and prints it.
With no arguments, prints current channel.
See README for more details.


When I have used it all I have to do is just execute channel and then the number right after so for instance if I was to change to channel 500 I would just do

./channel 500

I can also help with getting irsend to work in sage but this is all the time that I have for right now. if you would like any information on that let me know and I can get that info together

Let me know if there is any other info I can provide. thanks for all your help

[_Demo_]

Sorry about that. What I meant is the serial protocol not the interface to the program.

Thanks

_Demo_

[harrijay]

Is there any possibility we can get some type of generic tuner plugin support? So we can have a spot where we just cell an Executable with command line options maybe configurable via an ini file . This would make it easier to add tuning support rather than trying to reinvent the wheel everytime we want to add plugin support for linux. The windows version allows for people to make a DLL and then drop it in the correct directory and it works pretty good. Is there some sort of licensing issue or other restrictions I am not aware of stopping this from happening? I can run the channel exe in debug mode so I can get a dump of what is sent out the serial port for each number.