BTV user Test Driving Sage needs help with serial tuning

[Bigbird999]

I am a BTV user test driving Sage for the last week. For a bunch of reasons Sage might be what I need on my all purpose computer that I use to watch TV on a secondary display while I work. I also record the occasional show when there are conflicts with my single tuner BTV box. I have been using the ATI MMC with my Theater 550 tuner to do this, but they have so totally broken the software that it is almost unusable (but that is a topic for another day). The source form my 550 tuner is Svideo and RCA audio from a Motorola dct 2500 (I think).

I don't have an IR Blaster on this machine so I have been using the STB remote to change channels manually. Sage TV seems to be ideal so far. I have managed to get it configured for my use, the EPG is correct, show all my channels and I have test recorded a bunch of shows (manually tuning the STB).

I know I can add an IR Blaster (I have a USB IRT on my BTV box) but since the STB has a serial connector I decided to try serial tuning and got a $9 serial cable. Despite a couple of days of searching here and the web , I can't seem to figure out how to put it all together and get it going. I am not even sure if my STB serial port is activated (I am on Cogeco in Halton region, west of Toronto) and can find no way to test/find out if it is.

Can somebody walk me through the process of setting up serial tuning or send me somewhere where it is laid out step by step in some kind of idiot proof format? FWIW, I have down loaded exetunerplugin.zip and MultiDCTtuner_1_2.zip but I can't even understand the steps in the readme file. Maybe it is just the different terminology used in Sage vs BTV but I am stumped and running out of "test Drive" time (it just reminded me I have 6 days left).

Thanks for any help.

BB

Edit 8:37 pmWOOT!!!!!!! Stumbled around a bit more, found a post about editing a log file to get rid of Frey's references and figured out how to set up the source. And it now works!!!! Doing more testing. Looking good so far. Back to watching NCIS

BB