Back in 2011 I decided to build a HTPC with a Ceton InfiniTV4 (internal). The specs of said machine are as follows....
Mobo: ASUS P8H67-M EVO (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel H67
Proc: Intel Core i3 Processor i3-2100 3.1GHz 3MB LGA1155 CPU BX80623I32100
Mem: CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
Case: SILVERSTONE Black Aluminum / Steel Lascala Series LC10B-E ATX Media Center
Power: FirePower ModXStream Pro 500W 80Plus Semi-Modular High Performance ATX PC Power Supply 500MXSP
SSD: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD
HD: 4x Western Digital 2TB Internal Drives, 2x Western Digital 3TB External Drives
Cable: Cox Cable Fairfax Virginia
Firmware: 14.4.6.21
Driver: 13.6.3.1088
Hardware: 7359
Ok so everything worked pretty well and then this past year I got greedy and sold my internal InfiniTV 4 and bought the external InfiniTV6. It worked for a while, not as well as the InfiniTV4....but then one night I accidentally unplugged the power from the 5 port switch that both the InfiniTV6 and HTPC plugged into. They were unable to communicate for around 16 hours or so, and I am pretty sure that I reran some setups and such before figuring out what I had done. Since then I have had random problems popping up and then disappearing.....here are some of the issues.....
1) Recording Error -1073478364 (An error was encountered while recording X)
2) Weak TV Signal (usually resolved by exiting WMC7 and coming back in)
3) Audio drops out for a few seconds every couple minutes. Usually on 1057 (Comcast Sports Network) but now notice it on other channels
4) Sometimes TV shows will record a full show, but only partially playable. Goes to a Blue screen of Weak TV Signal
5) Sometimes only a few minutes of a TV show will record and no error message is ever generated
6) CableCard Detected Message (Do You want to set up the CableCard Now?). Even though it has already been activated.
7) PlayReady refuses to update. Already tried all the resolutions here (except the resetting of the DRM) http://www.silicondust.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?t=10360
So yeah, the PlayReady issue was the last straw. Right now I can tune NBC and a few other channels but everything else just shows a blue screen. Now I will point out that I have changed out the SSD at least twice. But the PlayReady issue just started yesterday and I have not made any recent changes. Kind of funny because I have three 4TB drives due to arrive tomorrow and I was going to swap out the 2TB drives I currently have in there. I am thinking that I am looking at a rebuild of this unit, but my main question is......Is this HTPC still strong enough to handle a InfiniTV6 recording 6 shows at once while watching a 7th? I have the TV shows recording to a Seagate Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s.
I guess my two worrying points are the Intel 2000 Integrated Graphics that the i3 is providing, and the 5400 spindle speed of the main recording drive for 6 shows to be writing to. I want to make sure that if I go through with a reload of Windows 7 tomorrow, that I don't need to upgrade anything that could possibly break PlayReady again. This HTPC only does recording of TV shows and also runs Media Browser 3. No video games or encoding is needed. It might be worth stating that with the Weak TV signal, I am in an Apartment with crappy wiring. But I can go over to my desktop PC and tune to the same channel with no issues. Not sure why the HTPC would show Weak Signal, but the computer across the room would tune in fine.
Any help is appreciated. I have a ticket into Ceton, but so far they just sent me back a canned response of things to try.....but with PlayReady broken.....I might just go the rebuild route to start fresh.
Ton of issues with my HTPC
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Phillyman
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Crash2009
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You might eliminate a lot of the issues by cold booting the network.
Shut everything down and methodically turn each on, one by one, working from the perimeter in. Modem>router>switch>workstation>
Shut everything down and methodically turn each on, one by one, working from the perimeter in. Modem>router>switch>workstation>
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DSperber
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My own experience with my own HTPC (and internal Ceton PCIe InfinitTV4 card, still the original from back in 2010) is that MORE AND FASTER SUPPORTING HARDWARE IS BETTER, as it produces immeasurably more reliable results.
I, like you, too used to see the same occasional but annoying WMC anomalies which were hard to diagnose as coming from either the Ceton hardware or other features in my HTPC. But deciding it was most likely a hardware issue, I embarked on significant upgrades in all aspects of the HTPC and have not seen ANY of the symptoms ever again.
For example, I decided my old SATA-II/USB 2.0 SuperMicro X38 motherboard and E6850 CoreDuo CPU and 4GB (which I'd been using both before and after the conversion of this machine to an HTPC) were maybe too slow for the new added demands, as I was also using this machine for my "upstairs work machine" as well as for its HTPC 24/7 use. So I upgraded to an ASUS P8Z77-V Pro board (SATA-III, USB 3.0), and i5-3350 CPU (with no onboard graphics to save on price, as I was using an external ATI video card anyway) with 8GB of PC3-12800 memory. I retained the same super-silent QuietPC mid-tower case and super-silent Noctua 120mm fans I'd previously been using. A new dual-fan Noctua CPU cooler replaced the old Zalman cooler.
