Beta firmware candidate for InfiniTV available - 15.1.13.152

[timaster]

I'm curious too about the ETH6 random reboots. I think the longest I've gone is about 60 something days. Never kept an eye on the memory. Right now mine is at 20 days and 18692kB (still on v14.4.6.21).

14.4.6.21 seemed like it started out using less memory than what 15.x did. My usual time for things to go bad averaged about 25-30 days on 14.4.6.21. 15.x started out for me using a bit more memory from the beginning. Right now, at basically 20 days, my 15.x eth6 is using 20.2MB.

Factors that influence the amount of time for things to go south might include the use of a TA (and/or which brand), number of computers/devices that are accessing it, number of channels pushed out by the cable system, etc etc. Lots of variables. The one consistent thing is just that the memory usages climbs fairly steadily, at least for me, for every firmware I've tried since 13.x.

Since I can't see inside the eth6's running OS, there is no way to know what is chewing up all the memory over time, if its a memory leak, a normal Linux caching more stuff over time issue, etc.

But hopefully Ceton will take these reports of memory usage increasing over time, see if it correlates to why the devices eventually get slow or crash/reboot, and hopefully eventually fix them. Its a bit frustrating to find shows that do not record every few weeks because the eth6 took a dump on itself and rebooted, or stopped communicating properly with the TA. I avoid a lot of that now by pre-emptively rebooting things if I notice channel change times slowing, but spontaneous reboots have sometimes happened to me after a day or two of uptime, so there are no guarantees.

[teamfox201]

Since I upgraded to this firmware 2 days ago I have had to reboot my ETH 6 twice because towards the end of the night when you try switching channels it says all tuners are being used and shows you what each tuner is tuned to. It seems like its not releasing the channel when you are done watching something and eventually you run out of tuners so it asks what you want to stop.

Looking at the Ceton console it shows that the playback status is stopped for the tuners not actually doing anything but Windows Media Center still throws that error.

I have had this system for about 5 months and I never saw that error until I installed this firmware.

[JohnW248]

But hopefully Ceton will take these reports of memory usage increasing over time, see if it correlates to why the devices eventually get slow or crash/reboot, and hopefully eventually fix them. Its a bit frustrating to find shows that do not record every few weeks because the eth6 took a dump on itself and rebooted, or stopped communicating properly with the TA. I avoid a lot of that now by pre-emptively rebooting things if I notice channel change times slowing, but spontaneous reboots have sometimes happened to me after a day or two of uptime, so there are no guarantees.

When you get the reboot, is the tuner uptime reset, all tuners pair GREEN and the TA is discovered -OR- is the uptime reset, the tuners are RED and the TA is disabled? (In both cases all cableCARD tabs are reset, EMMs zero'd out, CA stream count restarts, etc).

I had the second problem and found that a momentary AC drop would cause the tuner to restart in the manner. I've also seen the reboot in full operational mode but haven't tracked that to any physical problem or network issue.

[timaster]

When you get the reboot, is the tuner uptime reset, all tuners pair GREEN and the TA is discovered -OR- is the uptime reset, the tuners are RED and the TA is disabled? (In both cases all cableCARD tabs are reset, EMMs zero'd out, CA stream count restarts, etc).

I had the second problem and found that a momentary AC drop would cause the tuner to restart in the manner. I've also seen the reboot in full operational mode but haven't tracked that to any physical problem or network issue.

When the eth6 spontaneously reboots, everything goes red unless I reboot the Windows 7 box, or restart the Windows Media Center receiver service. The caveat is when the eth6 reboots, I have to check and make sure the TA is working first anyway. Sometimes the TA is rediscovered, sometimes not. In that case I usually reboot both the eth6 and the TA to get things happy.

Both the eth6's and TA's are on a UPS, along with a lot of other things (the house unified intercom system, core switches, and the Win7 MCE PC). So there should not be any AC drops happening. No other attached equipment is rebooting, and the UPS is nowhere near its capacity.

I also have the eth6's sitting vertically instead of horizontally, it keeps the tuner temps down by a bit. The area they are in is climate controlled, so room temps are never anything above low-mid 70 range. Certain eth6 crashes involve both of them at the same time, and I suspect that it is related to the TA's or something Cox sent out. That seems to be happening a lot less since last year, the biggest two changes since then were FW 1.40 on the TA's, and Cox completely renumbered the lineup.

