I want to capture my Cable via the composite in on a tuner card, and control the box with an IRBlaster.
However, every now and then the cable box gets miffled and takes >30seconds to change channel or respond to remote codes.
Obviously, Myth wont know the cable box is being naff and may record the wrong channel.

I have some electronics knowledge and was wondering the following...
MythTV allows a serial port control for other cable boxes, does this use 2way traffic to verify the current channel?

If so, I could build a small electronic (pic micro) interface that read the LED display on the box with channel number and sent it out the serial port. This would be easy to do and allow Myth to see what the box is doing.

This requires a little hard work by me, and modding my cable box possibly, obviously i dont want to do this if its not going to work.
What are peoples thoughts on this?
Alternatively, can I get serial control of newer Uk, NTL Pace digital boxes? >4000 series?

If the behavior is predictable you can work around it. For example, my sat box will sometime
take a few seconds to think whenever it gets a "7" and it will miss the second digit. I found
that it never does this twice in a row. So I aways send the channel number, wait 3 seconds,
and then I send the channel number again...

Hey Pyrofer

I am in the UK, and my dad has virgin media and a set top box, and I am
trying to get myth going with it.

Could you possibly send me an email to the address below, and we can share experiences.

_________________
Thanks in advance
Matt Shaw
matt@shagshaw.com

AMD Sempron 2400+ on Via Motherboard,
512MB Ram, 160GB IDE HDD,
Nvidia Geforce FX5500 128MB TV-Out,
2 x Twinhan DVB-T BT878 (Freeview UK)
KnoppMYTH R5F27