Error messages

[jaimeknapp]

I have Spectrum with a legacy TWC account with a Ceton Pcie-4 and Cisco CableCard and Tuning Adapter. Noting that this has been operational for years, with no modifications whatsoever to this PC solely dedicated to Media Center. All signal noise and levels are well within range and Centon diagnostics indicate proper operation of the CableCard and TA. Also within diagnostics, all tuners properly resolve most all channels. For a very long time the system has worked as well as one could expect, but the past couple weeks a problem has cropped up. Now, in Media Center, a number of channels resolve and tune properly, but I have been receiving these error messages on the majority of channels:

Channel Unavailable This channel is temporarily unavailable. Try again later. (SDV error:1)
Service is unavailable There is currently no TV signal detected for this channel. The channel may be temporarily off the air. Try again later.

This seems to be a timing issue where the tuning request does not receive a response within a certain amount of time and Media Center displays one of these messages. There have been occasions where leaving that message up, the channel may eventually resolve and tune.

There another oddity that has occurred while watching a live channel, playback stops and the Subscription Required message is displayed. Tuning to another channel then back will restore it properly.

Because there are as many channels that do operate properly, I see no reason to suspect that my cable drop and hardware have anything to do with it and that the problem lies somewhere within their system. My question involves dealing with Spectrum. Way back when TWC had a direct CC support phone number, you could cut past the support people who had no clue, but that is gone. Online chat seems less than worthless and recent email has gone unanswered. That leaves me with a phone call as my only recourse.

Perhaps this is just a rant, but if there are any suggestions as to presenting this to Spectrum, I would appreciate it.

[jaimeknapp]

Alright... After having documenting every single channel and their operation for days, preparing myself to call them and with changing absolutely nothing here, every single channel is operating correctly. Irritating, but not surprising in that this whole issue began when everything worked properly through the day, channels failed in the evening, but by morning again worked correctly.

To some degree, I have alternatives with Spectrum on the Samsungs, web-vased on this PC and a Roku, but my 80-year-old wife has Media Center also on an extender down pat with the Harmony 1 remotes I setup for her to operate the same way.

[RedWMC]

Thats awesome your ceton is still running. I don’t know if this is related to what I saw a long time ago, when I had my ceton but I had one of my 4 tuners fail.
To troubleshoot I started 4 recordings so I could find the problem tuner.
To resolve I re ran my setup and disabled the trouble tuner.

Saw this number for spectrum might be still valid?

https://www.timewarnercable.com/content ... NAT-NE.pdf

[RedWMC]

Alright... with changing absolutely nothing here, every single channel is operating correctly.
.

Glad to hear you got it working. Always is the worst when you can’t find a reason to the madness. Sounds like some bug or issue on their side that got resolved.

[jaimeknapp]

It definitely points to their problem, which is where the annoyance would be in dealing with support, who always assume their system to be perfect...

Anyway, it is hard to give up on my Media Center system with its four extenders. I have a new in the box Cetron and an identical, clean Windows 7 pc should I have any failures. I even have a second TA I was told many moon ago to just hang onto when trying to sort out an issue, which turned out to be their problem in our client database entry.

For now it's just hope for the best...