Hi,
After almost a year without TV (the old VDR box died completely and we didn't bother to rebuild it) it's time to watch some Christmas specials and I've tried to resurrect VDR.
I have it all working ok for our FTA cable channels and VDR works as it should there. For the few subscription channels we have a Hauppauge CI and a Conax CAM and a normal "subscription card". This setup worked well for years before the crash to I assume it should work ok now too.
During startup I see:
CAM 4: module ready CAM 4: Conax 4.00e, 01, 0B00, 04B1 CAM 4: doesn't reply to QUERY - only a single channel can be decrypted
Which looks ok to me. Then I also see a few of these pairs:
CAM 4: module reset CAM 4: module present
Looking into the Setup->CAM menu shows that "CAM 4" is present and is a Conax 4.00. Sometimes I can open the menu for the CAM but usually it fails. When it happens to open and I choose anything from the five entries there nothing ever happens, for some options I see some "Please wait" text and then after a while the menu is closed. So, something isn't right there.
After fiddling with the CA descriptor in channels.conf (this isn't really that much documented) I manage to get this:
CAM 4: unassigned skipped channels 15..19
The channels 15 to 19 are the encrypted channels. The initial channels.conf I got from "scan" had "1" for the CA field, but reading this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/vdr%40linuxtv.org/msg01409.html
I see the quote:
"Please set the CA parameter of these channels to 0 (FTA) and tune to them again. VDR should automatically insert the correct CA values then."
So I set them to "0" and restarted VDR. Now I see that VDR has changed the entries to:
SVT1;SVT:146000:C0M128:C:6900:1019:1018;1017:1004:B00:1010:0:1:0 SVT2;SVT:146000:C0M128:C:6900:1029:1028;1027:1004:B00:5030:0:1:0
ie "B00". Could be ok as this seems to be the id of the CAM. Hardcoding "4" there has no effect, and "1" at least makes VDR take a bit longer to decide that "Channel not available".
I am not trying to record multiple channels or do anything fancy, just get VDR limping along so that we can watch some live TV the next few days.
The setup is:
* 2 Hauppauge DVB-c FF cards * Hauppauge CI * Conax 4.x CAM * vdr-1.5.9 (unpatched)
I'll do a test with 1.4.7 too, just to make sure. Hang on! Nah, same thing with 1.4.7.
Any ideas what could cause this?
Best regards and a Merry Christmas,
Jan Ekholm
On Sunday 23 December 2007 23:02:23 Jan Ekholm wrote:
<snip>
I'll do a test with 1.4.7 too, just to make sure. Hang on! Nah, same thing with 1.4.7.
I also tested 1.5.12 which I somehow totally missed in the download area. Same thing with it. However, yesterday when casually browsing channels after VDR had been on for a few hours we suddenly were able to tune into a few encrypted channels. The first tuning was snappy but the next ones were slow, about 5+ seconds and we were about to give up. After a reboot I can no longer get any encrypted channels to work. But the whole chain apparently does work, it's just not too reliable at the moment for me.
This worked *very* well for years with 1.2 and 1.3 so something must have been drastically changed in this area the last year or so? Or perhaps I should just install an older 1.3 version and see if it works as it used to do? That would rule out hardware problems (all the old HW died (except the DVB stuff (luckily, as it's *expensive*))).
Anyway, I'm happy to have a working VDR setup again and I'm pretty sure we'll get to see the encrypted channels sooner or later.