Upcoming death of WMC/Ceton/cablecard/TA on Spectrum LA

[DSperber]

Well, I fear the end is nigh for me and WMC on Spectrum here in LA. Been around 15 years, but its days are clearly numbered.

I currently have two desktop WMC machines, one "primary production" and the other for "backup just in case". Both have internal Ceton InfiniTV6 PCIe cards in them, with a Spectrum Motorola cablecard inserted, and also connected via USB to a Motorola Tuning Adapter in support of SDV channels which Spectrum has a huge number of. All new channels are delivered by SDV now, with the legacy Motorola infrastructure long ago maxed out for non-SDV tuning (when it was still Time Warner Cable that ran LA).

For many reasons, I decided to play with a new third "desktop" machine dedicated for Win7 and WMC as a "lab" system used for experimentation. I bought a Lenovo M910x Tiny (and it's really tiny), which is very much the same motherboard and Skylake chipset and i7-6700 CPU as is in my "primary production" M910t Tower. Conceptually its a perfect Win7/WMC host, but physically very small.

So I decided to use my extra Ceton ETH 6-tuner box I had acquired several years ago when playing with running WMC inside a Win7-VM guest system running through VMWare on a Win10 host machine. Ultimately although I got it to work (almost 100% successfully) I never truly implemented it as a replacement for my M910t "native physical Win7" system because it was not truly 100% successful. I did have a "waiting for channel map" issue (required to be able to successfully tune to Spectrum's SDV channels through the tuning adapter) which I could never resolve. The Ceton ETH went back in its carton, potentially available for a rainy day.

Well, that rainy day has now arrived. I plan to try and use the external network-accessible Ceton ETH (successfully this time, hopefully, with a "native physical Win7" M910x machine which has no internal PCIe slots for cards). We shall see if I can emerge victorious.

And this means that I contact Spectrum, in order to acquire a third cablecard and tuning adapter, which I did yesterday. Unfortunately, SPECTRUM IS NO LONGER PROVIDING CABLECARDS OR TUNING ADAPTERS!! This is true both for a user requesting additional equipment as I am now, as well as for use to "repair/replace" malfunctioning current equipment. So no more repair/replacement available if you currently use a cablecard, which also means "death of Tivo".

They still "support" existing cablecards and tuning adapters (for which the price last year went from $2.50/month up to $6/month as a way of discouraging continued ongoing use and to encourage migration to for-rent Spectrum STB/DVR hardware), which means they will still "activate/pair/authorize" cablecards and tuning adapters if necessary. But there is no longer a supply of cablecards or tuning adapters for replacement purpose in case an existing one becomes unusable.

This policy change began last year, when [not coincidentally] the FCC rescinded their mandate that TV manufacturers and cable system providers must provide cablecard slots and cards in their equipment, to allow TV owners to connect cable coax directly to their cablecard-enabled TVs without requiring an external STB/DVR which had a built-in cablecard, in support of receiving and TV-decrypting digital copy-protected DRM content available from the cable company. Note that cablecard slots in TVs have been present at least going back to 2003 for sure, because I know there was one in my Sony 34XBR960 CRT/HDTV. I'm sure they were in TVs from other manufacturers as well, and going back many years before 2003.

I suspect we'll see the end of cablecard slots in modern TVs as well, replaced by Nextgen ATSC 3.0 tuners for OTA DRM content. I don't know have cable DRM content can ever be handled by a TV again, except through a cable company rented STB/DVR (either still with built-in cablecards only available to manufacturers, or through some other modern new electronic method). No doubt this is whey Spectrum still mus "support" cablecards, because they are welded inside of all STB/DVR boxes even those that are rented to customers by Spectrum. You just no longer can get "standalone cablecards" for use in Tivo and Ceton.


So, since i really have no other choice, I will be forced to remove the cablecard and tuning adapter from my "backup" WMC/PCIe desktop machine, and re-purpose them for use in my new M910x/ETH machine.

The end is nigh. Guard and protect your cablecard/TA with your life if you are a Spectrum customer. I suspect TWC and XFinity and other providers are probably going in the same direction.

[DSperber]

just a little recent postscript on this story...

I did play with the Ceton ETH external tuner on the project as I described, using the new M910x PC in order to try and build a new 3rd WMC Win7 machine literally "from scratch" in a branc newly installed Win7 from scratch. And that involved getting Spectrum to re-pair my existing cablecard that I temporarily removed from the Ceton PCIe card inside of my "backup WMC Z170 Win7 PC" in order to insert it into the Ceton ETH.

And though it did take some second-level backroom assistance from "cablecard support" to get that re-pairing to work, it wasn't all that bad. They did actually succeed and I was then able to get to work with my new research project.

Unfortunately, the Ceton ETH and Ceton 1088 driver/software theoretically supporting it and SDV, is still seemingly truly unusable with however the "SDV channel map" is delivered when the Ceton ETH and Win7 WMC machines are booted. Sure enough I still received the impossible-to-resolve "waiting for channel map" status that I had also received several years ago when attempting to build a Win7 WMC machine under VM (running Win7-VM on a Win10 host). Apparently this problem isn't directly related to running under VM, but rather must be directly related to something about how the Ceton ETH and dits irectly USB-connected tuning adapter work differently from a software perspective than the internal Ceton PCIe card with tuning adapter USB-connected to the PC.

