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Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 2:27 pm
by jtx
I recently "upgraded" my WMC PC and also changed from a Ceton PCIe 4 to a Ceton PCIe 6. My old WMC worked pretty good for several years, but I had to (1) keep it on all the time and (2) perform a weekly re-boot to avoid some issues, mainly tuners disappearing. Now, with the new PC and the Ceton PCIe 6, I am experiencing the dreaded "no tuners available" problem every 1-2 days and must perform re-boots to correct. I have tried many things, uninstalling all unnecessary software, re-installing the Ceton drivers, etc. Currently running the latest released drivers and firmware. One frustrating thing is that this new WMC PC is my old SageTV PC and it used the Ceton PCIe 6 for a few years and the tuners NEVER disappeared. (WMC is my back-up DVR, with SageTV being the primary, more reliable DVR). Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks in advance

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 7:42 pm
by Dkeyguy1
Back when I was having such issues, I found that I could open the ceton diagnostic tool, clear tuner configuration, uninstall ceton software, reboot, run ccleaner, and the registry portion, run free registry defrag, reboot when prompted,
reinstall ceton software, reboot when prompted, (that gets old) open diagnostic tool, scan for tuners, run wmc tuner setup.
After doing that, I never had to mess with the affected machine again.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard
http://www.registry-clean.net/free-registry-defrag.htm
I have used that method on at least a dozen machines successfully. Not all mine.
Making sure first that your tuner card is still showing up in the device manager of course. I did have one issue with a pcie connection.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 8:41 pm
by mdavej
Are you running anything else, like ServerWMC (for clients like Kodi or Emby)? I've found that to be very unstable and buggy and will eventually grab every tuner and never let go.

Sometimes PlayReady can be the culprit. Make sure it passes.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2016 12:28 am
by jtx
Thanks for the replies -
mdavej wrote:Are you running anything else, like ServerWMC (for clients like Kodi or Emby)? I've found that to be very unstable and buggy and will eventually grab every tuner and never let go.
I am not running anything else, just vanilla Media Center. I brielfy tried ServerWMC and had DVRMStoolbox and some other stuff, mainly for comskip, in my old WMC machine, but I am taking this new machine one step at a time. Have not seen any obvious Playready issues after initial set-up. Everything either works great or I get no available tuners.
Dkeyguy1 wrote:Back when I was having such issues, I found that I could open the ceton diagnostic tool, clear tuner configuration, uninstall ceton software, reboot, run ccleaner, and the registry portion, run free registry defrag, reboot when prompted,
reinstall ceton software, reboot when prompted, (that gets old) open diagnostic tool, scan for tuners, run WMC tuner setup.
After doing that, I never had to mess with the affected machine again.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard
http://www.registry-clean.net/free-registry-defrag.htm
I have used that method on at least a dozen machines successfully. Not all mine.
Making sure first that your tuner card is still showing up in the device manager of course. I did have one issue with a pcie connection.
Thanks - I'll have to try your procedure this weekend when I get a block of time. I've never heard of registry-clean or defrag, so I'll have to check that out.

One thing that I didn't mention is that I have another Ceton PCIe6 in a 2nd computer on the same LAN. As these are handled like network devices, I saw something online that suggested that this could cause an issue. Anyone heard of this?

I also saw a suggestion to change the WMC Receiver service to auto-start (I am trying this) and to change the login credentials for the service. Seems like a shot in the dark as the receiver service seemed to be running when the tuners disappeared on me last night.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Mon May 02, 2016 1:29 am
by jtx
Update: one week ago I changed the startup type on the Windows Media Center Receiver service from manual to automatic and tuners have not disappeared since. I am hopeful that this is indeed the fix to the disappearing tuner problem. Will report back if the problem happens again.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 2:45 am
by jtx
Well, after 10-11 days of no issues, tonight there were no tuners available. I checked Ceton diagnostics and the Infinitv6 PCIe could not be detected. Tried re-starting the Windows Media Center receiver service, no help. Had to re-boot. Now I'll have to try the suggestions here and/or other ideas, or maybe this is just something that can't be avoided. Does anyone have a Ceton PCIe6 that you can leave on indefinitely with no issues with WMC?

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2016 9:37 pm
by Slinkynose
jtx wrote:Well, after 10-11 days of no issues, tonight there were no tuners available. I checked Ceton diagnostics and the Infinitv6 PCIe could not be detected. Tried re-starting the Windows Media Center receiver service, no help. Had to re-boot. Now I'll have to try the suggestions here and/or other ideas, or maybe this is just something that can't be avoided. Does anyone have a Ceton PCIe6 that you can leave on indefinitely with no issues with WMC?
I do this and have no issues. I am also running 2 XBOX 360 Extenders and ServerWMC. No problems. I have certainly gone a month or two without a reboot, but more recently I will log into the box to mess around and then reboot when I log off. Who is your cable provider? Do you go into the Ceton apps on this machine, I have seen that cause WMC to lose the tuners until I reboot.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2016 10:57 pm
by randman
I just converted from the 4 tuner Ceton to the 6 tuner (PCIe) a few weeks ago. Other than the initial headache of getting the cable company to re-initialize the cable card I have not run into major issues. Like above, I run a 360 extender and the PC runs 24/7. Are you still having issues? I am running the following:

Driver Package Version: 13.6.3.1088
InfiniTV PCIe Driver Version: 1.0.2.4
InfiniTV Firmware Version: 15.1.13.152
InfiniTV Hardware Version 6252

Comcast/Xfinity

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2016 2:18 pm
by jtx
I am still having issues but not as often. It seems like I need to reboot once a week on average. I have scheduled a weekly reboot in task scheduler. In addition to the tuners disappearing, I also had wmc crash on me while navigating the main menu. One thing about my situation is that I also have a sagetv dvr - so wmc does not get used as much as if it were my only option - but I am checking it frequently and still trying to figure this out. I think that I am running the same versions as you as I recently switched to the latest beta firmware.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:50 pm
by alexar66
jtx wrote:I am still having issues but not as often. It seems like I need to reboot once a week on average. I have scheduled a weekly reboot in task scheduler. In addition to the tuners disappearing, I also had WMC crash on me while navigating the main menu. One thing about my situation is that I also have a sagetv dvr - so WMC does not get used as much as if it were my only option - but I am checking it frequently and still trying to figure this out. I think that I am running the same versions as you as I recently switched to the latest beta firmware.
Hi, I had the same problem and noticed that having my PC on a separate router really helped. Ceton card somehow was affected by the rest of my wired network and rebooted so PC disconnected with it. Now I have a wireless router with its own DHCP connected to my wired network, my WMC PC and the extender are connected to that router.

Re: Tuners Not Available - WMC 7 + Ceton PCIe 6

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 3:30 pm
by jtx
Update: it's been 2 months and I've had no issues - I ended up moving the Ceton Infinitv 6 PCIe to another PCIe slot (and then I had to re-configure WMC tuner setup) and since then the problem appears to be solved. This is the first time, ever, that I have had WMC running rock solid.