Need to reboot all the time to keep WMC working

[Nitrousbird]

Home Theater PC. i3 4330, 8GB ram, 250GB SSD, 1TB hard drive (which is ONLY for storing WMC recordings, nothing else touches it), GTX1050 video card, 500watt power supply, Micro ITX setup in a proper HTPC case. Connects to a Yamaha TSR-7810 that feeds to a 70" 4K Samsung, running 4K @ 60Hz 4:4:4.

Very little is on this HTPC. Mainly WMC, Plex Media Player (not server, my main desktop handles that workload), Spotify and a couple other small programs that don't run in the background and rarely get used. This rig is specifically used for the WMC and Plex Media Server; my Xbox One handles all other media needs on this TV. I also use four Xbox 360's booting up directly as extenders; 2 hardwired, 2 wireless. The HTPC is hardwired. Network is handled by an EERO Mesh setup with two beacons. WMC is being fed by a CableCard in a HDHomeRun Prime and Cisco switched video adapter attached to that - stuck with Spectrum service.

Two big issues:
- WMC will randomly not tune to any channel. Sometimes the HDHomeRun Prime and Switched Video Adapter need rebooted. I do that and if that doesn't work, a PC reboot will clear it up. This thing reboots fast, so it's 30 seconds from reboot to watching TV
- Won't connect to my extenders. I was having all sorts of issues, so I ended up deleting them, erasing the certificates and starting over. One is getting a generic setup error (I may need to hard reset it), two setup fine. The last is on my outdoor TV and it is snowing, so I'm not dealing with that. After the two setup and both working at the same time, I shut each Xbox off and restarted it. Neither would connect to my HTPC. Quick reboot of the HTPC and both came on. Both of these were the hardwired units, so it isn't a wireless issue.

I'm fine with having the PC reboot itself at 3am each day to keep things going. I already have a batch file to force reload guide data weekly due to previous issues, which 100% solved that problem. I can even put my HDHomeRun and video adapter on a smart switch and have my home automation reboot them daily as well. I just need this crap to work reliably as I'm sick of messing with it. I wanted to go YouTube TV but the wife wasn't having it as I've negotiated such a good deal that the streaming live TV services that are worth a damn don't save us any money and you lose a pile of channels in the process. Other than college football, everything we watch on cable is DVR - until Silcon Dust does DRM DVR, I'm stuck with WMC as no one else is handling DRM in the PC world.

What can I do to get this setup working reliably? I'll reimage the damn thing if I have to, but my confidence level isn't high that this will resolve my issue for the long term.

[jachin99]

Have you investigated some kind of network issue? It sounds like that PC is losing a lot of its connections. When WMC won't tune a channel, do you try it in the HDHR app? If that succeeds in tuning a channel then try switching back to WMC, and see if it picks the channel back up. I pretty much never have to reset my primes.

[adam1991]

Won't tune a channel and won't connect to extenders--this is a networking issue, anywhere from the NIC driver is corrupt all the way through bad NIC and bad cabling into a bad switch ports or bad switch and cabling--with the focus being on the WMC machine's networking, not the networking on the other parts.

[Nitrousbird]

Except if it was a networking issue - without rebooting or anything, I can:
- Hop online and surf or do whatever I want
- Open up my Plex Media player and play whatever I want...all content is stored on my desktop PC
- Open up Spotify and stream music

I've never had to reboot for either of the above to work. I have only had to reboot for WMC connection. Further, even if not connection to the extenders, it will still be playing live video from the HDHomeRun Prime. I have a hard time believing it is my network/NIC if WMC is the only item having this issue.

[jachin99]

Except if it was a networking issue - without rebooting or anything, I can:
- Hop online and surf or do whatever I want
- Open up my Plex Media player and play whatever I want...all content is stored on my desktop PC
- Open up Spotify and stream music

I've never had to reboot for either of the above to work. I have only had to reboot for WMC connection. Further, even if not connection to the extenders, it will still be playing live video from the HDHomeRun Prime. I have a hard time believing it is my network/NIC if WMC is the only item having this issue.

WMC needs a SOLID network, and I don't think those primes are any different. I went two or three years without a good network, and I constantly had problems with it. Then I upgraded my router, and ran some cabling and things work MUCH better. Have you tried resetting the router and switch? or maybe try connecting the WMC PC, one extender, and the prime up to the router, and see how things go. Surfing the web doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth to accomlish, and depending on what you stream in plex (IP channels?) it might not either. Try it out, and see how things go.

[adam1991]

Except if it was a networking issue - without rebooting or anything, I can:
- Hop online and surf or do whatever I want
- Open up my Plex Media player and play whatever I want...all content is stored on my desktop PC
- Open up Spotify and stream music

I've never had to reboot for either of the above to work. I have only had to reboot for WMC connection. Further, even if not connection to the extenders, it will still be playing live video from the HDHomeRun Prime. I have a hard time believing it is my network/NIC if WMC is the only item having this issue.

WMC needs a SOLID network, and I don't think those primes are any different. I went two or three years without a good network, and I constantly had problems with it. Then I upgraded my router, and ran some cabling and things work MUCH better. Have you tried resetting the router and switch? or maybe try connecting the WMC PC, one extender, and the prime up to the router, and see how things go. Surfing the web doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth to accomlish, and depending on what you stream in plex (IP channels?) it might not either. Try it out, and see how things go.

+1.

