[akelley]

If I have (had) an STB with firewire out, shouldn't I be able to record that to any recording device that is firewire compliant? I seem to be confused because I've read about how some devices do not record correctly and what not. But shouldn't Firewire be "plug and play"? So if my STB has firewire out, should any recording device that is firewire compliant be able to record HD content off my STB? Or am I missing something here? Is HD a special case in regard to firewire? Would I be able to just stick a firewire video capture card in my PC and capture the HD stream?

 

[mrmike]

Yes. And no. Think of it this way, Firewire is the lower level of the connection, like Ethernet is. Higher up the protocol stack is the AV/C (HAVi, etc.) command and data stuff (Kinda like TCP/IP and FTP and Telnet, though that's not strictly an accurate comparison but it works for now). Having access to the transmissions doesn't mean you can decode them. Your STB must also know how to talk to the device (There are different sorts of Firewire target devices). You can poke your head in here for discussion of a product that allows the sort of connectivity you're interested in. You can also do some searches for 1394 and Firewire, there's a bunch of threads on the subject floating around. It's not an enormous technical challenge, but it's not trivial either and we're still on the bleeding edges of the curve. It'll be easier later on one would hope.


-MM