firewire cable box id by GUID instead of node/plug

[jcrandall@…]

I run a mythtv box with a DCT-6200 firewire cable box, and I find that from time to time I have to shut down mythtv, run mythtv-setup, and change the plug (usually between 0, 1, 2) because the box or firewire bus has been reset and assigned a different id.

Luckily, it is very easy to fix this problem, I just run plugreport and it tells me where the box is now located.

Does anyone see a reason why we could not implement a function similar to that of plugreport that scans the firewire bus and tries to locate the cable box? We could then have an option in mythtv-setup to just set the cable box GUID rather than the node/plug.

We could even add a function to the mythtv-setup page that allows for automatic setting of the GUID for the first (potential) cable box found. This would also be a good step towards potentially supporting differences in cable box capabilities in the future, since at the same time we could probably detect which type of box the GUID is for.

I think that having to set node/plug is a major drawback to the firewire functionality of mythtv, and that having it handled more automatically would greatly enhance usability and reliability.

As we make these changes, we could presumably also add some more sane initialization to the firewire connection, such that having to do things like:

"plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=1" (from the wiki)

are not necessary to get it to work.

I'd be happy to work on coding this up, unless it is already being worked on...

[danielk]

Please post this to the mythtv-dev list, not in the bug reporter