Two Ceton Infinitvs Not Working When Tuner Sharing

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Bill

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Two Ceton Infinitvs Not Working When Tuner Sharing

#1

Post by Bill » Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:05 pm

I have 2 Ceton Infinitvs installed in my media center. Originally i had 1 installed and working well. I installed the second tuner, paired it with the cable company and now i cannot get live tv at all while using tuner sharing. If i do not do tuner sharing, all 8 tuners work perfectly. I put in a support ticket with Ceton, but i was wondering if anyone had experience with this problem before. My provider is comcast cable, and we do not use TAs.

thanks,

-bill
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#2

Post by Bill » Thu Feb 23, 2012 5:16 am

Ok, i have narrowed down the problem to enable bridging on the new ceton card. Any time i enable bridging, the computer locks up and i must do a manual restart. Everytime. Any ideas?

-Bill
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#3

Post by Scallica » Thu Feb 23, 2012 12:17 pm

Is bridging enabled with the first tuner? What type of network adapter do you have?
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Bill

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#4

Post by Bill » Thu Feb 23, 2012 4:05 pm

Bridging can be enabled/disabled on the 1st tuner without issue. The 2nd(new) tuner will crash immediately if bridging is toggled on, regardless of actually creating a bridge. I have tried to complete the setup with both the onboard realtek and a PCIe Intel NIC. No dice.
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#5

Post by Scallica » Thu Feb 23, 2012 4:25 pm

There could be a hardware issue with the second tuner. What happens if you remove the first tuner, put the second tuner in its place, and enable bridging?
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Bill

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#6

Post by Bill » Thu Feb 23, 2012 5:20 pm

i have not tried removing the 1st tuner, however i did change the PCIe slot for the 2nd tuner, and there was no difference. Crashed everytime when bridging was enabled.
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#7

Post by tkole » Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:59 pm

Bill wrote:i have not tried removing the 1st tuner, however i did change the PCIe slot for the 2nd tuner, and there was no difference. Crashed everytime when bridging was enabled.
Bill, I'm in the same boat. I have one card with HW ver 5000 that works perfectly when alone for network sharing and a 5124 card that doesn't work with or without the 5000. I exchanged the 5124 card in the hopes of getting another 5000 card but instead received another 5124 with all of the same problems. I have tried the new beta frimware with no improvement. The cards will function perfectly together if I only want to tune and record channels but then everything goes to hell when tuner sharing is enabled. I am going to try the card in another pc tonight that has a different MB and NIC to see if there is some incompatability with my current setup.

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#8

Post by SirBrady » Wed Apr 04, 2012 3:47 am

Hi Bill/tkole,

Were you able to solve the issue? I'm having the same problem where when enabling bridge support manually (through device manager) and using the network wizard crashes my system. I have HW version 5000 and the latest driver installed. When the system crashes, I have to restart my computer and run Windows repair since it can't even boot from the previous state. I contacted Ceton support and they told me it could be due to the fact that I'm using a wireless adapter. I went out and bought a 100 foot ethernet cable and tried the steps again to enable bridging but it crashed again. I'm running out of ideas...any help?

Thanks!

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#9

Post by tkole » Wed Apr 04, 2012 10:17 am

I never got it to work on that system. I ended up putting the cards in an older htpc and everything worked. This has been happening to people on avsforum as well.

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#10

Post by SirBrady » Wed Apr 04, 2012 2:02 pm

Thanks tkole. Do you know if this was due to some incompatibility with the NIC or Motherboard? This is my first htpc so I don't have an old one I could pop it in to. It would be terrible if it turns out that's the only solution :(.

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#11

Post by tkole » Wed Apr 04, 2012 2:57 pm

I tried disabling the NIC and installing a pci NIC card. Still the same issues. I checked the IRQ tables and everything, no conflicts. I decided that there was some mobo incompatability and switched. Try opening a ticket with Ceton.

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#12

Post by OwensJC » Wed Apr 04, 2012 5:39 pm

tkole wrote:I tried disabling the NIC and installing a pci NIC card. Still the same issues. I checked the IRQ tables and everything, no conflicts. I decided that there was some mobo incompatability and switched. Try opening a ticket with Ceton.
Those having the lockup problem when setting the Centon to bridge mode, what mother board are you using?
I have the "ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3" and it locks up every time I try to setup network tuning. HW ver. 5000 on the Centon.
I've been working with Centon for about 2 weeks, but nothing they suggest has helped. I'm wondering if all of us with this problem have the same or similar mother board.

Jeff

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#13

Post by SirBrady » Wed Apr 04, 2012 7:21 pm

I'm using a "MSI Z68MA-ED55 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard." We both have the Z68 chipset, which might be related? I also have HW ver. 5000. Ceton has sent me a list of instructions to try:

"We'll need to manually bridge the InfiniTV card to your network card so we can regain access to it. Please follow these steps:

1. Open your Network and Sharing Center.
2. Click on Change Adapter Settings on the left panel.
3. You should see the Ceton InfiniTV card there, as well as the computer's own networking card.
4. Select both at once (holding CTRL while clicking works well for this).
5. Right-click on them and choose Bridge Connections."

Have you tried this? I'm going to try it later tonight when I get home and I'll report back if it works or not. I've been working with them too for a week now but so far their suggestions haven't given me a solution.

Thanks.

