Subscription Required

[johnw248]

If you suddenly get a “subscription required” in the middle of a recording and it goes away in a minute or so, chances are you’ve just experienced a cableCARD reboot. If you have a Cisco Card you can look at the CA Diagnostic page in the card which will show you the current time and the boot time of the card.

Cisco CableCARD(tm)
Diagnostics
H/W Model: 0800, Ver: 0012
MAC Address: 00:1A:C3:3A:xx:xx
SL. No: PKGRZxxxx, Mode: MMODE
Boot Time
Fri Aug 19 2011, 3:09:02 PM GMT
Current Time
Mon Aug 22 2011, 6:12:08 PM GMT
Free Memory: 1583 KB
Bldr Ver: 121
OS Ver: PKEY1.5.2_F.p.2701
Build Time: Oct 8 2010, 18:21:13
Resource Status: 00021C1F00027DBF
BFS: Received, Hub ID: 7

If the card has rebooted you’ll see the boot time change, if you’re right on top of it, the time will be within seconds or minutes of the current time.

If this happens with the Ceton card, do a scan with the diagnostic tool and file a bug report.

Sometimes when this happens the recording will be stopped and you won’t be able to delete it until you restart your machine. I’ve even seen cases where you get a break and the recording picks up. The second part you could delete and the first part would be locked until you restarted.

In any case, this seems to be rare and can happen at any time (machine asleep or not recording). I generally keep a tab open in IE with this page up so I can refresh it and see if there has been a reboot.

Often when this happens you’ll also see the TA reset it’s USB connection and download a new channel map. Those you can see by going to the Diagnostic map for the TA and then on to page two and check serial link protocol and serial link anamolies. The channel table history is the last entry on the last item on page two of the Cisco TA:

SERIAL LINK ANOMALIES
DecodeErr Tx/Rx: 0/0
LastDecErrTxTime: n/a
LastDecErrRxTime: n/a
TxFlowCtrlToggled: 0
Overflow Tx/Rx: 0/0
LastOvFlowTxTime: n/a
LastOvFlowRxTime: n/a
ApduTxEr/OtherEr: 0/0
CHANNEL TABLE HISTORY
Rsp/Upd/Err/Rtx: 32/20/0/0
08/20@03:00:39 Upd v017 Blks=06
08/21@03:00:41 Upd v018 Blks=06
08/22@03:00:40 Upd v019 Blks=06
08/23@03:00:39 Upd v020 Blks=06

A cableCARD restart will show another time listing. The times here are local time, all other time refernces are GMT.

John

And after posting this I went and updated by Diagnostic tab for the cableCARD and found I had a cableCARD restart last night.

Boot Time
Tue Aug 23 2011, 11:18:39 AM GMT
Current Time
Tue Aug 23 2011, 5:13:43 PM GMT
Free Memory: 1584 KB
Bldr Ver: 121

The result was the movie that was in progess during the restart had about a two minute blue screen with “subscription required”.  And Media Center when I checked Recorded TV/Schedule/History show the recording was “partial” so it’ll probably be automatically rescheduled in the future.

 

[swoon]

Thanks, that is good info. Hopefully, the issue can be resolved soon. I have noticed this occur on occasion though it is pretty rare.

[chestnu1]

Dude you have no idea how much you just helped me out I have had that exact problem happen to me off and on since I installed my Ceton in may and I was never certain what the problem was and who I should talk too.

[welchwerks]

This has happened to me as well. I plan to also  file a bug report with ceton when it happens again

[PAPutzback]

i signed up for stars last night and I am getting subscription required. How do I get the cablecard tuner to rescan?

[Aaron Ledger]

There is nothing you can do on your side other than call up your Cable provider and have them send the authorization to your CableCARD.

[johnw248]

I have now also observered instances where I can get a “Subscription Required” blue screen in a program for about a minute and then the recording returns. I haven’t found any log that shows this issue other than the Ceton Web Gui log wil show the conditional access retracted and video set to 0 and then returns about 30 or 40 seconds later and gets a new authorization.

 

At this point I really don’t know if this is an issue with a CA issue with the cableCARD or a communication issue between the Ceton tuner and the cableCARD.

If you get this in a recording, you can pinpoint the time by playing the recording (which will be marked partial in recordedtv/scheduled/history as a partial recording due to a signal loss) by playing the recording and just skipping ahead until you hit the sub required screen and noting the time on the time line and then adding that to the recording start time.

If you are withing a reasonable time (like half an hour) of the issue, you can do a diagnostic scan and file it with your bug report. If it’s longer than that you can try reading the log (check to the debug time stamps to get GMT of the log) and trying to find the occurance. The ability to read the log took me some time to get used to, but you can do it and then copy that part of the log as proof of the incident.

I’ve notice that this is now happening on all systems (both Cisco and Moto) and with and without SDV so whatever the cause, it is widespread.

 

John

[welchwerks]

Ive had my card for better part of a year now with it is happing more lately,about once every 3 day. i dont have SDV in vegas and i only watch copy freely, we dont subscribe to showtime, HBO ect.

looking in the tuner logs but like you said not sure how to read for the error to help with reporting a bug, but can confirm it is happening. 

 

edit: i have 2 cards now

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