InfiniTV6 ETH Playready Update Failure Loop

[STC]

I shall repeat: have you tried a new cable card?

[th83]

Second review on this page mentions the playready issue: http://reviews.microcenter.com/3520-en_ ... eviews.htm

Another one: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 9&start=20

The post by kodi08 and EzEd on this page: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 9&start=20

...just to name a few after a quick search.

[th83]

...last one I couldn't fit on my last post:
seangrimes post on this page: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 9&start=20

^^He even reinstalled Windows fresh and still couldn't update PlayReady, but rebooting the ETH fixed it. I did a similar test last time it happened. I connected a friend's laptop up to the Ceton after installing WMC for the first time on that laptop and it got the playready error. When I rebooted the ETH, all the playready errors went away.

[th83]

At least you could incorporate 'reboot the InfiniTV ETH 6' as step #1 when your support department gets this call. Maybe then you could see for yourself if this is indeed the root of the problem (which it is from what I can see).

[th83]

I shall repeat: have you tried a new cable card?

I swapped out the CableCard the first time I had the issue (I guess I could say after the first few times I saw the issue within a week). It has come back twice since then, so maybe I'll try swapping it again. The first cablecard was in an HD HomeRun Prime for a while with zero issues, though. Also have seen this once at a customer's home (he just got up and running a week ago) and rebooting the ETH fixed it. It would be strange to have three bad cablecards (one of which had no issues in another device).

[mdavej]

Playready issues have nothing to do with Ceton and everything to do with WMC in general. Getting a new tuner might solve the issue only because you start over with Playready, not because the original tuner had some sort of incompatibility.

Following the standard Playready troubleshooting advice will probably fix the OP's problem. I'm not making light of the issue. It once took me 3 months to solve a Playready issue that persisted through 3 cable cards, 2 Cetons, 2 Homerun Primes and 2 Hauppauge (Silicon Dust like Homerun). So I know how frustrating it can be. Turns out hardware was not the problem.

[th83]

Playready issues have nothing to do with Ceton and everything to do with WMC in general. Getting a new tuner might solve the issue only because you start over with Playready, not because the original tuner had some sort of incompatibility.

Following the standard Playready troubleshooting advice will probably fix the OP's problem. I'm not making light of the issue. It once took me 3 months to solve a Playready issue that persisted through 3 cable cards, 2 Cetons, 2 Homerun Primes and 2 Hauppauge (Silicon Dust like Homerun). So I know how frustrating it can be. Turns out hardware was not the problem.

The thing is, in my case rebooting the Ceton fixes the issue instantly. Sometimes it can certainly be WMC, but if you look at my symptoms and what fixes it, this is not the case. Keep in mind I can fix it by doing NOTHING to WMC, and ONLY rebooting the Ceton.

EDIT: I have definitely experienced this less frequently since I swapped the CableCard, but when it happened multiple times in one week, I noticed that the ETH was running very hot and put it up on its side, so I'm not sure if the cablecard or the temps were part of the issue the first time. The lower temperatures have resolved some other quirks that I was seeing at first (really slow channel changes and pixelization when it got hot). Boosting my signal also helped even more with the channel changes and pixelization. At this point the biggest annoyances are the occasional reboots for 'no tuners' or 'playready updates'.

[mdavej]

Probably re-pairing resets a timer somewhere in WMC. There's no way for me to know for sure of course. But my issues also occurred like clockwork, and every symptom pointed to hardware ("Signal Lost", "Weak Signal" in my case). Turned out Playready was simply blocking the signal.

Have you tried this (from IE)?
http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Ind ... ndivit.asp

Have you tried all the other Playready fixes (there's a great list on Silicon Dust's website)?

[th83]

Probably re-pairing resets a timer somewhere in WMC. There's no way for me to know for sure of course. But my issues also occurred like clockwork, and every symptom pointed to hardware ("Signal Lost", "Weak Signal" in my case). Turned out Playready was simply blocking the signal.

Have you tried this (from IE)?
http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Ind ... ndivit.asp

Have you tried all the other Playready fixes (there's a great list on Silicon Dust's website)?

I tried all the fixes before I finally just rebooted the ETH. Now when it happens, I reboot the ETH and it goes away. Much faster. Since it will play older recorded DRM stuff, I'm assuming there's not actually anything wrong with WMC in my case. Something between WMC and the ETH.

