Recorded TV on Extenders

[daisyb]

I have a new and rather annoying problem that I’m hoping someone can help with as my WAF is seriously low!

I’ve been a WMC user for some years now and consider myself OK at setting up and tinkering with systems but this problem is eluding me.

A few weeks ago my wife reported that she could no longer watch recorded tv when using the extenders. We have a DMA2100, DMA2200, Ceton Echo and Xbox 360, as well as one room that has the Windows 7 x64 SP1 WMC PC attached to a TV. On the PC everything continues to work just fine but when we try to watch TV on an extender, the blue loading circle just rotates endlessly.

Initially I thought it must be an update from Microsoft but after trying to uninstall a number of updates it was still not fixed. So I tried system file checker (sfc /scannow) to return my system files to default but still no good.

Then I thought maybe it was a disk permissions problem as the OS and recorded tv are on different drives. So I moved the recorder storage first to a spare external drive and then finally to the OS disk. I also tried to record new programmes rather than trying the exisiting ones in case there was a DRM problem but none of this helped.

Eventually I reinstalled the OS from scratch (twice; once with all the available updates and once with windows out of the box) but even that didn’t work.

Finally I thought that maybe it was a network problem (and this is where my knowledge is rather sketchy). My setup is a bit messy currently as my router is in one room and the PC and extenders are dotted around the house but most of my experimentation has been done on the bedroom extender; so:

The internet router currently is connected a 4 port switch which is connected to the PC and another router that feeds the extender in the bedroom.
I’ve tried swapping the internet router with a spare one and connecting the second router directly to the first (hence bypassing the switch) but again this hasn’t helped.

I’m pretty much out of ideas now as this setup always used to work just fine but for some strange reason it won’t anymore. I can only think now that there may be a problem with the onboard ethernet.

Anyone else got any good ideas?

Thanks

Dave

[bob_p]

Several things to try:

Run the Xbox 360 network diagnostics to verify the network connection between the Xbox 360 and PC are OK.

Sticking with the Xbox 360 (the only officially supported Microsoft extender), can you play liveTV and videos on the extender (i.e., is it only recordedTV that is failing)?

Since you've reinstalled Windows, that should eliminate any software issues - on the PC - though you may still have software problems on the extenders - though if all of the extenders (not just the Xbox) are failing, that likely eliminates any software problems on the extender side.

Would you happen to have another PC with WMC installed? If so, try connecting the Xbox 360 to that PC and see if things work correctly.

Can you configure your network so that you are only using switches between your PC and the Xbox? If you are using any routers on your local network, all network connections should be through the LAN ports - you should only be using the WAN port on the router connected to your external network.

It's possible you might have a hardware problem with your PC - though that seems a long shot. Since you appear to be getting far enough to see the recorded programs but you can't view their contents, that appears to indicate your network is working - and you may be having a problem with playback codecs.

Try recording an SD channel and see if you can play that back.

Hope you can find something useful out of the above suggestions...

[DSperber]

Could be an issue with your graphics card driver.

I have four DMA2100's, and they all behave the same way, which is that when I power them on and they then connect to WMC and eventually present their main screen and provide the WMC sound, I must then wait an additional 10-20 seconds before using my remote. After this 10-20 second delay, the Windows "spinning circle" finally comes onscreen for maybe 5 more seconds before disappearing.

Once this whole getting-started delay completes, the extender is now ready to work perfectly. And as long as I don't power it off things are 100% fine. But every time I power the extender on from being off, I need to allow this getting-started overhead delay to complete.

If I don't wait for the "spinning circle" to appear and do its thing for 5 seconds and then disappear, but instead just casually start trying to use the remote immediately (as if the extender were going to be instantly available for use), it seems to lock up. Either the extender becomes entirely unresponsive, or the "spinning circle" spins indefinitely.

Now all of this is due to the video drivers on the HTPC. I have an AMD R7-250 card, and the drivers are from ATI. This strange extender behavior began happening about two years ago when ATI did something to the driver which I think was intended to improve deinterlacing performance for 1080i. Ever since then there has been this quirk on my extenders.

Yes, it's been at least a year or two that this behavior has been present, and it wasn't present before. I used to be able to use the remote and the extender immediately upon connecting to WMC. But no more. And this is definitely tied to the AMD graphics driver running the HTPC.

That's my opinion.

[DavidinCT]

I know this might be an easy one but, Did you unplug/Reboot your router/switch ? I would bring this down to basics, Do the network tests and start there. If the PC worked and that started, then you rebuilt it and it does the SAME EXACT thing, I would lean towards something else.

Do you have access to another router that you can try to see if that resolves your problem ? I have this Netgear 16 port gigabit router, normally it's really fast and works great but, after about 2 months, tranfers get really sluggish and sometimes errors out, On my extenders, yea, tv gets choppy or does not even play. I unplug it for 10 seconds, plug it back in and it's fine for a few months.

[glugglug]

Make sure your second router is set up as a bridge (don't use the WAN port) and that it is NOT acting as a DHCP server.

