Beta firmware candidate for InfiniTV available - 14.10.3.163

[pmrowley]

Erkotz, I am getting nowhere with support. They insist that the card is working perfectly, and that reverting the firmware should have fixed the problem. The problem I am seeing is this: If I go to the manual tuning webpage for the card and tune a channel, the PROGRAMS field displays "no programs." This would indicate to me that the tuner isn't receiving data. If I do this on my -4 card (which is working,) whenever I tune to a channel, I see a series of numbers in the PROGRAMS field. Whenever Media Center attempts to use one of the tuners on the -6 card, I can see that it's not getting program information, and MC is popping an error that the channel is out. What can I do from here?

[erkotz]

Erkotz, I am getting nowhere with support. They insist that the card is working perfectly, and that reverting the firmware should have fixed the problem. The problem I am seeing is this: If I go to the manual tuning webpage for the card and tune a channel, the PROGRAMS field displays "no programs." This would indicate to me that the tuner isn't receiving data. If I do this on my -4 card (which is working,) whenever I tune to a channel, I see a series of numbers in the PROGRAMS field. Whenever Media Center attempts to use one of the tuners on the -6 card, I can see that it's not getting program information, and MC is popping an error that the channel is out. What can I do from here?

If the firmware has been reverted, there is no way this problem could have been related to the beta firmware - there are no changes left behind.

I am the one that has been responding to your support ticket. There is a specific reason I am asking for the data I am asking for. Please supply it.

[Dkeyguy1]

Recently rolled back 2 InfiniTV4 to 1226 to check on problem what turns out to be cablecard issue.
Upgraded from there to this one and seems no downside,,,2 days. I'll report back after next reboot about 10 days out.
Adams Cable, mixed signal, most mpeg some h264, Motorola cards, no TA. And I can't begin to tell ya,
They are still, still not done with the upgrades. Everything so far appears to be "Copy Freely" so far. No Clear QAM detected.

Well,
10 days, 12 hours, etc., yada, yada, haven't rebooted yet, all 8 tuners working like a charm......
Now I'll go a couple more weeks, but it looks pretty darn good

OK, then.
15 days till a needed reboot and all is well with this firmware, 2 Infinitv4's, no tuning adapters, all digital, "Copy Freely"

[icedtrip]

Update Failed for me. Ticket number: #ZLJ-993-53047

[cwagner17]

Was running for 6 days then this morning video on all extenders was frozen. Changing the channel resulted in a message saying all tuners were busy,I rebooted and tuners were available.

Support Ticket #YVO-346-45803 - Log files attached

[golfdude]

im having an issue on my eth6 where i can record 2 shows at once, but if i try to watch a 3rd show at the same time, i get all tuners in use error, despite that not being true with 4 available tuners still open, or when both recordings are about to start, and im on a 3rd channel already, itll spit out recording errors on the 2 recording shows, but they will record anyway.. but i cant change the 3rd channel im already on to another one.. and wants me to kill a recording in progress just to change the channel.. this issue then remains when i have a single recording show after those (later that night), so only 1 tuner is in use recording the show, but if i try to change the channel, im blocked again with the tuners in use issue, not even beinng able to change the channel at all, with the only option ending the recording in progress to change it..

[mdavej]

Had to roll back. ETH is rebooting by itself daily at 3 AM, causing WMC to lose connection (DRM status RED).

Loaded the beta firmware again with the intention of opening a ticket, but no reboots so far in the past 24 hrs. Must have been a fluke the first time around or something my cable company was doing.

Spoke too soon. Rebooted by itself after running about a week, this time in the middle of the day. Just opened ticket IZU-711-62174.

[mldenison]

I reinstalled the latest beta on both my ETH's. I found a suspect Cat6 cable running between my HTPC and the managed switch which caused my NIC card to sporadically switch between 1gbs and 100mbs. Since replaced, both my Echos and both ETH's have been running fine, for the most part.

The only issue I'm left with is that when recording over 6 channels in the same time slot, I get a number of 'No signal - cannot record messages'. Usually, after several of these messages, the channel will record - flawlessly - within a minute or so. Occasionally not.

Any ideas?

[mcewinter]

I'm having a similar with my SD Prime. I had just installed the SD software on a different machine which upgraded the firmware in the process. I have seen no signal/cannot record errors in the past that seemed to iron themselves out but it dawned on me that upgrading the firmware is probably the reason why. I'm going to rerun TV setup if the issue persists just to see if that corrects the errors.

[mldenison]

I reran TV setup when this started, but it's been an ongoing issue for me.

[JohnW248]

I reinstalled the latest beta on both my ETH's. I found a suspect Cat6 cable running between my HTPC and the managed switch which caused my NIC card to sporadically switch between 1gbs and 100mbs. Since replaced, both my Echos and both ETH's have been running fine, for the most part.

The only issue I'm left with is that when recording over 6 channels in the same time slot, I get a number of 'No signal - cannot record messages'. Usually, after several of these messages, the channel will record - flawlessly - within a minute or so. Occasionally not.

Any ideas?

When that happens, go to Media Center, Recorded TV, view scheduled and then click history. Each attempt with no video, no signal should be there along with information on time and tuner tried. If there is an eventual success, that will show as well and you can see what was going on. Many times with networked tuners, one machine will try a busy tuner and return a no signal when another machine has it and go down the list of available tuners until it catches one. If it totally fails, first check and see if any tuner was available.

That will help with trying to see if it was just a usage issue or if there is some communication issue with the tuner.

[mldenison]

Appreciate the info! That'll help for sure.

[JohnW248]

Appreciate the info! That'll help for sure.