[mdavej]

I had no problem with recorded stuff either, only live. You did try the fix I linked as well? Have you run the digital cable advisor? That must pass as well.

[th83]

I had no problem with recorded stuff either, only live. You did try the fix I linked as well? Have you run the digital cable advisor? That must pass as well.

Yes, the first time I did everything (reset DRM, installed that security update, reinstalled WMC & PlayReady, re-ran the Digital Cable Advisor, etc.) and none of it worked. The only thing that worked was rebooting the ETH. Now when it happens (which seems to be every few weeks to once a month) I just reboot the ETH and everything goes back to normal. This is why I'm sure the problem I have seen is directly related to the ETH, nothing works except for rebooting the ETH, which works every time.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not having the issue right this minute, it just happens from time to time and I can fix it by just rebooting the ETH. If it were a problem with DRM or WMC, rebooting the ETH would not fix it (and the same problem could not happen on 3 PCs at the exact same time).

[JohnW248]

When you reboot the ETH are you just power cycling the unit? There is another way, if you can open the Web Gui, click on "LOG" and then in the command box type reboot and click send. It would seem your problem has nothing to do with playready or media center but might be a network issue of some sort that the computer and mc loses the ETH or the proper authorized level of connection to the ETH.

I would examine switches (cheaper seems to be better than expensive and some of the high end "green" switches seem to develop problems in connection to tuners), Ethernet card drivers and even cables. And remember it is better to connect to a switch and not to a router port. Is there any chance that these issues correspond to some other security scan that takes place?

[mdavej]

I had no problem with recorded stuff either, only live. You did try the fix I linked as well? Have you run the digital cable advisor? That must pass as well.

Yes, the first time I did everything (reset DRM, installed that security update, reinstalled WMC & PlayReady, re-ran the Digital Cable Advisor, etc.) and none of it worked. The only thing that worked was rebooting the ETH. Now when it happens (which seems to be every few weeks to once a month) I just reboot the ETH and everything goes back to normal. This is why I'm sure the problem I have seen is directly related to the ETH, nothing works except for rebooting the ETH, which works every time.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not having the issue right this minute, it just happens from time to time and I can fix it by just rebooting the ETH. If it were a problem with DRM or WMC, rebooting the ETH would not fix it (and the same problem could not happen on 3 PCs at the exact same time).

Now that you've explained it, I have to apologize for leading you down the wrong path. I saw the subject "Playready Update Failure Loop" and assumed you were the OP and that was your issue. Now that I see the the actual issue is something completely different, I can tell you that I have exactly the same problem and no resolution. I agree that this is 100% a Ceton hardware issue, possibly a slow memory leak in the ETH, if I had to guess. This is definitely something that Ceton needs to resolve.

[th83]

When you reboot the ETH are you just power cycling the unit? There is another way, if you can open the Web Gui, click on "LOG" and then in the command box type reboot and click send. It would seem your problem has nothing to do with playready or media center but might be a network issue of some sort that the computer and mc loses the ETH or the proper authorized level of connection to the ETH.

I would examine switches (cheaper seems to be better than expensive and some of the high end "green" switches seem to develop problems in connection to tuners), Ethernet card drivers and even cables. And remember it is better to connect to a switch and not to a router port. Is there any chance that these issues correspond to some other security scan that takes place?

I do not believe it to be a switch/network issue, as it has happened both at my house (where I'm connected to a Gigabit ASUS router) and one of my customer's homes (connected to a ProSafe Gig-E switch) with all new cables. Rebooting the PC should in theory clear it up if it's a network issue (since the PC would have to establish a fresh link to the ETH), but does not. Power cycling the unit does fix it. If/when it happens again, I will try rebooting the network equipment just to be sure, but I don't believe this to be the issue. I am planning to connect the main HTPC and Ceton to a business grade switch, have just not gotten around to it.

[JohnW248]

Based solely on trouble reports and not personal experience, business grade switches have introduced problems especially EEE switches which seem to time-out tuner connections for reasons only known to the switch. Since you see the same problem on your machine and a customer set-up is there any similarity in Ethernet settings in Windows between the two? Buffer size? etc?