[steveo_in_sd]

Using a second router instead of a $20 switch is quite possibly the source of your problems.

Do you have problems with Live TV and Recorded TV, or just Live?

If you are only having Live TV problems, and recordings work fine:
Are your tuners network or connected to your PC directly?
Do you have a Tuning Adapter?
Do you have 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps network?
Is any part of the network path used for Live TV wireless?

Other things to try:
On your router(s) turn off 'green' ethernet and any other power savings items you find.
On your WMC PC, do the same.

[steveo_in_sd]

I see I didn't read the OP description of the problem very well It would very much surprise me if Live TV works fine but Recorded TV does not on an Extender connecting to a PC with a newly installed OS.

Maybe if you have a very large library of existing 'copy-freely' shows recorded, and the Extender is trying to download all the metadata (i.e. thumbnails, etc.) you might experience what 'seems' to be a never ending spinning circle. I think there was a problem like that being discussed recently here at TGB, related to the Rovi cut-over. You could see if something like this is happening if you look at the router management console and see if a lot of data is coming in from the Internet when you launch the WMC session. You could also just start a session when no one is really trying to watch a show and let it sit to see if it ever starts working. Giving it an hour to spin might let it do something that we just aren't patient enough to wait on when we want to watch something immediately.

You should also check the 360's connection to Xbox Live. If that is successful, then you know the network software and hardware on the 360 are working fine, and it should report of the quality and speed of the connection is good enough for online play if I remember correctly; that should also be good enough for a WMC session.

[daisyb]

Thanks to everyone for their responses so far. Really appreciate you all taking the time to offer suggestions.

Just to clarify, Live TV works OK even on the extenders. The problem is only with recorded TV.

I did a bit more experimentation last night and plugged the PC and extender directly into the same switch and this didn’t help. I must admit I didn’t restart the switch before checking and previously all the networked items received IP addresses from the internet router so I may try it again and this time reboot the switch and set fixed IP addresses.

I also noticed that the first time I tried to play a recorded programme after the extender has initially booted, it will play for maybe 20 seconds or so and then it stops and goes back to the info screen (delete/restart/resume) but when I tried it a second time the blue ring rotated endlessly. I might leave it rotating indefinitely tonight and see if it ever bursts into life just in case.

As some of you have also suggested I think this might be either driver or network related. Unfortunately I don’t have another machine with WMC with which to check but I may have another network card which could help to determine if it’s the ethernet hardware or driver. I must admit I’d not considered the graphics card so I may uninstall the current driver and just try with the standard Microsoft vga driver to prove if it’s that or not.

I’d ruled out any Xbox or Live connection issues at the problem exists on all the extenders. As regards codecs, almost all the recordings are SD which WMC should handle out of the box and we only have copy freely channels in the UK anyway so I don’t think it’s a codec thing.

I'll report back after I've tried a few more things.

Thanks again

Dave

[blueiedgod]

I also noticed that the first time I tried to play a recorded programme after the extender has initially booted, it will play for maybe 20 seconds or so and then it stops and goes back to the info screen (delete/restart/resume) but when I tried it a second time the blue ring rotated endlessly. I might leave it rotating indefinitely tonight and see if it ever bursts into life just in case.

My first guess is the network or the network card in the HTPC

Second guess is the hard drive.

We have all of our recorded TV on the NAS, and sometimes, while we are watching recorded TV, it freezes, abruptly stops and goes back to the information about the show. Pressing resume only sends it into a spinning circle wait game.

However, choosing a different show, or even a live show brings the functionality back. Then, we can stop a different show, and go back to the original show we were watching.

I think the NAS has a memory leak, because rebooting the NAS clears up the issue for another 2-3 months.

[steveo_in_sd]

Just to clarify, Live TV works OK even on the extenders. The problem is only with recorded TV.

This is the part that is so mystifying. TV is buffered onto your recording disk before being displayed, so if you are having HDD problems they should show up with Live TV too. If you had network problems, they would show up with Live TV too. If you had some kind of router configuration issue, it would show up on Live TV too. If you had some kind of HDCP, Copy-Once, or other DRM issue it would show up with Live TV too.

If you can play 20 seconds of a Recorded show, and Live TV never stops working, then this is just very bizarre.

Have you tried clearing out the cache on the Xbox 360? I have a feeling this may fix it for you. http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-360/ ... stem-cache

Also, maybe remove the storage you have on the Xbox 360 and see if that changes anything. You may need a USB flash drive to put your profile and required updates to view Copy-Once content.

[daisyb]

Well I managed to fix it.
Not sure what exactly was causing the problem but as we all suspected it was a network issue.
By connecting the PC and extender directly to the switch and taking the second router out of the equation everything has gone back to normal.
I may attempt in the future to find out exactly what settings in the router were causing the problem but for now I need to rebuild my WAF a bit so don't want to rock the boat!

Thanks again to everyone for their input.

Dave