serial cable to cable box

[rkshack]

I have a phillips series 1 and a motorola cable box. The cable box will intermittently not change channels. If I turn the cable box of and on it will work again. But only for minutes. I have the same cable box in my other room and it works fine. I recently switched to the serial cable because the ir blaster did not seem to transfer the channel at all. I thought I remembered a setting to turn on the switch between ir and serial cable but I can't find that now.

Any suggestions.

rkshack

[stevel]

I think you have to rerun Guided Setup to specify that you're using the serial cable.

[rkshack]

I had to run an old script from 2002 by embeem. It turned it on. I rebooted and it worked perfectly.

Her it is:

Now for the setting up the tivo:

You'll need to run the following tcl script on your tivo. The standard disclaimers apply, I'm not responsible for anything you break and don't bother customer service about a feature that's supposed to be disabled .. got it? good.. now for the script:



code:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/tvbin/tivosh
### EXPERIMENTAL ###
# 2002, embeem

EnableTransactionHoldoff true

set db [dbopen]
transaction {
set swsysa [db $db open "/SwSystem/ACTIVE"]
set resgrp [dbobj $swsysa get ResourceGroup]
set tmpgrp [lindex $resgrp 30]
set tmpres [lindex [dbobj $tmpgrp get "Item"] 34]
set val [dbobj $tmpres get "String"]
if { $val == 0 || $val == 1 } {
dbobj $tmpres set "String" 1
dbobj $tmpgrp remove "CompressedFile"
puts "done, please reboot"
} else {
puts "wrong software version?"
}
}

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(no, there's no space between the | 's)

After running the script (and rebooting) go into
Messages & Setup -> Recorder & Phone Setup -> Cable/Satellite Box -> Control Cable/Sat. Setup

You should now be able to select serial for your connector to the cablebox.

There's a few different options for brand, really it's just that some caleboxes are marked motorola and some are marked GI -- select whichever brand makes you happy.

After selecting your brand it'll want to do a serial test, the serial test is somewhat quirky .. best advice is if it doesn't work the first time hit cycle the cablebox (just use the power button) and try again.

If all works well your channel changes will now be via serial cable and you can get rid of those dorky ir blasters.