[Nitrousbird]

Except if it was a networking issue - without rebooting or anything, I can:
- Hop online and surf or do whatever I want
- Open up my Plex Media player and play whatever I want...all content is stored on my desktop PC
- Open up Spotify and stream music

I've never had to reboot for either of the above to work. I have only had to reboot for WMC connection. Further, even if not connection to the extenders, it will still be playing live video from the HDHomeRun Prime. I have a hard time believing it is my network/NIC if WMC is the only item having this issue.

WMC needs a SOLID network, and I don't think those primes are any different. I went two or three years without a good network, and I constantly had problems with it. Then I upgraded my router, and ran some cabling and things work MUCH better. Have you tried resetting the router and switch? or maybe try connecting the WMC PC, one extender, and the prime up to the router, and see how things go. Surfing the web doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth to accomlish, and depending on what you stream in plex (IP channels?) it might not either. Try it out, and see how things go.

So by solid network, I have:
- Arris 32x8 modem - not that this matters at all for WMC. Consistent 117Mbps down / 12Mbps up, low latency, no packet loss, router speed tests daily with the same result.
- Above direct feeds a $400 EERO whole-home WiFi setup
- After the EERO is a 8-port Gigabit switch - TP Link I believe
- In my basement is a 24 port rack mount D-Link switch

Can't blame the 24 port switch, as one Extender that has the issue isn't going through that, nor are the wireless units obviously. HDHomeRun does go through it. Everything has to go through the 8-port switch as the EERO only has one Ethernet port. I previously had a Asus AC3200 router before it decided to die and had some issues with this as well (upgraded to the EERO this summer when we were rarely using WMC). When I had the Asus I didn't need the 8-port switch, so problems were there prior as well.

To FURTHER state this is unlikely my network, I can watch large 4K movies via Plex without issue. I watched 2hr, 15min, 54GB movie this past weekend without a single glitch...FAR higher bandwidth than anything WMC could possibly see. Watched a couple other 50GB movies recently without issue. No issues with Netflix 4K HDR Atmos content either on my Xbox One, which is connected the same way as my HTPC.

At this point, I've decided to just re-install Windows 7 fresh and start over. Any DRM content on there I haven't watched has been there a while, so I'll just re-record if available or torrent as needed.

[adam1991]

You resist very strongly the network notion--but so many issues just like this over the years have been proven out to be something relating to networking. Remember: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

So continue to eliminate the impossible--but do so carefully and without making any assumptions, and make sure the impossible is eliminated.

As has been pointed out, the XBox 360 and the extender system is more finicky than you'd think with respect to the networking infrastructure.

With luck, your re-install will solve the problem. If it doesn't, come on back.

My guess is it will--but probably because by definition a re-install corrects something that went wacky in the network drivers.

Oh--and switch out your cabling at the very least, as it's the cheap thing to do. And move to different ports on your switch.

[joelkirzner]

Instead of rebooting, have you tried just closing and reopening WMC application?
I often have issues with the tuner not connecting, or a video error and I just close out WMC and reopen.
I do think this is a networking issue and I would test out another way to connect the primes to your network.
Maybe connect the modem directly to the 8-port switch and connect the primes to that. Bypass that whole home wifi setup and that 24-port rack for the time being.
I once had severe problems with the WMC dropping the connection and I just changed out my switch, rerouted the cabling and things improved greatly.
I think it's best to avoid having the primes connect to a switch which is connected to another switch.
So: Modem-->8-Port Switch-->HD Homerun Primes. And connect the WMC PC to the same switch if possible.
One last thing... There are Gigabit Ethernet switches that are MANAGED, which may be a better option for you. You can prioritize the traffic on the network by each device. It's a little more expensive than the regular one, but it may be worthwhile.

[Rainey]

I had those problems before when using two HDHR Primes and Two or more HTPC's WMC. I assume that is what you have.

The problem is WMC's (more then one) all trying to use all the tuners and don't share well together. If WMC1 is using a Tuner and the other WMC2 trys to us that tuner WMC2 will mark that tuner to not use it next time. At some point you start to only have a few tuners left and WMC will try all tuners until it finds a good one when it need to record a show. So if you have 6 tuners and record 4 show at once and maybe even watch one show at the same time, there is a good chance of some tuner being mark bad in one or more of the WMC's and once it starts finding one marked bad tuner, then all end up being marked if many are in use. A reboot of WMC is required to reset the marked tuners in WMC.

I solved the problem as follows.

I had two HTCP's for the most part. I had two HDHR primes, so when i setup the tuners at the WMC PC i only had WMC1 and Prime1 paired and then WMC2 and Prime2 paired, so each WMC had it own tuner. I never had the issues of no tuners available any more after that.
I did still have the issue of having recording in to different places because of two different WMC PC's.


Edit:
I forgot to say, before i found the above fix of each WMC PC only using one HDHR, i tried a few bat files to reboot things. It helped but did not completely solve the problem.

You run a task in the middle of the night to reboot the pc and point it to a bat file with the following command
shutdown /r /f /t 0

same with the HDHR you can reboot them with this command where 131D1XXX is the ID number of you HDHR
"C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config.exe" 131D1XXX set /sys/restart self

[n127]

Your HTPC maybe under powered. 500 Watts power supply may not be enough, but I think that your problem is network related like other said. I have GTX 980 Ti, and my PC consumes 340 Watts(Per Kill-a-Watt adapter) when I play games, but watching/recording 3 full HD videos with WMC consumes only 90-120 Watts(I have HDHomeRun Prime too). I have an 800 Watts power supply bronze rated(80%+ efficiency). So this may or may not be an issue.