Ceton InfiniTV 4 card issues

[nadspink]

ya, they sent the beta drivers and new beta firmware for the card. installing the drivers had no change and i couldn’t install the firmware since the diagnostic toll needs to be able to “see” the card to install the firmware. thanks for the suggestions though. if i seemed a little short earlier i’m sorry, just a frustrated.

[mikinho]

Can you PM me your ticket #?  Typically this occurs when bridged w/ an Ethernet card that has older drivers.

[santanan]

Try removing the card, then removing the drivers and reboot the computer.  Make sure you have no trace of the Ceton app.

Then place the card in a different PCIe slot. Go thru the install process.

I’ve noticed at times there may be  a conflict with the PCIe slots, and moving them around may work out better.

[nadspink]

i tried all the the slots in three different pc’s. the drivers were the most recent(this month)for my network card. i tried three different drivers for the network card and still the same thing.

[nadspink]

just tried it again with a fresh install of win 7 64 bit and it has the same problem

[santanan]

Have you checked “Device Manager” to check if the card is showing as an unknown device? 

If it does show and with no conflicts, then try to reset the Ceton card.

[nadspink]

i do appreciate your comment but if you had read the whole post you would see that i’ve tried this in three different systems and two different operating systems and i’ve already stated that it shows that the device drivers loaded fine. i’m not the smartest guy in the world but i would’ve noticed if the device manager showed a conflict with the tuner. it’s already been taken care of thanks to some excellent help from mike.

[johnw248]

let us know how the replacement card works. If your cable company pairs cards, then your new card will have a new host ID and you’ll have to go through pairing again and then re-run tv set-up in media center. The good new is you won’t have to re-install the drivers! You’ll probably want to click the tab in the diagnostics to dump the tuner data and then re-discover so that the old setting in media center are cleared.

The fact you were losing the card may have been an indication of a HW failure starting and the rest you know ….

John

[nadspink]

actually i’m still using the same card. somehow the tuner card remained stuck in network bridging mode since i was sharing one of the tuners with my bedroom htpc. i’ve never seen a card get the settings stuck even after removing the drivers, oh ya and trying it in two different pc’s. once it was set back properly it worked like a champ. i had no idea about it, if it weren’t for michael i would still be with out hd channels. my wife and i both thank you.

[vanpsmtg]

I have been back and forth with Ceton on this problem for a couple of months now. They have been very responsive and have even sent me a new tuner, but the problem still remains.

I will start at the beginning. I received my tuner in December of 2010 and it worked flawlessly. I never updated the drivers or the hardware or firmware. Then a couple of months ago I built my Granddaughter a new computer for her to have in her room. She has a 37″ HDTV in there so I thought it would be nice to give her a DVR option and TV tuner for her to use. I rarely use all 4 of my tuners so I thought I would assign her one of mine via the “Bridging” route. I then downloaded and installed the latest drivers, FW and HW from Ceton. I downloaded the Network Setup Wizard and ran it on both computers and all seemed well.

Then Things began to happen.  I record everything, but watch sports in what I call Semi-live mode. I will let it record for about an hour before I start watching it, so that I can skip all the pre-game BS and skip through the commercials.

Sometimes while watching a game I would get the channel identifier that indicates that the recording is completed, but it wasn’t supposed to be finished yet.  I then checked to see if another show was still recording and it stopped also. 

This has continued to happen with no discernable pattern ever since I did the network bridge thing. It can happen 2 or 3 times during a baseball game or go a week and never happen, but it usually happens almost daily.  The Event Viewer log just says ” Manually stopped for use by another component”.  I have updated my BIOS, have the latest driver available for my network adapter and Video Card, but nothing I have tried seems to work. 

Both Ceton and I are unable to solve this problem. Does anyone out there have an idea?

   I posted the above on TGB and JohnW248 suggested that it is probably  a CableCard Issue.

I have since installed the tuner on my WHS 2011and it worked fine for almost 2 days and then happened again.

I have a Motorola card. When It happens all my tuners disappear for a few seconds and then come back by themselves with no re-boot required, I do have to reboot in order to delete the partial recording sometimes, but not always.

 

[mikinho]

Can you PM me your ticket # and I’ll take a look at it.

[elneino]

I had the same problem (tuner disappeared).  Resetting the tuner to factory settings through Ceton’s “InfiniTV Network Tuners” Media Center plug-in fixed the problem.

[denyart]

[quote=vanpsmtg]

…I received my tuner in December of 2010 and it worked flawlessly. I never updated the drivers or the hardware or firmware….. I then downloaded and installed the latest drivers, FW and HW from Ceton…

Then Things began to happen.  I record everything, but watch sports in what I call Semi-live mode. I will let it record for about an hour before I start watching it, so that I can skip all the pre-game BS and skip through the commercials.

