Now WMC can be a pain in the ass, and I've found that out first hand during many hours of slamming my head into the keyboard. I've been having a TERRIBLE time with the whole extender deal. I've pretty much been through every configuration, network setting, piece of hardware, windows installation, etc and it just won't calm down and be stable and just WORK. I'm SO sick of telling them "oh, it's good now and it hasn't had any issues in a few hours" - then sometime shortly after I always get a call saying something is having issues.
Some backstory -
First, the cable card was installed in a win7 ultimate machine which was used as a normal desktop. Initially streaming was done over wireless-N. The computer has an SSD for the boot drive, and an internal terabyte drive for the DVR recordings. Inital setup on that machine was a pain in the ass, but eventually got it working. Extender was choppy and slow. Constantly dropping off, channels weren't tuning right, sometimes the extender would connect as it should and other times it would be this "round and round" of restart the computer, check the settings, reconfigure the extender - and eventually it would just start magically working again. Enough of that, ran cat6 cable from the router to the Xbox - a little faster, can max out the network tuner settings but it's still being unstable. Sometimes it'll connect and play quickly, other times it won't connect/detect media center correctly. Then the round and round of restart everything commences again. Usually during all this, live tv and everything are working just fine on the actual PC. I still to this day haven't discovered any real reason behind it deciding to connect or not, it really seems to be "try it enough and eventually it'll work"
So trying to remedy that still, I connected the Xbox directly to the computer through the ethernet. Problems still persisting. Tried two different network cards, tried a different router and switch as well as disabling all gigabit ethernet stuff, No changes. New cables. Tried reinstalling/repairing media center and all the DRM and playready stuff, completely uninstalled and reinstalled the infinitv card and it's still doing it. Windows firewall, defender, antivirus, all disabled or uninstalled and same goes for similar features in the router. I tried looking in the event logs and one of the Asus programs that came with the computer was throwing an error, so I uninstalled all the Asus stuff. STILL NO IMPROVEMENT! I've literally spent weeks at a time trying to chase down the extender issues and I've never had so much trouble with this kind of stuff in my life. It's like it has a mind of it's own.
So my friend and I were talking one day about it, and how fragile media center is or seems to be. We decided that he should get a dedicated media center PC, do a fresh install of windows with only media center because maybe the desktop that was being used had a tainted windows installation on it, or windows update might have broken something along the way.
Current issues -
So on Friday, new media center PC parts show up. Brand new Asrock motherboard, SSD, windows 8 pro, AMD FM2 dual core, and a bunch of other stuff. Get windows all installed and configured, and again it takes an hour or two just to get the extender to connect properly. It never has any connectivity issues to xbox live, internet, network, anything. It can always detect all the PC's in the network. I've been over the router settings a thousand times, updated the firmware, disabled any LAN firewalls, UPNP is on, xbox is correctly addressed, etc. The extender was working fine for the time being, but Saturday morning the solid state died and we had to redo the windows installation again. Installed windows 7 ultimate, immediately upgraded to windows 8 pro. Terabyte DVR drive was installed from the other computer too with the new build.
Media center is working great on the PC currently after reinstalling, but adding the extender now fails at whatever the last check box of the WMC configuration screen is. It times out, Xbox says failed to connect. WMC says extender is configured and ready for use. Check event logs, it says it's sending the [whatever it calls it] to the xbox, no errors currently but the xbox just churns away on "contacting..."! I'm amazed that on a fresh installation of windows I'm still having these issues. I think windows 8 did install the current updates, so hopefully there aren't any out already that break it in some way.. I'm almost tempted to remove all of them or start again without updating. Now though, the Xbox doesn't show any PC's in the test screen, although it will still find media center. I haven't touched the router settings or xbox settings since it was working before.
Does ANYONE have any ideas on things to try? I'm really at whits end with this crap. I've tried every idea I've had 10000x and I'm about ready to just throw the whole setup in the garbage. It's REALLY awesome when it works, but it isn't ever for that long and I'm really done with having to problem solve and troubleshoot this constantly.
If it means anything, the computers on their network are on a domain now too. Everything else network related is working brilliantly, except the goddamn extender.