Other times, it is just one or the other, and usually happens at some point when the memory has exceeded the 21MB+ level of usage on the eth6. The TA's are the Motorola MTR700's running FW 1.40.

[tzr916]

I have no tuning adapter, but when my ETH6 has spontaneous reboot, I also have to restart the WMC machine or else there will be missing tuners in WMC.

[JohnW248]

I have no tuning adapter, but when my ETH6 has spontaneous reboot, I also have to restart the WMC machine or else there will be missing tuners in WMC.

Next time this happens before you restart the WMC machine, go to the web gui for the ETH and click on each tuners and see if it is RED or GREEN.

If you have RED tuners (meaning they're not paired for DRM with Media Center, you can try stopping the ehrecvr service and waiting a couple of seconds and starting it. Restartng (the other option) doesn't seem to work. If that turns out to be your issue, examine how your wall wart is connected to AC. I found mine was on a power strip with a built-in breaker and that was in the on/off switch. Slight pressure to the on position would break and make AC service and it seems even momentary drops will cause the ETH to restart. Changing out the powerstrip fixed my issue.

[tzr916]

...examine how your wall wart is connected to AC. I found mine was on a power strip with a built-in breaker and that was in the on/off switch. Slight pressure to the on position would break and make AC service and it seems even momentary drops will cause the ETH to restart. Changing out the powerstrip fixed my issue.

ETH6 plugged into an AVR UPS along with cable modem, Wifi router, and 16 port switch that have never spontaneously rebooted. ETH6 sitting vertical with fan, temps are 40C.

[blueiedgod]

My ETH is also a victim of random reboots. When it does reboot, WMDRM is broken, and no cable TV is recorded. I opened the ticket with Ceton and after going back and forth for a few months (between trying things out, and logging failures) they determined that there is nothing wrong with the ETH.

The fact remains, ETH reboots randomly and breaks up the pairing with WMC.

The ETH is on a 1000 VA ups along with the router, 3x SiliconDust HomeRun Duals, and the switch. Neither one of those register a power outage when ETH indicates that it has been rebooted.

Ceton implied that it was the NIC in the HTPC that was losing connection causing the ETH to reboot.

The 3 of the SiliconDust HomeRun Duals are not affected.

Just to give Ceton the benefit of the doubt, I ordered the Intel Pro NIC. Time will tell if Intel PRO NIC makes a difference.

[mldenison]

I went round and round with Ceton because of pixilation issues with unwatchable shows, no signal messages on the start of recorded TV's. I have 2 ETH's and insisted one was bad.

I started out with unmanaged switches and moved to managed switches. My HTPC has a Z97 motherboard with an i7-4771 processor and 16GB of ram on Windows 7 x64.

On boot, the Intel NIC settings showed a 1gbs connection as also seen in the managed switch manager. After a particularly bad evening of recording, I looked at the network speeds both on the PC and the switch. They were both showing the network speed at 100mbs.

As it turned out, the wall plate for the PC was faulty. For some reason quickly degrading the network speed.

After replacing it, it's solid at 1gbs and has worked mostly flawlessly ever since.

With apologies to Ceton.

I have the HTPC reboot in the wee hours and have to power cycle the ETH's every 5 - 7 days else I get the No Signal messages or no tuners found messages if I run them longer.

I have 3 Echos on MOCA that work almost flawlessly. Occasionally, I'll have to power cycle one of them about once a week when there's a problem connecting.

So far, I'm about 99% pleased.

[cats22]

I am happy with this firmware. The only problem was the hang after a cable card firmware upgrade (described in an earlier post). i am using mythtv and I have had no copy once problems, and no failed recordings for a couple of weeks.

[mdavej]

http://192.168.1.XX/Services/Log.html#bottom
type in: reboot
click send

Thanks for the response.
Fortunately I do not need a TA, so this will be helpful. Based on this I found the following command reboots the ETH 6
wget -q -t 1 -T 2 -O - --post-data "cmd=reboot" http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/command.cgi
I will add this to my scripts to run once a week and hopefully be assured of not running into the memory slowdown.

Just wanted to post a huge thanks for this. Wget followed by a PC reboot once a week works like a charm. My ETH also reboots at random for no apparent reason. This avoids the random reboot and memory leak issues altogether. My TA continues to work fine without a reboot.