Sometimes while watching a game I would get the channel identifier that indicates that the recording is completed, but it wasn’t supposed to be finished yet.  I then checked to see if another show was still recording and it stopped also. 

… It can happen 2 or 3 times during a baseball game or go a week and never happen, but it usually happens almost daily.  The Event Viewer log just says ” Manually stopped for use by another component”.  I have updated my BIOS, have the latest driver available for my network adapter and Video Card, but nothing I have tried seems to work. 

Both Ceton and I are unable to solve this problem. Does anyone out there have an idea?

   ….I have a Motorola card. When It happens all my tuners disappear for a few seconds and then come back by themselves with no re-boot required, I do have to reboot in order to delete the partial recording sometimes, but not always.

 

[/quote] This is almost an exact replica of my issues.  I had a newer tuner that I have referred to as dash 71 since its identifier ended in 3f-71.  THis newer tuner would stop responding in Media Center and I got many partial recordings similar to what is described here.  I have gotten to the point of RMAing my dash 71 tuner back to Ceton, but since then I still have partial recordings with my older “dash 78” tuner that was one bought back when the waitlist was still in place at the orginal 3 vendors.  In any case, I am concerned that this issue is going to start reducing the WAF since these partial recordings are going to start showing up on my wife’s shows.  I put a dual clear-QAM tuner back in just to reduce the chances of this, but the problem is a serious knock on Cetons for real everyday use.  I feel kind of bad that two of my friends bought Cetons in December since I had so much success previous to these recent issues.  Is it possible there is a few advanced things I could try to troubleshoot these issues?  I and my one friend are both capable of advanced troubleshooting steps (he’s a classically trained IT professional, and I am an average hacker that does IT for other friends and family).

[denyart]

Strange thing.  I have had both an old Ceton and a newer one which I thought was a problem tuner.  I have had a trouble ticket open for a while and it got to the point where I thought it was just the new 3f-71 tuner taht was causing my issues, but it has been sent back and I am still having partial recordings that have messages about the tuner being used by another component.  I also have seen the system uptime on 192.168.20x.x show the signs of rebooting with short uptimes that coincide with partial recordings.  Now one thing I have not done since I pulled my dash 71 tuner was go in and reset the tuenr settings using the Ceton uitility and then rerun the Media Center TV setup, but at this point I am curious if I have just sent a card back in response to a problem that was not the card itself.  I would agree that the -71 tuner seemed to fail completely instead of only quickly rebooting like my -78 tuner does, but I would like to help get to the bottom of this soon since I just got two friends convinced to buy and use Ceton tuners this last month and they are both getting nervous (at least one is) after seeing my issues.  One of them has seen these sames issues as well where his tuners quit working all of a sudden and only a restart seems to fix it.  I gave him the link for the beta firmware and he put that on and moved his PC to get stronger tv signals for the tuners and he has been okay since then.  Any word on how this thing is progressing?  Thanks

[johnw248]

Just what is happening will depend on several factors and it would help to know:

1. Type of cableCARD (and hence the headend controller) Moto or Cisco
2. If you have SDV in your area
3. Signal level on stations with this issue, if it appears random, the oob signal level

I’ve seen the following four types of failure:

1. Card crashes. The card stops responding and disappears from media devices. A machine reboot is necessary to bring it back up.

2. Card crashes. The card stops responding but recovers. In media devices (if you keep Network open) the card (or usb device) returns at the bottom. Uptime is reset in the web interface.

3. CableCARD crashes. The card or usb stays up, uptime is not impacted.

4. CableCARD error or conditional access problem. This only impacts stations which are copy once (0x2) and will appear as subscription required for about a minute or so in the recording.

 

In cases 3 and 4, if you go to Media Center, recorded tv, scheduled, history you’ll see the recordings listed as recorded, not recorded or partial. Each recording can be clicked on for additonal information. Usually this is where you’ll see ended for use by another component which in my experiece is a cableCARD crash/reset.

If you have a cisco card, you can open the Ceton web interface and click on cableCARD and then open Diagnostics and it will show you the boot time of the cableCARD. If you made a note of this with your last error, you’ll know if the card restarted and when. The Ceton LOG also has a lot of information but it may be a bit difficult to find what you’re looking for. Check for things like card restart or reset, server busy, etc.

Cisco CableCARD(tm)
Diagnostics
H/W Model: 0800, Ver: 0012
MAC Address: 00:21:BE:49:3C:2E
SL. No: PKGTSGSQW, Mode: MMODE
Boot Time
Thu Jan 26 2012, 5:35:37 PM GMT
Current Time
Sun Jan 29 2012, 3:38:28 PM GMT
Free Memory: 1554 KB
Bldr Ver: 124
OS Ver: PKEY1.5.2_F.p.2801
Build Time: Feb 3 2011, 17:13:46
Resource Status: 00021C1F00027DBF
BFS: Received, Hub ID: 44

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