For fun, connect the ETH and the Computer to a cheap Monoprice switch and jumper that to your network and see what happens.

[mdavej]

Based solely on trouble reports and not personal experience, business grade switches have introduced problems especially EEE switches which seem to time-out tuner connections for reasons only known to the switch. Since you see the same problem on your machine and a customer set-up is there any similarity in Ethernet settings in Windows between the two? Buffer size? etc?

For fun, connect the ETH and the Computer to a cheap Monoprice switch and jumper that to your network and see what happens.

Mine's on a cheap switch and does the same thing as th83's. Can you confirm that your ETH will run for a month without a reboot? That's about all I can get out of mine.

Would you mind sharing your settings (green, jumbo packets, I/P offload, etc.)? Do you know of any issues with green switches?

[nxsfan]

Mine's on a cheap switch and does the same thing as th83's. Can you confirm that your ETH will run for a month without a reboot? That's about all I can get out of mine.

Would you mind sharing your settings (green, jumbo packets, I/P offload, etc.)? Do you know of any issues with green switches?

In my thread I complained about two problems: WMC would spontaneously re-request the stream ("Viewing Conflict") and would be allocated a new tuner, leaving the previous tuner streaming into the ether until the Ceton was reset. The other problem was my HTPC (in the Ceton diagnostic utility and WMC) reporting that the CableCARD had been re-inserted, even though the InfiniTV Eth itself never gave any indication of a CableCARD issue.

There were two seperate fixes to this issue:
- Using a dumb 100mbit budget switch (didn't matter if the cheap switch replaced or extended the expensive switch).
- Disabling EEE on my HTPC.

It hasn't been a month since then (about a week) but the InfiniTV has been impressively solid since then.

I do not have jumbo frames enabled.

Perhaps my logging tool (https://github.com/nxsfan/ceton) could help you diagnose the behaviour of the tuner prior to the crash.

[RyC]

I've got the ETH on an old dumb Netgear switch too, and I'm at around 50 days of uptime, and the last restart was when I unplugged it to move things around.

[EZEd]

I'm one of the ones that had this problem from some of the other posts that th83 references above. I've had it roughly 4 to 6 times over the past year and a half. It is spontaneous and has no lead up (no symptoms to tell you that it is about to happen). It expires after a while all on its own (sometimes). Other times I've had to reset all network devices (ETH tuner, switch, router and PC). More recently I have set static IP on the ETH and disabled EEE on the NIC card. That has helped to gain some stability on the main PC for the issue. Caveat is that I wasn't having the issue when I changed these things so I can't tell yet if it has had any effect.

The only problem that I've had recently is that the 2 other PCs will lose the tuners over time if I haven't used them to watch live for a few weeks. The main PC doesn't do it because we use it regularly. I thought maybe setting static IP for the ETH would fix the problem on the other secondary PCs but really hasn't. They still lose tuners fairly easily but at least now all I have to do is restart the PCs and the easily find the ETH and resume.

I haven't had to restart the ETH within the past 3 weeks at least. TWC here just changed to the national line up so I had to perform TV setup on all three PCs and then setup again now that the permanent lineup is in place. I did have to restart both the tuner and TA to complete that exercise because they just wouldn't sync up without it. I WAS surprised this time that it did NOT set off a Playready failure loop. It actually went through without a hitch from that standpoint.

So right now I'm in pretty good shape except for the drop off of the secondary PCs. Like th83 and seangrimes, I can confirm that when the loop hits, none of the published fixes work (including using the DRM reset file). The only thing that fixes it is expiration of time and because you're so desperate to fix it you restart ETH, switches, routers and PCs numerous times. Somewhere during that process it magically heals just like it spontaneously started and goes away for a while. I too am convinced it is a network comm issue. Whether it is induced by the ETH or not I can't say but it is coincident that restarting the tuner does seem to effect it. Sometimes however that alone is not enough. Sometimes you have to restart everything involved with the network chain.

I'm hopeful that setting static IP for the tuner has fixed it for me but I'll have to just wait and see.

[STC]

I have an old unmanaged Netgear 8 port gig switch between my HTPC and the Eth6. It's good practice to keep the constant chatter of these two to themselves on their own switch backplane away from our main LAN IMO.