Latest Ceton InfiniTV 4 Info Thread - Page 139

how do the new cable cards work? I have an old HP 9300 HTPC(2006) with cablelab's certifcation and ATI wonder cable card.
The DRM rights come with the HP 9300 and had to be bought that way! How do systems work without cablelabs cert?
Can you record HBO?

CableLabs lifted the requirement that complete systems had to be certified quite some time ago. Now only the tuner has to be certified and it can be added to any PC. WMC is still the only software that supports copy protected content though.

So you can't copy HBO?

Depends on your cable operators, but typically you cannot

Thanks for the correction, you guys would be the expert, I'm sure.

I have a problem myself. I was using my gaming pc as my HTPC.. It has win 8 on it.. It was working fine,but I wanted to build a dedicated htpc.. I moved the blu ray player and the infinity 4 to it. I get all the regular channels,but I can't get the premium channels. I called comcast 3 times,the sent signals and everything and still ,won't work. I swapped in a new cable card today,called comcast,they paired it and sent the signal for HBO ect.. Still doesn't work.. any suggestions?

I got it.. I had to activate windows 7 media center from inside media center.. Comcast sent the signal and its all good

My Ceton failed me again last night. The signal from the Duke game on the Raycom network disappeared for awhile (weather?). The comcast DVR just continued recording. The ceton thought it was recording but it was discarding the blocks of data. What happens is that the file on disk no longer increases. You have to pull up WMC, stop the recording and restart it. Last week I attempted to view the recording of Downton Abbey with Zoom Player at 10:13. The eventual file had only 13 minutes. It seems if you look at the ceton crossly, it fails. As a result I won't be returning my comcast DVR. I do love recording to *my* HDD, however.

I think the main problem with Ceton is that it requires an excellent signal 100% of the time. Having only 2 tuners, your comcast DVR can get by with a much weaker signal. The Ceton, on the other hand, gets split 4 ways. So if possible, you should minimize any splits in your system and make sure the Ceton gets the strongest possible signal. Just a single split before the Ceton means each tuner gets only 1/8th of the original signal strength.

Signal strength and quality is key. Eliminate any unecessary splits. I found it necessary to use a Motorola drop amp with a + 15dB boost. This is a clean amp so you are not inrcreasing noise as you pump the gain.. My SNR is roughly 36 dB or a little higher. I had all the wiring replced by Comcast including the intial split for the Modem. The ground was replaced. When everything was perfect with the amp inline it just worked. My Tivo worked pretty much any old way.

My brother fought this same battle for months everything was replaced including the cable on his street before Comcast got things good enough to make the Ceton robust. This was in a 5 year old neighborhood.

I currently have a split that wil go away. I continued to have my Tivo operational for the last 3 months despite the 100 percent up time I am seeing with my Ceton now. After the Superbowl the Tivo HD will go out of service and I will remove the split. My signal will probably be about +6 db to at that point, in fact it might be a tad hot.

Time Sync, This was posted several months, maybe close to a year ago, but I finally got around to loading the task on all my PC's, it's fantastic, for the most part, you don't have to set your recordings to come on 1-2 minutes earlier, recordings start right at the start of the show, give or take a 1-2 seconds. my clock's would drift, slow down, by up to 5 minutes between sync's, and sometimes,even with the two minute start buffer you'd miss a few minutes of the recordings, no more.

There are a lot of new comers, so wanted to re-post the link.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/timesync/index.html

I also took it one step further and checked the option to run the sync every ten minutes, until the next trigger.

I've noticed in my event logs lately that the nist time server has not been available for 8 tries but my time seems to be staying correct. Has anybody else noticed this?

Use pool.ntp.org. Much more reliable.

I will do that but it would seem that the National Institute of Standards and Technology time server should be accurate, no?
Edited by Sammy2 - 2/5/13 at 11:40am

Accurate, yes. Reliable as to available for connection, not so much. It's the gov'ment after all...

Yeah, that same government that tracks satelites, airplanes and large ships at sea? That same government that does all sorts of research that depends on accurate and reliable time service?

IDK but I think they actually keep the atomic clock so all other services are getting their informtion from this one.

