XBOX 360 as Extender not playing live TV or recorded TV

[kurick]

I am the proud new owner of a HDHomeRun Prime. I have it connected to a Gigabit switch on my network and I ran the installation on my main Window 7 PC. Good specs, Corei5 3.3 GHz CPU, 8GB RAM, Nvida GTX560. I just started playing around with with, but so far everything is working great when using it on the PC.

The problem is I am trying to use an XBOX 360 as a Media Center Extender and the TV functionality is not working at all. I have "paired" the XBOX with my Window 7 PC, and when I launch the Media Center on the XBOX, the interface works fine. It connects quickly, the guide information is accurate, but it just won't display video. When I tune to a channel, I get a black screen, but I do get audio. Same thing when trying to play back recorded content. It happens with major networks like NBC and ABC that should be unencrypted and "copy freely" and well as encrypted channels.

I have Ethernet running from my main router/PC to my living room connected to a gigabit switch on both ends. Along with the XBOX, I have a Mac Mini, PS3 and my TV hooked up to that gigabit switch and everything works fine. To rule out a connection issue I even installed Window 7 on the Mac Mini and it woks great, TV viewing works perfectly.

I have run the network tuning performance wizard from within Media Center on the XBOX and I have a perfect connection, full green bars all the way. Since my PC has a gigabit card and the XBOX is only 10/100 megabits, I tried enabling flow control on my NIC, that does nothing. I have tried wireless just for the heck of it, still the same, if not worse. The XBOX is normally hooked up VIA component, but I changed to HDMI for testing purposes, same problem.

I know the XBOX should be able to be used as an extender, I've see videos of it worked perfectly. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing the problems I am experiencing?

[lithium630]

I have 5 extenders running, never had that problem. Have you tried deleting the Xbox from the PC and installing it again? The only other thing I can think of would be to try to repair the PC system files in case something got corrupted. Open an elevated command prompt and run:

sfc /scannow

That should fix most errors. If you have custom menus you might have to redo them after running that.

[kurick]

So I did some more testing and while I don't have a solution, I have at least pinpointed the problem a little more. I have another computer, I mentioned it earlier, the Mac Mini I installed Windows 7 on for testing. When I changed the XBOX Media Center to connect to the Mac Min instead of my main Windows PC, its works fine. Live TV works great and recorded TV plays back as well.

So to me that seems to point to an issue on my main PC. Its a much more powerful machine than the older Mac Mini, so it is a little surprising to me. I do not use any firewall on that PC, so I am not sure what would or could cause that problem. With this new information does anyone have any ideas?

[Tracer]

Did you by chance install any other video codecs on the media center PC?

[kurick]

Yes, I installed the K Lite Codec Pack 7.5.0. Should I try removing that?

[Tracer]

While I wouldn't think installing other codecs would effect externder playback. I would remove K-Lite and see if that makes any difference, with windows 7 there really isn't much of a need for additional codec packs anymore.

[kurick]

I tried that and it didn't seem to do anything. I would just to a fresh install of Windows but my wife uses this computer to work at home and there is some VPN software that is installed and its kind of a hassle to get it reinstalled.

[Scallica]

Did you try lithium's suggestion above? Did you try uninstalling/reinstalling WMC?

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-reins ... windows-7/

[lithium630]

I tried that and it didn't seem to do anything. I would just to a fresh install of Windows but my wife uses this computer to work at home and there is some VPN software that is installed and its kind of a hassle to get it reinstalled.

Codec packs and screw things up beyond repair. Even uninstalling them doesn't always help.

[davemha]

Did you ever solve this problem? I'm having the exact same issue - no extra codecs installed in my case.

[caldwelljt]

I am sorry to resurrect an old post, but this seems to be the closest online discussion I can find about my problem. I have been working on this problem for two weeks and going on 4 weeks trying to get my setup finished. I was pretty much done at one point and made a critical error that caused data loss and forcing me to rebuild my media center and ever since then I haven't been able to get it working again.

I have a Ceton ETH6 Ethernet tuner with a cable card
I am running media center within a VM (it works, I had it working and others have done it.)
I am using xbox 360s as media center extenders.