For those unfamiliar with wget, here's a download link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin3 ... p_redirect

My PC reboot script is simply "shutdown /r".

[JohnW248]

My ETH is also a victim of random reboots. When it does reboot, WMDRM is broken, and no cable TV is recorded.

The ETH is on a 1000 VA ups along with the router, 3x SiliconDust HomeRun Duals, and the switch. Neither one of those register a power outage when ETH indicates that it has been rebooted.

They may be right about the NIC, but what is the UPS? Is it a constant output device or is it the classic "I'll kick in when the power goes below "X"" device? Unless you know how fast it kick (say 1/2 cycle AC?) it could be that it has a tolerance of 95 volts before it kicks and I don't know what the wall wart on the ETH looks for. Since we went to those new "green" switching wall warts, it could still kick off the ETH even though your other devices don't.

See if it happens at any particular time of day. utilities make power switches at times, usually late at night or early morning. Many years ago when I was working at the Warner Bros ranch, I got in at the same time as the generator operator at the power house and every morning between 4:30 & 5 AM as he turn on the generators that were on the utility 11000 volt lines, there was a power drop in that section of Burbank. Back then we didn't have switching power supplies and all these wall warts to deal with so no one noticed or complained.

Just something else to look at, I do know that a power drop on the ETH supply will cause it to restart in a non-standard way with the tuners RED and the TA disabled. Sometimes after a half hour or so you can issue the reboot command to the tuner and it'll restart paired and with the TA ready. A constant power UPS is always powering the outlets off its batteries with clean current and thus are much more expensive than the run of the mill UPS at Frys, etc.

[tzr916]

My UPS actually makes a loud BEEP noise when the voltage drops. This has happened a few times while I'm sitting here watching Tv, yet the ETH does not reboot. I also setup email alerts when my ETH reboots (ping the ETH every few seconds and if no reply I get an instant email). It has never happened when the UPS was beeping. In fact I perform a load test every 30 days (run on batteries for count of 10) and everything remains up and running, including the ETH. My breaker has even tripped once or twice, and I have time to run outside to the box and flip it back on, all equipment still running when I get back inside. Tells me the batteries/ups are doing their job perfectly.

[timaster]

While my eth very infrequently has a "random" reboot, up through FW 14.x at least, it would ultimately get nutty and either require a reboot, or it would crash/reboot, typically between 21 and 30 days of uptime. The predictability of it, and the corresponding appearance of what at least looks like a memory leak from the outside, certainly sounds a LOT more like a bug, possibly within the OS or some library of the OS, a ceton app, etc, but who knows. They don't seem to acknowledge it. And certainly, other issues (power drops, bad NIC's, etc) can cause fits with the eth, but even with all those accounted for (clean power, Intel Pro NIC, corporate level switch, etc), I still end up with the need to reboot after a fairly predictable amount of time.

Bottom line, it sure looks like a software issue and not a hardware one.

Thus far, my 15.x upgraded eth is at 25 days of uptime, and so I am waiting to see what happens soon. The memory usage is still slowly climbing inside the eth (currently 21.6MB).

[blueiedgod]

My ETH is also a victim of random reboots. When it does reboot, WMDRM is broken, and no cable TV is recorded.

The ETH is on a 1000 VA ups along with the router, 3x SiliconDust HomeRun Duals, and the switch. Neither one of those register a power outage when ETH indicates that it has been rebooted.

They may be right about the NIC, but what is the UPS? Is it a constant output device or is it the classic "I'll kick in when the power goes below "X"" device? Unless you know how fast it kick (say 1/2 cycle AC?) it could be that it has a tolerance of 95 volts before it kicks and I don't know what the wall wart on the ETH looks for. Since we went to those new "green" switching wall warts, it could still kick off the ETH even though your other devices don't.

See if it happens at any particular time of day. utilities make power switches at times, usually late at night or early morning. Many years ago when I was working at the Warner Bros ranch, I got in at the same time as the generator operator at the power house and every morning between 4:30 & 5 AM as he turn on the generators that were on the utility 11000 volt lines, there was a power drop in that section of Burbank. Back then we didn't have switching power supplies and all these wall warts to deal with so no one noticed or complained.

