Macroblocking with good SNR/SignalStrength

[tomatoactivator]

I have SNR in the 37-39 range, my Signal Strength is in to +0.5 to -5.0 range (mostly in -3.3) and I get Macroblocking strangely during some days. I can go through a long time (Superbowl for instance) and get perfect picture, other days I get a ton of macroblocking (1 every 10 secs) with any and all channels.

InfiniTV 6 PCIe
Intel 4400 IGP (new Haswell HTPC)

I've had a Tivo and had no issues for 5 years in this place, anyone have similar issues and solutions to start with?

[mcewinter]

How new is the HTPC? A failing hard drive can cause issues similar to this; heat can cause issues as well.

[tomatoactivator]

HD (2 of them) are old, rest of the HTPC is new, I'll try switching out the drive but they seem healthy with good Smart scores. Heat is all reported under 40c for cpu/hd/motherboard/tuner

[mcewinter]

I've had issues with perfectly good hard drives that were getting full.

[JohnW248]

I would suggest you connect an external USB drive (a usb 3.0 would be nice if your computer supports it) and then go into settings/tv/recorder and change the destination to that drive. Then if you don't want to reboot you can stop and start the ehrecvr service, otherwise a recording will immediately go to the new USB destination but the live tv buffer won't move until you reboot.

I would also suggest you make a note of the channels and time when you get the problem. Then check you channels against their frequency and see if they're all in the same QAM tank or close to it. (You can check that by opening the web gui and checking the tuners and frequencies or load one of the utilities that will query the tuner and show all the tuners on one HTML page.)

You might find the problem goes away with the new HD, maybe its time sensitive or frequency sensitive. Some cable systems without SDV can really compress parts of their service. Also remember that besides over compression, mpeg errors should be concealed by the video driver so see if you have the same results on the computer and an extender if you have one set-up. Some video drivers are better than others, not a big fan of Intel right now having a new laptop that doesn't support HDCP on the built in display but does on its HDMI out port.

[tomatoactivator]

The real annoying problem is that the bad macroblocking (ala big gray block like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u_cPiQzZuQ) comes seemingly randomly and rather scarcely.

I've seen Elementary go nuts and thats at 10pm on CBS and have had PBS SidTheScienceKid at 10am? and some HBO at ?4am? But otherwise 90-95% of the shows record without issues. I'm still looking at a temporary HD solution so I don't spend too much money trying to resolve this issue. I did move the liveTV folder to the other HD and am seeing if that are any differences, but chasing down the 5-10% issues are aggravating.

[JohnW248]

I looked at your youtube example and this looks a lot like network issues to me. This can be caused by a lot of things not related to the tuner/hard drive/media center.

A few suggestions to check:

1. Connect the tuner and the computer to a switch and NOT to ports on a router. Routers are notorious for sniffing and that interferes with packet transfers.
2, Make sure that the Windows Firewall is on, third party AVS cause problems because they don't like 3rd network devices and also run various scans at times known only to them. The safe solution is to run MS Security Essentials along with the Windows Firewall.
3. If you have any other configuration, make the changes (unmanaged giga switches are cheap now days and you should be able to fine an 8port switch under $30) The computer tuner and any extenders should be on the switch and a jumper from the router to the switch. Then if you are running any other AVS, remove it (not shut it off) and get the total removal clean out tool from the source (Norton, MacAfee, etc) and then download and install MS Security Essentials if you're on Win8 then just remove the third party avs and run Defender. The MS products update automatically and fun a full computer scan once a week. MS Update runs a malicious removal tool on each update Tuesday.
4. Now re-install your Ceton driver so all the right stuff gets written to the FW exception rules and the proper ports are open.
You will not have to run TV set-up again or do anything to the tuner except make sure it's on.

But this really looks like heavy network usage and I'm guessing its from an AVS, if you are downloading torrents, that could be the cause of heavy network usage. You can open Windows Task Manager and click on Network and it'll show you a graph of your network usage in case you have something updating or are doing heavy file transfers to servers or something like that. But those are the things I'd be looking at for this problem.

[steveo_in_sd]

Had a similar problem recently. Bought a $25 switch and hooked everything up to that instead of my router and problems went away immediately.

[tomatoactivator]

Well just for an update I got about 4-5 days without macroblocking with a different HD setup but once again it said hello during a basketball game for about 10min during the day and then the signal problems went away. This machine really has nothing installed and just runs WMC so I don't believe something running in the background is messing this up. Well on to other trial and errors. I got some ceton support ticket stuff to go through and I'll do it this weekend so hopefully that fixes my issues.