Right now I have managed to get everything to the point that it appears to be working, however when attempting to watch live or recorded TV on an extender (360) all I get is a blank/black video. The menus work fine, even tuning to a live channel shows the channel description banner briefly (as normal) and I can hit things like pause and record and they appear to work, but no sound and no video actually appears.

On the server itself, I can tune many of the channels with the limitation that some that are protected (no hdcp in VM), but that is expected. If I am working with FOX on channel 8, it shows on the VM but I just get black on the extender.

So far I have rebuilt the media center server 4 times. Twice as windows 7 and twice as windows 8, I have also replaced the xbox with a different one, all to no avail. I've disabled the firewall and followed a number of other suggestions I found that didn't solve it (I currently do not have any of those changes applied, as my media center server is sitting at a clean setup state, meaning it is to the point where I think it should just be working (but it isn't).

Other than moving hardware around on my network and delving into packet sniffing, I can't think of anything else to try. Maybe yet another, non-360 extender? A different tuning adaptor? My network is almost pure gigabit with a very small 10gbe section between my NAS an core switch.

Any clues on where I can look next? logs? other forums? registry issues? ANY help would be appreciated as these extenders are the ONLY way I plan to use my cable service

[davemha]

I think I solved the black screen problem but I honestly can't remember how. I sold the whole rig in a move less than a month after. I know I tried codecs, including the Shark codec pack, and that may have been what worked. But, yeah, can't remember for sure.

[caldwelljt]

wow, quicker response than i expected.

I wasn't aware the codecs were spongeable with WMC. Well, that implies I know that much at all about WMC, which i don't, i guess my assumption is that as long as I was performing stock activities (watching live or pre-recorded shows created on this very box, and dealing with somewhat standard clients (xbox 360) that whatever codecs are installed are what is required, and that adding a codec would only have an effect if a video, not created by WMC itself, were introduced.

That being said, I think I have one more clue. After running across this thread and at least one other, where it was reported audio was working and video only was showing as black (where as I am getting black/no audio), I tried the following:

1. Tuning to a free to record channel and attempting to start a recording from the xbox. This seems to have worked, although I am getting a considerable amount of jitter, which is possibly a clue that I am getting some under-performance somewhere. This leads to a theory that maybe the xbox 360 as a WMC extender, will opt to show nothing if video does not come in a timely manner. Any suggestions on what tools are used to judge memory, network, disk i/o? (i.e. whatever tools, including perfmon or similar, that will give me info I may compare with others.

2. I went to a channel that is working inside the VM, in this case channel 2. I tuned to it on the xbox in the WMC extender app, and on the theory that audio was working i cranked it all the way up, but heard nothing. I then turned it back down and enabled closed captions, and those work. I enabled CC using the xbox remote, so i don't know if something of the stream is making it all the way, or if CC is handled differently than audio/video streaming.

---

All that being said, i'm open to other ideas. I'm going to try to rule out a network issues, putting them all in the same switch, testing different network paths/splitting up bandwidth. I am not familiar with any codecs but if you could describe, name, link them, i'll give those a try to see if they make a difference.

Also, Also, I may continue on in a slightly different way if all else fails. If I don't move to a physical box for WMC (which i don't want to do). It looks like the "backend" of WMC might be working or near working, and i've been looking at some alternative solutions such as myth, kodi, vsplex (sort of), and it looks like in some cases WMC can be the PVR side, with jobs submitted and extract out independant of the WMC interface. Has anyone any knowledge or details/breakdown of this?

In that case I have a few RaspberryPIs i could use and/or I could use DLNA or some such thing to deliver content.

[caldwelljt]

gar this is maddening. Does anyone have a quick suggestion on how to tell where my problem is? like, is there an easy way to tell if the video stream is actually leaving the WMC server?

maybe i could try one of these other tuners i have, although everything in me says that it's not the tuner if i can actually watch it. i'm starting to wonder if the cost savings is worth it (i had hoped to have the most basic cable with only one cable card, just so i can get a few of the cable news channels. and local stuff (which i can get with an antenna). i got ceton because it has 6 tuners, but i really wish it would do the direct/live stuff that the hdhomerun would do. but the hdhomerun wont do but 3 channels per cablecard and you can connect to it as easily and directly from PCs and phones/etc.

i wonder if they will get around to adding cablecard tuner support to my qnap nas

[davemha]

Does anyone have a quick suggestion on how to tell where my problem is? like, is there an easy way to tell if the video stream is actually leaving the WMC server?