Also, because I had an available large hard drive in the machine I decided to use it for my primary recording drive. But even though it was 7200rpm, it was an older SATA-II drive and had a smaller hardware cache on it. I upgraded to a 2TB SATA-III drive (also 7200rpm) with 64MB cache.
Also, you moved your Ceton InfiniTV6 tuners to be external, but you didn't mention if it was network based or USB. As you do talk about accessing it from your other computer, I'll speculate it is network based? This puts enormous pressure on your home router/switch hardware and network cabling and NIC speeds in your HTPC, if you're truly recording 6 HD shows at one time. Do you have at least CAT5e if not CAT6 cables, or are you still using CAT5 (which doesn't support gigabit). Do you have gigabit router/switch hardware? As part of my own HTPC home infrastructure upgrade, I re-cabled the home with CAT6 cable, and use only a gigabit router supported by gigabit switches where needed.
Also, I upgraded my video graphics card first from an old ATI fanless (and huge) HD3850 to a newer fanless (and slightly smaller) HD4850, and then to a newer HD5770 (which required more power), and then to an even faster HD5870 (which now required TWO external PCIe power connections). Each upgrade obviously resulted in significantly better performance, but with additional heat generated and additional electrical power requirements from my super-silent Nesteq 600W PSU. Most recently I've upgraded (or "downgraded") yet again, this time to a low-power and less graphics-power HD7750 (i.e. the now re-branded Sapphire DDR5 R7 250 which is the same almost silent mid-level performance 72GBs bandwidth card at a very reasonable price), which doesn't even require ANY additional PCIe power connection and consumes at least 100W less power than its HD5870 predecessor. Sure, its graphics performance is significantly and visibly less than that of the HD5870 (about 160GBps bandwidth), but I'm not a gamer and mostly watch TV around the house through my three Linksys DMA2100 media center extenders rather than on the HTPC itself where the graphics card performance might be a real issue. The low-profile DDR5 R7 250 from Sapphire (which fits in small cases with its low-profile bracket provides "perfectly adequate" HD performance when I do watch HDTV on the second 24" monitor of my HTPC while working on the primary monitor, and has three onboard digital connectors to monitors via HDMI, DVI and DP) is an excellent upgrade from Intel built-in graphics, providing about triple the performance of the Intel HD graphics from a suitable Intel CPU.
I have never considered a 5400rpm drive to be adequate for HTPC needs, and certainly not if it had to support six programs recording/playing at once. Larger SATA-III, faster spinning, larger cache, larger capacity... the bigger and faster, the better is bound to be HTPC performance.
I realize hardware upgrades cost money. But if you're genuinely asking it to record six shows at once from a network tuner while feeding a seventh recorded program to an extender, you are asking for quite a bit... of your CPU, network components (at 5-12MB per HDTV program running through your router and switches and cables), hard drives, etc. Also, if your cable provider's signal going into the InfiniTV6 isn't super-strong to begin with, splitting it internally as is done is perhaps going to drop the feed to each tuner unacceptably, which also contributes to "lost data" and "impossible error recovery", aka WMC anomalies during playback. The less bottleneck, the less under-capable hardware components, well it makes sense that this can only help things and not do any harm.
A while back I bought an internal PCIe InfiniTV6 (during a Ceton "holiday sale"), just because the InfiniTV4 was no longer available and because I did want to have an available spare hardware replacement if sometime in the future it was necessary). I don't really have the need to record that many shows at one time from cable as I also have a Hauppauge HVR-2250 OTA/ATSC tuner card in my HTPC, for local network OTA/ATSC channels received through my roof antenna. This provides an independent pair of tuners for off-air ATSC antenna recording without any of the recompression or "copy-once" restrictions now being imposed by TWC/LA on ALL of the channels they distribute, even the free-to-OTA local networks. So I can still edit/save copy-freely network programs to remove commercials if I want, which is something I can no longer do with TWC/LA feeding my Ceton card.
My advice to you: absolutely go to high-cache high-performance more expensive 7200rpm SATA-III drives, rather than "green" slower-speed drives. This is a very cost-effective hardware price/performance upgrade that is relatively inexpensive compared to other hardware upgrades you might consider.
I, like you, too used to see the same occasional but annoying WMC anomalies which were hard to diagnose as coming from either the Ceton hardware or other features in my HTPC. But deciding it was most likely a hardware issue, I embarked on significant upgrades in all aspects of the HTPC and have not seen ANY of the symptoms ever again.