My Ceton Infinitv is not a USB orETH Infinitv, I know I linked a video with a Ceton Eth card and that probably caused a lot of confusion, but that was only to show the big grey macroblocking that I get. That was not my video and its definately not the same Ceton product.

So it still works vast majority of the time, just not all the time.

[JohnW248]

Well just for an update I got about 4-5 days without macroblocking with a different HD setup but once again it said hello during a basketball game for about 10min during the day and then the signal problems went away. This machine really has nothing installed and just runs WMC so I don't believe something running in the background is messing this up.

You could also be suffering a cable problem known as "intrusion" which is a foreign signal that gets into the cable. Most cable companies can test for this with their tools. Things that can cause this are loose connectors, bad splitters, rusted connectors, water, etc. It can happen anywhere, either inside or even a problem outside on the drop to your house.

Don't be mislead by what's "installed" on your machine, there are lots of operations that go on in the background that you have no control over and the worst are third party AVS so if you haven't followed the earlier suggestion, that certainly could be an issue.

It might be time to have the cable company out and check for RF problems. Since the problem is intermittent, mark a recording with the problem that you can show the Tech when he comes to show him the type of problem you're getting.

[erkotz]

If you have any antivirus/firewall software installed, uninstall (not disable) it and see if that resolves the issue.

[tomatoactivator]

Update so while doing items on the Ceton support ticket (which has you installing "custom" windows update hotfixes) I ran into some problems and then had more problems while trying to windows restore things.

It seems that the computer is getting slower and slower and an HHD dying may be to blame. I hooked up the Tivo back for now since the WMC isn't working at all. I'll be debugging the situation soon enough but honestly it maybe a few weeks until I have the free time.

[JohnW248]

Update so while doing items on the Ceton support ticket (which has you installing "custom" windows update hotfixes) I ran into some problems and then had more problems while trying to windows restore things.

It seems that the computer is getting slower and slower and an HHD dying may be to blame. I hooked up the Tivo back for now since the WMC isn't working at all. I'll be debugging the situation soon enough but honestly it maybe a few weeks until I have the free time.

If you can still start Windows and if there aren't too many bad sectors, try and clone your system drive to a new drive with the supplied Acronis software. I have done this and had the DRM survive to a new system drive twice. If you just put in a new drive and re-install the MB drivers and Windows, none of your previous recording that are CCI 0x02 will play anymore.

Live tv will usually show up a failing drive pretty quickly because of the constant write/read cycles, so that might explain your original problem of pixilation.

A successful clone will retain DRM as of the date of the clone so it's worth a shot if your original drive isn't too far gone. Once you have every thing working put in a dedicated drive for tv recording either internal or USB/eSata. Then when a drive fails, you just replace that drive. Move your desired archival recordings off to a RAID for storage.

[tomatoactivator]

A successful clone will retain DRM as of the date of the clone so it's worth a shot if your original drive isn't too far gone.

Do you know if Windows Restore from a (recentish) Restore Disk will work? My last day of working with the system was spent trying to uninstall/reinstall updates that may have gotten corrupted in the process. I am generally unexcited with the prospect of another day of computer diagnostics/debugging/installing and don't know if trying to fix a potentially corrupt pc is worth my time right now.

Thanks for all the help guys, hopefully I'll get this all resolved eventually.

[DavidinCT]

I looked at your youtube example and this looks a lot like network issues to me. This can be caused by a lot of things not related to the tuner/hard drive/media center.

A few suggestions to check:

2, Make sure that the Windows Firewall is on, third party AVS cause problems because they don't like 3rd network devices and also run various scans at times known only to them. The safe solution is to run MS Security Essentials along with the Windows Firewall.

Can I ask a question here? I deal with these types of issues too. Getting blocky recordings, same as above. I thought maybe it was the drive (it was a old one) so I picked a brand new 2tb 7200rpm drive, under speed tests, its' faster than the old one. Video card and CPU are up to the task. The 2tb drive is JUST for recorded TV, nothing else. The OS lives on a 90gb SSD, the other media (movies, music, etc) live on 2 other drives.

It's a dedicated machine, not too much running on it and MS Security Essentials is enabled but, any folder or file to do with WMC is on the exclusion list.

I have the Windows Firewall completely disabled, I feel safe on my network and it allows me not to have to screw with the firewall just to get basic stuff working on it.

You say to make sure the firewall is enabled, Why and with it completely disabled, could this be causing this issue, and if so, can you give me details why ?

One would think with the firewall completely disabled, that there would not be a firewall issue.