-- "Easy" is a relative term. Wireshark is a great packet sniffer and, yes, with it you can see each and every little packet that is leaving your PC on the network. Have fun sorting through them. (Once you learn to use Wireshark it's not that bad. Filtering helps.) Also, have you tried turning off your Windows Firewall? And I'm assuming you're using an unmanaged switch (i.e., there's nothing in between your PC and Xbox that could block packets).

-- For performance testing, I used to use SiSoft Sandra for general PC info. There are plenty of free video benchmarking tools for Windows. Solarwinds has some great network performance tools - and they used to have some free ones too. The ones that weren't "free to evaluate". I assume they still do.

-- The only codec pack I can recall was called "Shark". I seem to recall liking it.

When I was in your position, googling all this, it seemed to me that streaming to the Xbox really just didn't work well. Which was the major reason I bought the Xbox at the time. My solution today is an old Windows 7 box running Media Center with a Hauppage tuner. But we really don't watch live TV much; instead, I have a homebuilt NAS server (on CentOS) with a few terabytes of movies and series. It's much easier than going through "legit" channels - even when they're free. I have Amazon Prime and I've had Netflix and Hulu Plus. In all cases, they have such poor interfaces and their buffering is so bad that I end up ditching them and going back to my evil, pirate ways.

[caldwelljt]

Ok, so I am pissed at myself for burning up so much time over the wrong approach. I did a "cheap" wireshark by just manually watching packet counts on both the nic inside the vm (right click>status) and looking at it from the esxi server's view (slower update, but to find out if data was really leaving my server). And, from what I could tell, by isolating all other traffic, including the ethernet tuner via using recorded TV playback for testing, I was able to tell data was indeed leaving the box, but somehow it just failed to show up on the xbox. I expect wireshark would give me some better data, maybe OOO packets? corruption, i dunno, haven't made it that far because......

I happened across a similar but not directly related thread over here: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 40&p=64025 where they had a similar issue start up after installing software that affected the NIC on the media center.

This made me think, what easy options could i change on the server that might drastically change how network traffic is processed. The easy was firewall, but that was already off. After that I thought about either changing the NIC type from E1000 to VMXnet and/or installing a USB NIC and sharing that into the virtual server. I prepped for both, and quickly found that switching the servers virtual adaptor type from E1000 to VMXNET instantly caused it to start working.

It looks like an easy fix for a fuzzy problem, meaning that (i suspect) there are a number of ways these symptoms can be created by (in ways you and I wouldn't normally expect to) affecting how information and data is passing through the WMC backend, the OSI levels, and the DRM. Ticking off one of those along the way is likely to give _some_ kind of issue to extenders that may (or may not) cause part of all of the symptoms I was complaining of..

Oh, and I also attempted to pull out the Ceton extender I had bought and never even opened. Only to find out that since I had all these issues and stepped from windows 7 to windows 8 on the WMC server, there is just zero support on windows 8. I'm not sure what I will do, perhaps i can s till return it, i don't feel like going back to windows 7 just to get this one extender working. I was, in fact, considering moving to the windows 10 hacked in version someday if.


That being said, i'm getting some skipping on live TV, however my esxi servers is NO WHERE NEAR optimized. I've go some powerful options to throw at it and expect it to behave better with more bandwidth, ram, speed, disk i/o, space, etc thrown at it.

I downloaded 5 or 6 codecs, almost all of which ticked off anti-virus software and failed virustotal.com. I went threw known hoops removing what I could before attempting to install shark/etc codecs, and then used snapshots to try them out, but they didn't make any difference (yet). I'm considering rolling back to before they were installed because i'd hate to have this server start freaking out in a month or two because it started clunking around on some virus or other malware.

[RyC]

Yeah this is a "known issue" when running WMC in a VM under ESXi, the e1000 NIC causes problems. Sorry I didn't catch that you were trying this in a VM until now. I personally just passthrough a real NIC to the VM and everything works great.