WMC Taskbar Notifications

[tzr916]

ETH6 + Echo
Win7 Pro 64
PC, ETH6, & Echo all on one switch in the same room (6ft patch cables showing Gigabit connected)
Tuner temps are 60-66
SNR is 36-37db
Signal is -4 to -5dbvm

I know how to hide/disable notification icons. I'm just wondering why these are happening. Rebooted PC & ETH6 several times but still getting these icons:

1. The green wmc globe is always on in my taskbar notification area. Hover on the icon don't get any balloon message. Click the icon it says open wmc, update now, cancel update (grayed out), enable auto updates. The icon used to only show up when wmc was doing an update, but now it's there all the time. Why?

2. Also keep getting a "!" icon with balloon "No Tv Signal" at random. Click the icon it says trouble shoot, open wmc. Yet when I'm running wmc, it's never missed a recording and never failed to tune any channels.

[JohnW248]

It's normal to see the wmc globe if ehtray.exe is running and an update has been run. When you don't get the information pop up, that's a problem I've had and explored over on missing remote dot com. One theory is to go to the task manager and to the processes tab and find ehtray and open file location, then stop process in the task manager and go to the file location and right click and run as administrator. This works sometimes. I've found that every extender will open a copy of ehtray and you have to go to Resource monitor and then CPU and find all running versions of ehtray.exe and stop them. Then you can open or run as administrator one copy which will be used by the host. This sometimes works. Also sometimes just stopping all running ehtray.exe and then closing MC on the host and waiting a few minutes and re-opening it will bring up a working globe on the next update. BTW when you close the process, run your mouse over the task notification area and it'll disappear until an update is run. I have better luck just waiting for a scheduled update to run rather than going into the guide and right clicking on a channel number and get latest guide. That does work sometimes. Also sometimes it works on reboot with no intervention. So don't know exactly what's going on, on a 32 bit machine it seems to work on its own all the time, on some 64 bit machines it seems to work all the time and on others none of the tricks seem to work. I have four 64 bit Win7 machines two are Pro and two are Home Prem and one Home Prem I've had little luck with. It does seem to be working on its own on Win8. Go figure.

As to your second point, any time you see the "!" icon, go to recorded tv, scheduled, history. Your error should be listed. If you are on SDV, this might just be a timing issue with a TA returning information to the tuner late and but it works for the second try. Windows puts up that error on the first try if it fails and also a message in Media Center. If all tuners are unable to get a signal (say the cable is out or the coax is disconnected) you'll get six of those messages in MC on top of each other. Check the history and see which tuner seems to have the problem or which channel and proceed from there.

[tzr916]

I checked recording history and it did have two shows that were marked
NOT RECORDED: NO TV SIGNAL

It was listed 6 times for each show. It tried to find signal on tuner 1 through tuner 6 and couldn't. Then I tried to go to live tv and couldn't get any channel at all. Live tv came back after I restarted wmc. I really hope this is not a sign of things to come.

Are there any wmc or network logs that I can enable and look at?

[JohnW248]

There is an event log for Media Center, you can get there by right clicking on computer and choose manage, then open event viewer, then Applications and Settings and finally media center. You will see the recording failures as well as successes there as well. If you haven't power cycled the tuner you can go to the web gui for the Ceton and click on LOG and it'll have a very long listing of the tuning attempts, if there are none there, then communication was lost between MC & the tuner.

I would suggest you do a diagnostic scan from the Ceton utility and file a support ticket. A few people have reported their tuner "missing" at random after a couple of weeks, some got a new FW update from Ceton which addressed this issue. You should see if that is the problem you experienced.

It is an unusual fix to stop and start MC to get the tuners back, that might point to a crash of ehrecvr service but that would be in the Windows logs just above the Applications and Settings setting in the Event Viewer.