According to this link https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FireWire it looks like the drivers in the kernel changed around 2010. So I'm beginning to believe any quality card should work?
As far as communicating with the cable box, I'm going to use a program someone created called mythchanger. According to the documentation it will control the box I'm looking to get. FireWire is mandatory on all cable boxes according to federal law. Many boxes have usb2 but not all are activated.
Thanks for the info!

On Mar 16, 2016 9:09 AM, Matt Graham <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:

On 2016-03-15 18:38, Office wrote:
> I'm running Mythbuntu 14.04 on my home theater and looking to upgrade
> my
> cable box and the new box is best controlled by firewire. My home
> theater does
> not have that connection and I don't want to blindly stick a card in
> only to
> find it comes with a bad linux driver. Any suggestions on a good card?
> or what
> to look for when adding this to my system?

The last time I looked at firewire in 2006ish, there was only one
firewire chipset that was generally found in the wild.  I bought a
firewire PCI card at the local Worst Buy and it worked just fine.  The
kernel module is probably called firewire-ohci or ohci1394 depending on
how old the kernel is.

Talking to the cable box itself will probably be more difficult than
finding a PCI card that'll work.  The firedtv module looks like it would
be thing to try first.  udev will probably load the correct modules when
you plug the device in.  (I thought that manufacturers had abandoned
firewire because USB2 was cheaper and far more common, but you learn
something new every day...)

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