For example, I decided my old SATA-II/USB 2.0 SuperMicro X38 motherboard and E6850 CoreDuo CPU and 4GB (which I'd been using both before and after the conversion of this machine to an HTPC) were maybe too slow for the new added demands, as I was also using this machine for my "upstairs work machine" as well as for its HTPC 24/7 use. So I upgraded to an ASUS P8Z77-V Pro board (SATA-III, USB 3.0), and i5-3350 CPU (with no onboard graphics to save on price, as I was using an external ATI video card anyway) with 8GB of PC3-12800 memory. I retained the same super-silent QuietPC mid-tower case and super-silent Noctua 120mm fans I'd previously been using. A new dual-fan Noctua CPU cooler replaced the old Zalman cooler.
Also, because I had an available large hard drive in the machine I decided to use it for my primary recording drive. But even though it was 7200rpm, it was an older SATA-II drive and had a smaller hardware cache on it. I upgraded to a 2TB SATA-III drive (also 7200rpm) with 64MB cache.
Also, you moved your Ceton InfiniTV6 tuners to be external, but you didn't mention if it was network based or USB. As you do talk about accessing it from your other computer, I'll speculate it is network based? This puts enormous pressure on your home router/switch hardware and network cabling and NIC speeds in your HTPC, if you're truly recording 6 HD shows at one time. Do you have at least CAT5e if not CAT6 cables, or are you still using CAT5 (which doesn't support gigabit). Do you have gigabit router/switch hardware? As part of my own HTPC home infrastructure upgrade, I re-cabled the home with CAT6 cable, and use only a gigabit router supported by gigabit switches where needed.
Also, I upgraded my video graphics card first from an old ATI fanless (and huge) HD3850 to a newer fanless (and slightly smaller) HD4850, and then to a newer HD5770 (which required more power), and then to an even faster HD5870 (which now required TWO external PCIe power connections). Each upgrade obviously resulted in significantly better performance, but with additional heat generated and additional electrical power requirements from my super-silent Nesteq 600W PSU. Most recently I've upgraded (or "downgraded") yet again, this time to a low-power and less graphics-power HD7750 (i.e. the now re-branded Sapphire DDR5 R7 250 which is the same almost silent mid-level performance 72GBs bandwidth card at a very reasonable price), which doesn't even require ANY additional PCIe power connection and consumes at least 100W less power than its HD5870 predecessor. Sure, its graphics performance is significantly and visibly less than that of the HD5870 (about 160GBps bandwidth), but I'm not a gamer and mostly watch TV around the house through my three Linksys DMA2100 media center extenders rather than on the HTPC itself where the graphics card performance might be a real issue. The low-profile DDR5 R7 250 from Sapphire (which fits in small cases with its low-profile bracket provides "perfectly adequate" HD performance when I do watch HDTV on the second 24" monitor of my HTPC while working on the primary monitor, and has three onboard digital connectors to monitors via HDMI, DVI and DP) is an excellent upgrade from Intel built-in graphics, providing about triple the performance of the Intel HD graphics from a suitable Intel CPU.
I have never considered a 5400rpm drive to be adequate for HTPC needs, and certainly not if it had to support six programs recording/playing at once. Larger SATA-III, faster spinning, larger cache, larger capacity... the bigger and faster, the better is bound to be HTPC performance.
I realize hardware upgrades cost money. But if you're genuinely asking it to record six shows at once from a network tuner while feeding a seventh recorded program to an extender, you are asking for quite a bit... of your CPU, network components (at 5-12MB per HDTV program running through your router and switches and cables), hard drives, etc. Also, if your cable provider's signal going into the InfiniTV6 isn't super-strong to begin with, splitting it internally as is done is perhaps going to drop the feed to each tuner unacceptably, which also contributes to "lost data" and "impossible error recovery", aka WMC anomalies during playback. The less bottleneck, the less under-capable hardware components, well it makes sense that this can only help things and not do any harm.
A while back I bought an internal PCIe InfiniTV6 (during a Ceton "holiday sale"), just because the InfiniTV4 was no longer available and because I did want to have an available spare hardware replacement if sometime in the future it was necessary). I don't really have the need to record that many shows at one time from cable as I also have a Hauppauge HVR-2250 OTA/ATSC tuner card in my HTPC, for local network OTA/ATSC channels received through my roof antenna. This provides an independent pair of tuners for off-air ATSC antenna recording without any of the recompression or "copy-once" restrictions now being imposed by TWC/LA on ALL of the channels they distribute, even the free-to-OTA local networks. So I can still edit/save copy-freely network programs to remove commercials if I want, which is something I can no longer do with TWC/LA feeding my Ceton card.
My advice to you: absolutely go to high-cache high-performance more expensive 7200rpm SATA-III drives, rather than "green" slower-speed drives. This is a very cost-effective hardware price/performance upgrade that is relatively inexpensive compared to other hardware upgrades you might consider.
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mike_ekim
- Posts: 174
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It seems that a lot of the issues are either error messages for a weak signal, or problems that can result from a weal signal.
Captain Obvious asks "do you just have a weak signal?".
Captain Obvious asks "do you just have a weak signal?".