David Engel wrote: >On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 10:57:56PM -0500, David Engel wrote: > > >>No, I could get FR_HAS_LOCK. However, the signal was always 0000 and >>any attempts to actually capture anything resulted in a TS stream >>where mplayer couldn't find any video. >> >> >I have to backtrack a little on this. > >Just for grins, I did a rescan for QAM256 on my cable last night. I >found 7 services, 4 of which had non-0 video pids. I tried tuning >them but still got a signal strength of 0000. I tried a capture on a >few of them anyway, and surpisingly, got something. Mac, is the >signal strength checking in the Fusion 5 driver known to work? > > David, You must have missed the email that Mac sent rather recently, explaining that signal strength DOES work, but Mac isn't yet happy with the return values. Currently, the driver is hard-coded to ALWAYS return 0. It is probably better off that Mac chose to do this, because it would be worse if it were reporting a signal strength value that meant absolutely nothing, and to have the unit-scale of nothingness change with each driver revision. ... and I quote: <<from mac michaels: This is because I have not found a method to generate a signal strength that I like. Signal strength is not directly available from the lgdt330x chip. The driver always returns 0. >> Mac, is there anything that I can do to help you get this feature implemented? Is there any info that you need that someone reading this list might be able to provide? David, If you are getting a LOCK, then this means that you are locking onto the frequency correctly, but that the data is encrypted, and cannot be handled by the driver. >I didn't recognize the programs nor channels I captured. After >unsuccessfully trying to capture some video pid 0 services, I went >back and was no longer able to find any video. It was late so I >didn't do any more. > > > Ah, so now you ARE getting a picture... this is good. I have some similar experience to what you are getting. My cable company offers ON-DEMAND. This is a method in which the customer can use the GUI built-in to the provided set-top-box to choose video content provided by the cable company to watch at the customer's choosing. I have noticed that there are certain unencrypted channels that seem to carry HDTV content that is not currently being offered by any standard cable channels... I have discovered that this content is actually an ON-DEMAND session being watched by someone that must live somewhere nearby. I have even noticed the stream pause and rewind sometimes. It is possible that this is what you are seeing on these other channels. >I'm not terribly optimistic, but I guess this warrants a more thorough >examination of every service I can detect. > > Be optimistic... The driver is working for you. The only problem is that your cable company is encrypting too many channels. I've noticed that there are some DVB drivers that are able to watch encrypted content. From what I understand, this is something that is enabled at the hardware level, and the DViCO boards do not support this. I wish this were not the case...... hopefully someone will eventually prove this wrong, althought the FCC isn't going to like that idea. -MiKE
