Phase 2: Recording Dropouts Due to Weak Signals
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JohnJ9
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Phase 2: Recording Dropouts Due to Weak Signals
Now that I have the ETH6 working, I've started recording things, and I'm getting recording sessions quitting at times due to weak signals. I've looked up the KB material, and I seem to be well within acceptable ranges: SNR up in the 38-39 range on all tuners, but signal levels range from -5.6 to -1.5. The KB says this should actually be fine, but I'm finding things quit, and quit fast without even showing pixelation before they quit. I do also see that one or two dropouts coincide around the time of a second recording starting up. Is there a way within WMC to set greater tolerances, just in case this is a very momentary blip? Are these figures actually worse than the KB article lets on?
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mdavej
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I've had similar issues in the past. Weak signal errors seem to be a catch all for many issues, not necessarily a true weak signal issue. In my case all my failed weak signal recordings turned out to be due to a failed play ready update. You may want to check that since your signals are actually fine.
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JohnJ9
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I took a quick glance at that in the past, and I seem to be fine there. In fact, in every case, things start and then won't continue. I feel I can probably spot an event interacting with another tuner on the device at the same time that corresponds with the supposed loss of signal. Not positive, but that's my gut feeling right now. I do with the log on the device was using current time rather than starting at the time_t(0). I'm sure they wrote a quick utility to convert the log, but I haven't done so yet, and find it a bit of a PITA to look back through and try to look for corresponding things. I had another tuner get stuck playing, this time after recording had completed. It took a bit of work to find the right events in the log, and I was fortunate that the recording was from a channel I've never watched, or I might never have found the right thing. The stop got sent over, but it never stopped, and I could only tell from the diag screen and the lights going nuts on the switches.
I foresee getting this device to work is going to be challenging. There seems to be a lot yet to debug. The DVR mfrs have the benefit of having a known hardware set, a stack under their control, and not have to do battle with a window system and operating system that wants to make things like spreadsheets run smoothly, but this seems like a controllable enough environment that it ought to be cleaner by now. I'm continuing on with a box that was, ostensibly, bought only to interact with the ETH6, so it ought to be easy enough to get running right. In some senses, I'm willing to be a guinea pig and try what they want tried, as long as we finally get to a system that does that it's asked to do 100% of the time.
I foresee getting this device to work is going to be challenging. There seems to be a lot yet to debug. The DVR mfrs have the benefit of having a known hardware set, a stack under their control, and not have to do battle with a window system and operating system that wants to make things like spreadsheets run smoothly, but this seems like a controllable enough environment that it ought to be cleaner by now. I'm continuing on with a box that was, ostensibly, bought only to interact with the ETH6, so it ought to be easy enough to get running right. In some senses, I'm willing to be a guinea pig and try what they want tried, as long as we finally get to a system that does that it's asked to do 100% of the time.
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JohnW248
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There are some basic set-up recommendations that we've found with the SD Prime tuner which might be worth looking at. For example, how are the windows machines and the tuner connected? If you are using ports on a router, that can be trouble. It's best to have all the network clients on unmanaged switches with just a jumper from the switches to the router and let the router control the world to your network and not your network.
Look for anything else that might be contributing network traffic, if you have a program that off loads recorded tv to a NAS, that might impact packet transfers. Windows error messages are sometimes a bit cryptic like the old magic 8 ball--reply hazy try again or weak signal might point to a problem but not the one the message indicates. Weak signal can be sent for a number of reasons with network tuners that have nothing to do with signal level at the tuner but do have to do with streaming reaching the windows box.
If you find as the number of tuners in use go up you have increased pixilation, Ceton has an experimental beta which attacks that issue, you can search for it in this topic but make sure you have everything else "fixed" before you start with the FW updates.
Now I feel its only fair to say I have 3 SD Primes running successfully but I couldn't get a ETH to stay up without crashing for more than two days and when it restarted it wouldn't WMDRM pair so while it tuned it couldn't stream protected content to the two machines I had split the tuners between. I still don't know if that unit was just defective or the PS was bad or what, but I wound up returning it.
Look for anything else that might be contributing network traffic, if you have a program that off loads recorded tv to a NAS, that might impact packet transfers. Windows error messages are sometimes a bit cryptic like the old magic 8 ball--reply hazy try again or weak signal might point to a problem but not the one the message indicates. Weak signal can be sent for a number of reasons with network tuners that have nothing to do with signal level at the tuner but do have to do with streaming reaching the windows box.
If you find as the number of tuners in use go up you have increased pixilation, Ceton has an experimental beta which attacks that issue, you can search for it in this topic but make sure you have everything else "fixed" before you start with the FW updates.
Now I feel its only fair to say I have 3 SD Primes running successfully but I couldn't get a ETH to stay up without crashing for more than two days and when it restarted it wouldn't WMDRM pair so while it tuned it couldn't stream protected content to the two machines I had split the tuners between. I still don't know if that unit was just defective or the PS was bad or what, but I wound up returning it.