Saturn Cable Box

[maddog]

Hi All
My lovely series 1 Phillips Tivo arrived at great speed from George and is now setup with a big fat drive just waiting for action.
A problem though - no sound.
I have a General Instruments Saturn STB and it only has the choice of using the RF Coaxial connector or a video and mono audio connector.
Which one should I have connected it up with and could this be the cause of my problem? (I used the video out connector). How do I connect up the sound?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
:)

[Darren King]

Hi.

You can't use the RF option as the internal tuner is not compatible in it's current un-modified state.

So that leaves you with the mono audio output from the STB. You will need to buy an RCA "Y" cable that splits up the mono audio output from the STB and feeds this into the left and right audio inputs on the back of the TiVo.

[Wanted]

I traded by old STB with Saturn that had just the one audio channel out for a newer version that has two audio outputs. I was getting my cable modem installed at the time and I just told them I had a new home theatre system and wanted the two outputs.

It was just a small lie, I just wanted the newer one with the better remote and OSD and didn't have TiVo at the time either. They just swapped it out. Maybe you could call and give it a go. They didn't moan when I did it. I did already have a newer one for my 2nd STB and the guy was going to be there anyway to run cables but you never know.

[maddog]

Thanks Darren that did the trick
Wanted - thanks for your suggestion - I'll give that a go too.
Is the sound that comes down the saturn cable in stereo?
Any other good tricks I should know about? ;)

[zollymonsta]

Thanks Darren that did the trick
Wanted - thanks for your suggestion - I'll give that a go too.
Is the sound that comes down the saturn cable in stereo?
Any other good tricks I should know about? ;)

The General Instruments 2200 decoders only output stereo sound via RF out (no good for use with a tivo). The two audio jacks on the back cheat, it's actually mono out left/right. The newer models (3300) have a built in nicam decoder (Saturn use Nicam, just like TV1 and TV2) which works perfectly for Tivo as you can connect the left/right and video into the rca jacks direct on your tivo.

Hints and tips?.... Well the only one I can suggest is to get some wide black tape and make sure you mask off the IR blaster on the front of the box (so no other light can get in), otherwise there can be issues with these boxes not changing channels correctly.

[maddog]

Thanks all.
One further question and rather off topic, the file containing postcode data seems to be unavailable - can I just add a random but unique postcode to the existing file?

[zollymonsta]

It should be there.
No, it needs to be correct with the correct one (02115 for Saturn I think from memory) else you won't be able to complete guided setup, or get guide data.

[maddog]

It should be there.
No, it needs to be correct with the correct one (02115 for Saturn I think from memory) else you won't be able to complete guided setup, or get guide data.

Ok..it must have been included somewhere as I managed both of those things.
I think I may have misunderstood some of the documentation - I was trying to correct the time which was 12 hours out. Did it with a commandline hack in the end. Has anyone set up syncing to a NTP server?

[zollymonsta]

did you try setting GMT to +7 (I think it was that.. been a few months since I last re-imaged).

There is a script called 'fixtivotime' which will connect to a time server and depending on if your timezone is set correctly, it will sync up the time.

I'm not sure wether the emulator corrects the time or not, or if 'fixtivotime' is on the latest image. If you want it, let me know.

I set up a cron job to run 'fixtivotime' each day at 2am. Just to make sure my time is always correct.

ZollyMonsta

[Wibble]

Has anyone set up syncing to a NTP server?

Both emulator and manual load should sync to an NTP/TIME server.
The emulator setup give an NTP/TIME server address to your tivo.

The LOADGUIDE slice loader calls /hack/bin/fixtivotime (also known as ntpdate) wich does the following:
# Stop time warp messages
touch /var/timestamp
# Set the time to time server with appropriate timezone offset
/tvbin/settime `rtimetz -v 207.126.98.204 207.126.98.204 129.6.15.28 131.107.1.10`

Some versions of fixtivotime/ntpdate use the TIME protocol (port 37) some of the newer images use the NTP protocol (port 123)
This caused DJC and I some problems when setting up the emulator on Orac.

[maddog]

Excellent - thanks. So that means I should be able to hack fixtivotime to sync against either my own network ntp server or directly to another NZ server such as the otago uni one.