Tuner conflict HDHomeRun Prime

[poit57]

I have questions related to tuner priorities because of a tuner conflict message I was receiving last night. I have 3 computers set up in my home networked to my HDHomeRun Prime. Probably 95% of the television consumption in my house is done from my living room computer which also has 2 ATSC tuners and 2 ClearQAM tuners where I get basic cable channels like CSPAN and local channels that are affiliates for national broadcast networks.

Last night, I was recording from two of the local channels that are available on all 7 of my tuners. I could see on the face of my HDHR Prime that the two outer LED's were showing tuners in use. I tried to check in on a baseball game on Fox Sports, but I received a message that no tuners were available and WMC gave me a choice to cancel one of the two programs that were recording at the time.

I was trying to figure out why WMC wasn't putting the middle tuner on the HDHR to use because I had noticed this a few times in the past. I checked from my office computer and had no issues tuning to live channels. I went back to the living room and all 3 tuner LED's were now turned on. I thought maybe somehow my office computer had taken control of the resources of the middle tuner on the HDHR, so I stopped the live TV, closed WMC, and even rebooted that computer, but this didn't help.

After the two programs were no longer recording, I tried power cycling the HDHR, but that still didn't make a difference. What finally resolved the issue was going through the tuner diagnostics screen in WMC. I acknowledged that playback would be interrupted and then checked the signal from my second tuner. That finally took allowed my computer in the living room to access all of the HDHR tuners.

My questions are these:
1. Why would my computer have lost access to the middle tuner of the HDHR Prime in the first place? The other computer had no problem accessing this tuner during troubleshooting, but surely that computer hadn't taken control of that tuner beforehand or retained control after the computer had been restarted.

2. Is there a more reliable way to set tuner priorities? It seems that often the ATSC tuners are used before my cable tuners and I have a lot of issues with signal quality. But this doesn't seem very consistent, as evidenced by the behavior last night. Ideally, the QAM tuners would be used first, so that the HDHR tuners are not occupied when they are needed for an encrypted cable channel.

[mcewinter]

I your tv guide, left arrow to the channel and press the info button. Select edit channel. You can arrow the sources up or down.

I'm curious what you did inside of tuner diagnostics to enable the tuner. Did you see anything there that verified your issue? I'm only asking because I've never explored that menu option.

[poit57]

I did some more messing around because the diagnostics still didn't resolve my issues as I expected. It only allowed me to temporarily check the signal of that tuner while the diagnostic was running, but I did figure out what the underlying issue was.

I changed my cable TV plan a few months ago, so I decided to use the auto-select option from the guide settings in WMC from my living room PC. I discovered that the middle tuner was disabled on all cable channels. I'm guessing that for some reason, one of the other computers in my house might have been using that tuner at the time that I started scanning the channels. I started running the auto-select again before I left for work this morning. I will check it when I get home to make sure all three HDHR tuners are available per cable channel.

[gary94080]

I have a single WMC-PC setup with two 360 extenders running at my sister's house and one of the three tuners went AWOL.

it was also the middle tuner. I don't know what caused it.

I power cycled the PC and Prime and reseated the cablecard and all three tuners checked out ok.