Digital Cable TV from Set-Top-Box over Firewire?

[warden_wolf]

Hi, I'm new to this program, but it looks like it may be capable of what I am needing. I am trying to get the MPEG2-TS stream that comes across my Cable lines into my computer so I can view it directly (recording would be nice, but not essential). In fact, I have spoken extensively with my cable company about this, and they have talked to Motorola (who makes the set-top-boxes they use) and nobody has ever heard of anyone trying this, but they all agree it should be doable. So, at some point next week, they are all going to converge on my appartment to try this out. I have a Firewire card from Adaptec with a TI chipset, and my computer is powerful enough to handle decoding MPEG2 all the way up to at least 720p, probable 1080i too. So, I'm just looking for a way to "see" the MPEG2-TS stream that will come over the firewire connection. I was hoping that, since VideoLAN is designed to handle streaming video, it might be able to do this? I just need to know how to set it up to get a stream over the firewire interface...
If anyone out there has done this, or knows the theory behind it, I would greatly appreciate some help/advice. Thanks in advance!

[Sigmund]

search the forum and elsewhere for sony microMV. These cameras produce mpeg2-ts and is connectable through firewire. perhaps you could play-pretend this set-top box is such a camera?

[calinb]

Yes, some of us are doing this. Live pause anyone:

viewtopic.php?t=4351

Check out the HDTV recording stickies on the AVSforum too.

[solbergn]

Hey,
I'm pretty new to this whole thing aswell, but here's what I'm doing and my experience.

I've got a Motorola DCT-6200 with firmware 7.15 from Charter Communications in Boone, NC. Running Windows XP SP2, I installed the driver like AVSForums told us all to. I fired up the VLC, ran the streaming wizard, and got perfet sound, but not so perfect video. I also captured a bit with the capture programs they talk about in that AVS forum, and get the exact same result. The video is very choppy (i.e. VLC reports drawing about 7/100 frames) but the sound is crystal clear 5.1. Here's my rig's specs:

AMD Athlon XP Mobile 2500+ @ 12.5x200 2,500mhz.
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Kingston Hyper-X 2x256mb
MSI GeForce FX 5900XT video card
Western Digital 36.7gb Raptor, WD. 250gb SATA, WD. 40gb JB PATA harddrives (the 40gb is half linux, half XP, raptor is Win2k)
Onboard Firewire from motherboard.

Has anyone had trouble with this type of setup? Maybe I just have gimpy firewire?

I can't wait to start working with you guys on this. Thanks in advance for all the help.

-Nate Solberg

[calinb]

Nate,

I have a Moto 6800 rev. 7.15 from Comcast. I'm running XP Pro sp1 and the drivers as described in AVSForum.

Also ECS L7S7A2 Barton 3000+ running 10.5x (200MHz / 2.1GHz) 34MHz PCI, 1G DDR, Seagate 250G IDE boot drive, Raptor 74G SATA (all for live pause buffering with indexing off, no dynamic disk) el cheapo (Fry's $11) firewire PCI card.

When I first tried VLC 7.2 for capture, it crashed, but I recently tried it again with 8.0 test1 and it worked. DCTRecord and CAPDVHS work fine too. You might try a firewire PCI card (different chip). I'll have a look when I get home but I think mine has the VIA chip.