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#14

Post by OwensJC » Wed Apr 04, 2012 8:51 pm

SirBrady wrote:I'm using a "MSI Z68MA-ED55 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard." We both have the Z68 chipset, which might be related? I also have HW ver. 5000. Ceton has sent me a list of instructions to try:

"We'll need to manually bridge the InfiniTV card to your network card so we can regain access to it. Please follow these steps:

1. Open your Network and Sharing Center.
2. Click on Change Adapter Settings on the left panel.
3. You should see the Ceton InfiniTV card there, as well as the computer's own networking card.
4. Select both at once (holding CTRL while clicking works well for this).
5. Right-click on them and choose Bridge Connections."

Have you tried this? I'm going to try it later tonight when I get home and I'll report back if it works or not. I've been working with them too for a week now but so far their suggestions haven't given me a solution.

Thanks.
Have not tried that, I'll give it a shot.
I have tried going into device manager and turning on bridge mode for the Ceton card. That simple act locks up the PC within 10 sec., so I have a feeling it will lock up when I manually bridge them, but, I'll give it a try.

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#15

Post by SirBrady » Thu Apr 05, 2012 5:16 am

So I tried for a few hours today and didn't really get anywhere. These are the steps I took.

1. Updated all the drivers not from the motherboard site, but from the actual manufacturers' sites. Found out I had about 2-3 drivers that weren't up to date.
2. Went through the steps Ceton gave me to see if I could bridge two networks together like that and I could, but I don't know what's the next steps.
3. I read on http://www.missingremote.com/guide/ceto ... ltiple-pcs that they require the steps ceton sent me but only AFTER you enable bridging on the Ceton card (which I tried and still freezes my system).

I thought the steps Ceton gave me was interesting. It set up a bridge successfully...BUT now prevented me from watching TV on my main HTPC. Also, without enabling "support bridging" on the card itself, I'm not sure if it was useful setting up the bridge the way Ceton asked me to do it. I THINK (though I'm no expert) what happened after I set up the bridge that Ceton gave me and losing TV signal on my main HTPC is the tuners never got assigned to my main HTPC. Even after I went through the MediaCenter setup again, and saw all green on the Ceton diagnostics, it still didn't work.

Any other ideas? I'll keep you posted if Ceton sends me more instructions.

Thanks!

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#16

Post by Bill » Thu Apr 05, 2012 9:30 pm

the only way i got it to work was to switch my two ceton cards in place of each other. IE Ceton #1-Pci-e-1 Ceton#2 -Pci-e3 -> Ceton #1-Pci-e-3 Ceton #2-Pci-e 1. Not sure how or why this worked, but it did. Try all available slots and see if anything changes. My mobo is a gigabyte. I tried both an Intel PCI-E nic and onboard realtek, with the same issues for both. Good luck.
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#17

Post by SirBrady » Fri Apr 06, 2012 6:00 pm

Thanks for the info Bill. Unfortunately, I did try that on my machine (all 4 slots) and all of them crashed my system when enabling bridging. A Ceton employee did suggest to me to enable Promiscuous mode on my wireless device. That is supposed to help when Bridging. You can find more info on how to do that here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302348

Even after doing that though, I still can't get it working. These are the steps I took:
I forced the Promiscuous mode above for BOTH the wireless adapter and Ceton card.

1. Manually changed the Ceton device from "Default IP Settings (DHCP Server)" and changed it to a Static IP.
2. I then manually bridged the Ceton Card and Wireless router.
3. Went through the steps above to force Promiscuous mode.
4. Was then able to SUCCESSFULLY go through the entire network wizard mode. Finally! But...
5. Afterwards, I set up my TV signal and no matter what channel I switched to on my TV I would get: "Service is unavailable...There is currently no TV signal detected for this channel. The channel maybe temporarily off the air. Try again later"

I went through trying to fix this for about 2 hours and finally gave up. I was able to collect a Ceton diagnostics though. By the way, the Ceton diagnostics page reported everything as green. Even when I entered a TV channel to test in the box, it would complete successfully. My noise ratio seemed pretty good. The Ceton webpage also reported that tuner 1 was tuned.

Also, the only step I skipped when manually setting up my bridge was going to the Ceton device and enabling "support bridging." That immediately crashes my system before or after I set up the bridge still.

Any other ideas? I'll keep posted on what I hear from Ceton.

Thanks!

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#18

Post by Bill » Wed Apr 11, 2012 3:43 pm

Under the ceton properties, "support bridging" has to be enable to get live TV to work with tuner sharing. The ceton card is tuning the channels, but because the bridge is incomplete, it's not getting passed from the ceton network device through the bridge. There's new firmware out (72?) and that might be worth a try. You have a wireless device, does that mean you're going to share tuners over a wireless signal? I tired a wireless n client about 15 feet away through 1 wall and it wasn't fast enough for HD stations without blocking and cutting in and out. If you're not sharing, just set it up for viewing on that tv without tuner sharing and you shouldn't have a problem. I'm not sure how common this problem is, but it's a problem for sure. The other option is to reinstall windows and hope for the best, but that is more of a last resort.
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#19

Post by SirBrady » Wed Apr 11, 2012 8:00 pm

I actually got it to work...with little rhyme or reason. I went back and tried re-seating the card in all 4 PCI slots again and it worked this time (on the last slot). I don't know why since the last time I tried it froze on all the PCI slots whenever I tried to enable "support bridging." Regardless, thanks for the feedback and help. I'm trying to get my main htpc to sleep now and only wake when one of the other computers in the house requests to watch TV. We'll see how that goes. By the way, I decided not to use the wireless adapter and go with Powerline adapters throughout the house so I could have WOL support. Hope this thread helps anyone who is having the same trouble.

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