[JohnW248]

The reason to have the firewall enabled before installing the drivers is to make sure that the proper ports are enabled with the proper rules. I know this is important on the SD installer, not sure it is so important on the Ceton driver. I don't know if disabling the FW does the same thing as removing it (as with say the McAfee FW or the Norton FW which will still be working even if disabled). I've just found it is easier to not try to out think the computer and let the installers do what they are supposed to do. You can go to the Ceton Knowledge base and look at the recommendations for open ports etc to use McAfee & Norton. I just gave up on all that stuff back with Vista and the OEM machines and the ATI DCT tuner and went to Security Essentials when it came out.

If you're getting blocking you need to determine if it is happening from the coax to the tuner or from the tuner to the host. If you have good signals and high SNR then I'd be looking at network issues and if you shut off the FW and it really is shut off, then you may have router issues.

[JohnW248]

A successful clone will retain DRM as of the date of the clone so it's worth a shot if your original drive isn't too far gone.

Do you know if Windows Restore from a (recentish) Restore Disk will work? My last day of working with the system was spent trying to uninstall/reinstall updates that may have gotten corrupted in the process. I am generally unexcited with the prospect of another day of computer diagnostics/debugging/installing and don't know if trying to fix a potentially corrupt PC is worth my time right now.

Thanks for all the help guys, hopefully I'll get this all resolved eventually.

If you use a system restore and do a "repair" you might save the DRM, if you do an install, you'll lose all the DRM recordings. First try rolling back to a restore point and see if that stabilizes the machine, if it does you'll just lose the recording made after the restore point date.

Windows Update has been a problem for the last several months, the best suggestions from the update masters is to turn off auto updates and just get notifications and then monitor the Tuesday updates on google for various reports --- a couple of days is worth it for the safety of withdrawn updates and other fixes. Then read all those update links and see if you really need to do a system update to change the currency for a foreign country to the Euro, etc. I hide those and don't waste the time and effort on them. And there are other issues that pop up like a couple of months back when they released a cert update that killed all protected content recording. I also keep a less used machine to use as a test bay but still get stung occasionally when a AMD machine won't restart, etc.

Too bad MS doesn't have ehome to run the updates through along with office, system, etc to make sure they don't orphan several thousand of us with an update.

[DavidinCT]

The reason to have the firewall enabled before installing the drivers is to make sure that the proper ports are enabled with the proper rules. I know this is important on the SD installer, not sure it is so important on the Ceton driver. I don't know if disabling the FW does the same thing as removing it (as with say the McAfee FW or the Norton FW which will still be working even if disabled). I've just found it is easier to not try to out think the computer and let the installers do what they are supposed to do. You can go to the Ceton Knowledge base and look at the recommendations for open ports etc to use McAfee & Norton. I just gave up on all that stuff back with Vista and the OEM machines and the ATI DCT tuner and went to Security Essentials when it came out.

If you're getting blocking you need to determine if it is happening from the coax to the tuner or from the tuner to the host. If you have good signals and high SNR then I'd be looking at network issues and if you shut off the FW and it really is shut off, then you may have router issues.

My infiniTV 4 is a internal PCIe card, would network have any effect here ? (it's not a network based tuner). I assure you the firewall is 100% disabled, I did some port testing on a crap load of ports to confirm (I rebuilt about 2 or so weeks ago).

The Switch is a netgear gigabit 16 port switch, I used to have a HDhomeun running Clear QAM off it for a while (till Comcast killed clear QAM about a year ago), no problems at all with video breakup or anything on these switches...

Signal is very strong, no problems there but, it will happen on almost every recording where I will get some digital breakup, in some way. Some shows are perfectly fine (not very common), some it will effect it only for a few seconds, other the whole show can be a complete mess. No rhyme or reason for it.

At one time I had 3 Clear QAM tuners in this box, One PCI card and a HDhomerun (network) and never saw these digital breakups like this.

[cwinfield]

My guess is it being heavily compressed by the provider in which case there really isn't much that can be done. http://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-the-bl ... s-picture/ As far as the difference in Silicondust and Ceton, my guess is that SD has better error correction circuitry or is less sensitive to compression.

[tomatoactivator]

Update:

So I got another HD and now this computer has 100% new parts and I'm still seeing issues of (seemingly random) macroblocking. And truthfully I am beginning to think that either Ceton or WMC is just a lot pickier about error correction. If that's even possible. At a loss of what to do.

Is there a debug screen that shows how "dirty" a signal is? I thought that was what SNR was supposed to show but I am in the 39 area for that.