1. When the ETH6 reboots (and it will do it randomly at times depending on your firmware). At least one of your PC's needs to re-establish a connection to it using the Microsoft Windows Media Center Receiver' service or 1 or more of your tuners will be RED for WMDRM pairing. Red Pairing is a 'dead stick' and one less tuner available to your network. No need to bounce all the PC's, just one will reset the WMDRM for all 6 Ceton tuners.
2. Because the ETH6 randomly reboots, I have a script running on all my Media Center PC's to reboot themselves every day @ 4AM. This cuts the service (from above) and re-establishes it. But - this method has a flaw. Let's say you have 6 Media PC's on your network and your ETH6 is up and running @ 5AM. Each PC (when it reboots at 4AM) 'pairs' with a Ceton tuner when it reboots (even if it isn't using it actively). Now consider one of my PC's is a recording box which at times can record 2 or more shows at the same time. When those recordings kick in, what happens to the pairing of my 6 PC's (assume I am recording two shows at the same time)? The recording Media Center 'takes' another tuner from the Ceton that was initially connected to one of the 6 PC's. Those two recordings end, and you assume the Ceton re-disburses the 6 tuners across all 6 boxes again, but it doesn't. When it grabbed that 2nd tuner to record the second show, it disconnected from the PC it was 'Media Center Service' paired to, so when I launched Media Center on the 2nd PC (the one that lost its tuner due to PC #1 recording 2 shows and grabbing it) I got the errors - no tuner. A simple reboot of the 2nd machine re-establishes the Media Center Receiver service to the Ceton and all is well.
So now, I'm good except for the flaw. I have no way of knowing (i'm not a crazy techie script guy) when the ETH6 randomly reboots but if I did, I could script my PC's to reboot just after it happens. What I did try once, was scripting the ETH6 to purposely reboot @ 4AM then have my PC's reboot at 4:05AM to re-establish the Windows service. This worked well but fell apart when the ETH6 randomly rebooted itself. It also doesn't address the multi-recording issue and using 2 or more tuners on one PC.
So what do I now? I replaced my ehshell.exe executable with a batch file that stops the Media Center Service, Starts it, then launches ehshell.exe (Windowd Media Center). Works perfectly every time for me now (only issue is I have to use a keyboard to launch the shortcut rather than the big green button on my remote which is hard coded to the original ehshell.exe. Unless someone knows a fix for that
Curious about my run script - it's pretty basic and below:
NET STOP EHRECVR
rem pause 1
NET START EHRECVR
rem pause 1
%windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe
close