You are confusing accuracy with reliability. nist.gov can be down, overloaded due to high public demand, etc. The public time servers are not guaranteed to be available and sometimes aren't. ntp.org generally suffers none of those problems.

Don't use it for all I care. If you want to fix your problem you have the answer.

Just don't think you should blame the government for it because if it weren't for the government you'd have no stardardized time to even go by. ntp.org must quere nist from time to time to keep their time servers accurate but maybe they aren't as overloaded.. Either way, the time on my HTPC is accurate, best I can tell but I'm going to switch to pool.ntp.org anyhow. Thanks.

As a sidenote, there's dozens of weather sources too but they all get their information from weather.gov, which puts out a pretty fine product on the internet so I go to the source there too.

Hey all.

Just want to say I love my iTV4 USB. It's changed everything in my house as far as how we consume entertainment.

Now, I know iTV works with Verizon FiOS, but our local fiber is "Cincinnati Bell FiOptics". They are giving some good deals to switch, but I don't want to lose my media center/cablecard system.

Their website isn't helping at all. Before I call (and probably confuse them), will the iTV4 USB work with Cincinnati Bell Fiber?
Thanks guys.

I think it should work.

From: http://www.cincinnatibell.com/customer-support/product_support/fioptics/video/#faq_8
"We also offer CableCards to our customers to lease just like a set top box. If you have a CableCard enabled device (i.e. Series3 Tivo, Television, Computer), we can provision the card in the device for you to allow service. You will be eligible for subscribing to our higher digital tiers with a CableCard, but still will not have access to VOD (Video On Demand) or our interactive channel guide. Please call the Billing Department (513-565-9890) for information on leasing CableCards."

that's awesome. great find Ken. I really appreciate it.

Ken by chance have you run the digital cable advisor in WMC since updating the card. I had the exact same issue (all locals no premiums) at one point and solved it by rerunning the cable advisor. It seems somewhere along the lines my playready components got fudged by swapping CC. I do agree FIOS CS is the worst.

If you mean before I got it working, I might have run the DCA but I don't remember doing it. I know that haven't run it since I got the CCV signal sent and got my premium channels back. I did manually run the update for playready but that didn't solve the problem.

I don't subscribe to it but I've been getting Showtime since the CableCARD swap. I wanted to make sure I wasn't being charged for it so I checked my channel package and premium subscriptions. I found "Limited Time Complimentary Showtime" listed there. Maybe they are giving me a free premium upgrade for a while to make up for the problems I had with the CableCARD?

I had problems with time.nist.gov so I changed it to the nist time server closest to me (nist1-pa.ustiming.org ). The only nist server in PA happens to be about 10 miles away.

FYI, time.nist.gov isn't a time server. It's only a pointer that redirects you to the next available nist time server. More info here.

I was reading that just today!

I decided to go with nist1-la.ustiming.org . I wonder if the actual IP Address (64.147.116.229) works? Sure does..

I worked with a customer on CinBell last week - it works fine with the InfiniTV

Have had major problems with my Ceton InfiniTV 4 and Kaspersky Anti/Virus...Long story short. I had to remove my A/V. Re-installed InfiniTV set-up. However, when Media center scans for the tuners it would only find 1. If you tried to record media center would say no tuners found. It took me 2 months to figure this out. So to save the rest of you the heartache. This is how I had to fix it. After you remove the A/V you must also remove the Infiniti TV entry in Programs ( Add/ Remove Programs). Also remove the network driver under system properties. Re-boot. download a fresh copy of the installation set-up form Ceton and install.Run throught the set-up again and you should see all 4 tuners return when Media Center scans for new tuners. This has solved all my recording issues and working for several weeks so far. Hope this can help someone else.

i'm getting flickering on verizon fios hbo and cinemax hd premium channels. all other HD and standard def premium channels are fine. i have an i3-3225 w/ intel hd 4000 graphics. all drivers seem to be updated to the latest. what should i do?

Disable Dynamic Contrast on your video drivers

erickotz

this worked like a champ with me...now do you have any suggestions in making my watching live tv more crisp.