No TV signal / RED WMDRM / ETH6 or WMC?

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FMinMI

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No TV signal / RED WMDRM / ETH6 or WMC?

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Post by FMinMI » Wed Feb 05, 2020 1:29 am

For the past 4 months I have been fighting recording issues with my system that has been pretty reliable for years and it is getting worse. I am hoping for some suggestions.

About November time frame, I started to be plagued with WMDRM pairing going RED issues. A search here gave me a .bat file to stop and restart EHRECVR (NET STOP EHRECVR, pause 2, NET START EHRECVR) which I set up in Task Scheduler to run every 2nd day. I also put my ETH6 on a timer (after replacing the wall wart with a 12V/5A high quality switching power supply), having it reboot every 3 days at 5AM and my server reboot at 5:30AM after reading again here the fact that there was some kind of memory leak issue that could cause the ETH6 to randomly reboot after a week or so. Finally, I put the ETH6 on a large heat sink after reading about the temp problems some had seen (although Ceton Diagnostics never showed an issue for temp).

This worked for a while but then I started getting it so often I had to TASK SCHEDULE the EHRECVR stop/start to run 4 times a day and reboot the ETH6 daily, but still had recording failures.

So, I thought that maybe the ETH6 was going south (I did reload the firmware just in case it somehow got corrupt) and I bought a used one on eBay that was supposed to be good, but again ended up with many missed recordings due to the pairing issue.

Then I thought maybe my Gateway "server" (Intel) was dying (ran 24/7 for 4+ years) so I bought a new, 'older' DELL (Intel) with WIN8 and did a fresh install of WIN7 w/SP1 and all the updates, putting it into service in late December. (NOTE: both running 64 bit, 8GB memory, SSD C: and SSD D: drives, with all recordings going to D:)

This gave me some hope, as it ran for a number of days before any issues showed up, BUT alas, it did -- just like with the old server and the old ETH6.

Thinking that maybe a WIN7 update (I had my old server as well as the 'new' one set to auto update) may have caused the issue, I found an image backup of the old server from 2017 and loaded it, then turned off Windows Update, plus went to TASK SCHEDULER/Microsoft/Windows/Media Center and disabled mcupdate, mcupdate_scheduled, PeriodicScanRetry.

This ran great -- for 3 days straight, without any issues.

Thinking I finally was out of the woods, and with WMC programming guide shutting down, I then used EPG123 to install a new guide system based on Schedules Direct. I followed all instructions and got it working without any errors that I saw. It worked... for several days.

But now I am having issues once again :-(

Checking Event Viewer I am getting errors of "There was no TV signal when the show was scheduled", and the issue is not consistent. Going to History in WMC, it shows that Tuner 1 was not available, then Tuner 2 was not available, but then Tuner 3 was and recording started, however 4 minutes late. Then last night, a show didn't record due to the same reason, and History showed it tried all 6 tuners. I have also seen "TVtuner encountered an error (0x%2) %1 and 'was not recorded due to an unexpected failure".

I just don't know what is going on. My next thought is to go to Spectrum and ask them if they would please replace the Cablecard and Tuning Adapter since they are over 4 years old but wondered if ANYONE has ANY OTHER suggestions before I make that long drive (no local store).

Thanks!

Frank losing his limited hair in Michigan

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