If you find it is an issue with choices, you can re-arrange those on a per channel basis by going to the guide and right clicking on the channel number and choosing EDIT CHANNEL and then from that menu choose EDIT SOURCES. When that open you can move tuners up or down or uncheck tuners, etc. This is also an easy way to check a tuner when there are multiples available by unchecking all but the one you want to test and save/save and then tune to the current program. Remember to go back and re-enable the other tuners.

It also seems when you do this, MC will remember this as a "new order" and make a different choice on live tv in the future. (Live and Recorded usually work off a different list from the old days when we only had two tuners and live was tuner 0 and record was tuner 1 and if 1 was busy then it would go to tuner 0, etc.)

[JohnW248]

One thing I did notice since going to this new release is needing to confirm going to cablecard diagnostic screen (and only the diag page, the other 8 don't exhibit this behavior)... Never had to before and I couldn't really tell if this message was coming from the card or the tuner (is it possible my card got a partial update that now exhibits this behavior)... and for some reason when I access that screen, feeds cut to WMC in a few seconds (often resulting in a temporary subscription required) For most this wouldn't be an issue but I happen to go to those screens a lot more often. One thing I noticed is it always seems to recover from such issues where before if there was a problem I'd have to reset either the tuner or the TA. I am going to give it a few days to try and pull in the update before reverting to see if this new behavior follows the firmware or not.

That is the workaround for NDS cards. Cisco actually makes the NDS card, and unfortunately, there is not a good way to tell a "PowerKey" Cisco card from an "NDS" Cisco card, so the workaround is applied to both cards. Accessing that screen breaks Cisco cards, so we reset the card after accessing that screen. We are still trying to get Cisco to fix the actual issue here. When that occurs, we will remove the workaround.

Seems like a poor workaround, this has crashed the 6 tuner PCIe card a number of times, it'll run on one machine with .163 as long as you never open the diagnostic tab, on another machine with .114 the tuner crashes at about four hour intervals, after a one 12 hour trial period I rolled back to a known good stable FW but at this point not interested in any FW with a NDS workaround in it....just not worth the trouble and hassles and missed recordings and crashes and RED tuners and Disabled TA (all of which go away with a stable FW).

[signcarver]

I think I'm with John on this as I had to revert... It would appear to run well for a few days (actually it seems to help with TA issues) but then my USB tuner finds itself disconnected from the PC after a few days (never more than a week) the week is only if I don't go to any cablecard screens in that time. It behaves more like either a memory leak that is accelerated if one visits the cablecard screens, or perhaps my provider is trying to upgrade my cablecard firmware... still hasn't on this tuner and I do know every now and then the issue appears to crop up very soon after they try and push it out if not during. Unless I can run something that collects diagnostics more live, I don't think I can be of much help tracing this down as I have to power off to get the connection back as pulling the usb does no good. In two weeks I may revisit it as I am off for a month and can try to watch it a little more closely (I have other tuners available). This tuner is a bit old so I am open that it may be hardware failure but reverting seemed to have fixed it but I need to give it another week or two to be sure.

It seems the last time I had issues with a firmware, it too had some NDS specific fixes which I believe were reported as broken again in the next release... Though not ideal, perhaps different firmwares can be picked up for different cable cards...

[smassey22180]

Beta has worked fine for me for the past month. Standard setup with 2 WMCs but I don't use tuner pooling and have a huge fan on my ETH6.

[mldenison]

Both my ETH's have now been up for 14 days without a reboot. My HTPC reboots on a schedule everyday in the wee hours.

I haven't had a problem during this time - even the 'No Signal' message has not been seen.

I do get the occasional Echo lockup on Live TV everyday or so, including a 'Subscription Required' message when on Live TV. Power cycling the Echo cures it. My wife is mostly happy now with it.

[kd6icz]

My system has worked flawlessly ever since I removed my ETH tuner. The ETH tuner works fine if I run it by itself and the PCIe tuner works fine if I run it by itself but the two together on one PC seem to cause confusion.

[scyto]

I just had the no tuners to service your request issues (my wife was watching NFL on broadcast channel via xbox extended and it just stopped with tuner conflict message). I checked on my main machine and same issue for live TV and also failed to record something manually. I had not updated to beta tuner firmware. Only thing that changed is I had rebooted 2 nights ago after a bunch of windows updated that had been wanting a reboot for a week or so along with upgrading my Nvidia drivers 2 days ago.

What was odd was that tuner diagnostics showed each tuner working fine I could see tv in diags.

So I did full Ceton ETH6 power down and HTPC reboot, no change.

Then I upgraded firmware, installed 1 optional update and rebooted HTPC again.

I did full reboot again, this time OK.

Given one person above said they had same issue with home run prime and that I had not applied the beta firmware and that diagnostics showed signal to be fine including tuning I am pointing a finger at a recent windows update....

[JazJon]

I installed this beta firmware in hopes the no signal pop-up windows would go away. I've been clearing them all year, very annoying. I never missed a recording though, they were false errors as usual.

Good / Bad news.

Good:
All popup errors are gone so far

Bad:
The even worse dreaded Macroblocking has returned with a vengeance.

Here is an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u_cPiQzZuQ

I would rather clear error messages and have have perfect recordings, than have no error messages with unwatchable shows.

How do I downgrade? I'm assuming I'll have to open a support ticket but wanted to post here first.

Driver Package Version 13.6.3.1088
InfiniTV Firmwre Version 14.10.3.163
InfiniTV Hardware Version 7359

Signal is anywhere from
-3.0 dBmV and +2.3 dBmV
(depending on the channel)

Power Cycled / Rebooted no change