In other words my M910x + Ceton ETH attempt was in fact a total failure in terms of even being possibly another backup or even complete replacement for my existing two Win7 WMC machines. Without 100% reliable functionality and support for Spectrum's SDV channels through a tuning adapter, any such project would have to be considered unusable.

So, after a week of playing around with the M910x + Ceton ETH, I aborted the project and moved the cablecard back into the Ceton PCIe card inside my Z170 machine. And then I once again called Spectrum to once again re-pair the cablecard now back in its original "host". Well, this time the re-pairing just couldn't be accomplished by the Spectrum people on the phone, even when second-level backroom support was enlisted. For some reason they just couldn't get the job done. We tried multiple times, as I made phone calls repeatedly over several days hoping to find somebody who really knew exactly what "trick" needed to be done in order to achieve success.

Finally, I asked the supervisor I happened to be on the phone with that final time (on Tuesday) if they might be able to actually find another cablecard on some shelf or in some warehouse somewhere, and bring it to me in order to replace the current cablecard just on the off-chance the current card had gotten physically damaged so as to now be un-pairable. I pleaded my case, and amazingly she was willing an able to do that. A visit to my house from a technician was scheduled for Friday, with a "guarantee" that he would be bringing a new cablecard with him. How that cablecard would actually have been obtained, I knew now. But I was promised it would occur.

And over the next three days I must have received five follow-up phone calls and text messages from Spectrum dispatch, reminding me of my upcoming Friday morning scheduled visit. And each time a person was on the other end of the phone call I reminded them that the whole reason for the visit was just to deliver me a new cablecard, and get it paired successfully. So just be sure that the technician had a cablecard with him, else it would all have no purpose. Although I was just talking to "dispatch", they assured me the information was in the notes of the record and that for sure he would have a cablecard with him.

Well, sure enough on Friday morning "Sergio" showed up, and sure enough he actually had not only a new cablecard with him but also a new tuning adapter (just in case that was needed as well)!! Apparently he had contacted two other technicians, who happened to separately have had (a) an available cablecard on one truck, and (b) an available tuning adapter on a second truck. So grabbing those two parts from two colleagues, he came to my house "armed for battle". I couldn't believe my luck!

And this time, he phoned the special "cablecard support desk" phone number in NY (which I took note of), in order to enlist the skillset of that special group. Sure enough they knew what extra steps were really required in order to (a) COMPLETELY remove my old cablecard from my account, in order to (b) ADD A BRAND NEW cablecard to my account, and then (c) properly bind / activate / validate / authenticate the new cablecard in its Ceton PCIe host. And after 30 minutes of work, I finally did have a "green check" and the new card was truly working properly! And of course my existing tuning adapter was also once again working correctly, and delivering 100% of the 1023 channels and "channel map" it needed (obtained successfully in two separate chunks with Ceton PCIe, according to the LOG... and apparently just not possible through Ceton ETH and what must be "defective Ceton 1088 driver software"). "Ready to resolve" tuning adapter, with a "green check" cablecard.

So I was once again truly back in business with my original Z170 and internal Ceton PCIe hardware. I thanked Sergio profusely.


I honestly didn't think this was going to be possible, and there may well not be many/any other replacement Motorola cablecards available. But miraculously I was "saved" at least this time.

Once again, protect your cablecard and tuning adapter and fully-functional WMC setup with your life, for as long as you can.

NOTE: even though the unsuccessful "waiting for channel map" problem with the Ceton ETH would have made any M910x result genuinely unacceptable, the real problem was the it is now 100% impossible to activate PlayReady on any newly built Win7/WMC machine. The fact that MS has shut down its PlayReady "enabling / activating" server, so that WMC setup can no longer get the "PlayReady update" it requires (which I believe is a licensing / enabling handshake, not so much a true software update requirement), it is now just physically impossible to build a brand new DRM-enabled WMC machine. Physically impossible.

I even tried restoring a current "image" of my "production M910t WMC machine" onto my new M910x hardware, expecting Windows to do whatever it needed to in order to adjust to any minor hardware differences but to at least take advantage of a working active PlayReady setup. Turns out NOT TRUE. Turns out MS and PlayReady and DRM is too smart to be fooled by this simple trickery. It immediately detected the different CPU and motherboard as a "new machine", and once again insisted on doing its "PlayReady update" to theoretically get DRM correctly enabled and working on this new machine. But once again, since there is no longer an MS PlayReady server in the cloud to do this re-licensing, I was unable to get WMC correctly working for the Spectrum DRM and copy-protected content environment even ignoring any SDV channels because I also couldn't get the Ceton ETH to work properly.

==> WMC in Win7 from scratch, if Ceton cablecard-enabled support and PlayReady is required for DRM and/or copy-protected contents... NO LONGER PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE!! PlayReady enabling is absolutely dead and no longer available.

So guard your current WMC setups with your life... as long as we still have cablecards that work and WMC systems from pre-2020.