Just something else to look at, I do know that a power drop on the ETH supply will cause it to restart in a non-standard way with the tuners RED and the TA disabled. Sometimes after a half hour or so you can issue the reboot command to the tuner and it'll restart paired and with the TA ready. A constant power UPS is always powering the outlets off its batteries with clean current and thus are much more expensive than the run of the mill UPS at Frys, etc.

It's an APC Back-UPS 1000RS (it powers: FiOS ONT, main router, 24 port switch, 3x SiliconDust HomeRun Duals, Ceton InfiniTV6 ETH, Antenna amp/controller, drop amp and a few cooling fans for the router switch and ETH). There are no logs of it switching to battery power.

[JohnW248]

The APC (and the Cyberpower) don't kick in fast enough or until the voltage drop is low enough to trigger the unit. There are lots of us that have had equipment power cycle on utility problems that haven't even phased the UPS at all and no log issue recorded. And they are not units that provide constant clean sine wave power at 115 volts regardless of input. For ultimate protection you need a power regulator/back-up device.

It's like the old adage that the best protection for the fuse on your high power transistor audio amp was the $35 power transistor that would fail and protect the fuse every time (and yes, I know that is true).

[Sancho]

Greetings, all.

I'm in the midst of a nasty problem. I have two InfiniTV 4s running on two Windows 7 x64 PCs. I ran the pre-Beta upgrade on one, and it went off without a hitch. When I tried it on the other, it failed numerous times, always on step 3/8 (unpacking). Because that device was setup to share tuners over the network, I decided to reset the Network and clear the tuners. I'm not sure if the device was detected or not at this point. My assumption was that it was, but I just tried again, and the Reset Network was available, even though the InfiniTV 4 is not detected.

After resetting and rebooting, I could not get to the Ceton pages using its previous shared network IP or the default 192.168.200.1. The Ceton network device exists, but has been assigned an IP in the 169.254.x.x range. This is probably not surprising, given that the InfiniTV 4 is not detected. I'm a little surprised the network device shows up. I shut it all down, used the opportunity to clean the PC and reseat the adapter. When I booted, Windows detected the device, but gave the Failed to install device driver message. I installed the latest driver package, but the problem persists.

So my suspicion is that the failed upgrade attempts bricked the adapter.

I've sent Ceton a diagnostics dump, but I figured I'd post here in case anyone has any ideas.

TIA.

[JohnW248]

If you can get to the web gui with the 169.254.x.xxx address, go to the system tab and click on network settings and see if you can reset the card there.

If not, you'll have to see if Ceton has a magic trick or if you have to send the card back to reflash.

[arbeleg]

Has anyone successfully used this firmware with Time Warner Cable, especially in the Cleveland area?

I just switched from WOW (where I was having the CableCARD legacy copy protection problem this firmware is supposed to fix) to Time Warner. I am encountering "Copying Prohibited" messages on a number of channels, though there are many that come in just fine. The symptoms are very similar to the legacy copy protection problems I was having at WOW (which they patched by downgrading the firmware on the CableCARD), so I was hopeful that this firmware would fix the TWC problem. But so far it hasn't.

One possibly notable difference between the config between WOW and TWC is that TWC has a Tuning Adapter, and WOW didn't require one.

I've spent hours between Ceton support and TWC's CableCARD support, and have uninstalled, reinstalled, patched, re-paired, upgraded, downgraded, scanned and reconfigured so many different aspects of the system (drivers, Ceton software, Silverlight, Win7 fixes) along the way that it would be hard to list them all. But nothing has enabled me to view all the channels I'm supposed to receive. So I'm wondering if any has had recent success with a Ceton-TWC-SDV setup, and whether the problem could be related to SDV?

[cwinfield]

I use TWC in Charlotte, NC with SDV on this firmware & it's been working great. Need a lot more info as to what is happening in your situation. What kind of cablecard, is it a Cisco NDS? I assume your tuning adapter is a sta1520? In the settings webpage click on channel map, are the channels your trying to watch listed? Did the change in providers disable some of the channels your looking for in your guide, try edit channels and add check if its disabled? When you try to tune is it giving you a error 1 or error 3? which channels are you not receiving? You might have a bad cablecard or the one your using now might be improperly provisioned. Also on the tuning adapter it needs to have a solid green light and be ready in the ceton webpage.