Latest Ceton InfiniTV 4 Info Thread - Page 140

Kaspersky sucks with regards to using it on a Media Center PC. It simply wreaks havoc with everything. Your best bet is to uninstall it and download Microsoft Security Essentials. It should provide sufficient protection and won't interfere with your HTPC operations.

I just built a Win7 64 Home HTPC with InfiniTV4 PCIe but I can only view about half of my HD channels. The channels I do receive look perfect, but for the others it says no signal available. I still have the Cox-issued DVR, and when I plug that back in it still receives all the HD channels. CableCard activation and WMC setup went smoothly without any problems at all.

Is this a signal strength problem? My provider (Cox Cable north San Diego county) requires (I think) the tuning adapter to be in parallel with the ITV4, and therefore I have a coax splitter to have one cable to ITV and one cable to the TA.

I have opened a support ticket with Ceton but wanted to check here in case I'm missing something obvious. I did everything Ceton support recommended in their first response to me (update to latest beta firmware, install three Windows hotfixes, and change power settings) but this made no difference.

If this is indeed a signal strength problem, is there a way to have the ITV4 and the TA in parallel without cutting the signal in half with a splitter?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, and please let me know if I can provide more information that would be helpful.

My guess is your TA isn't connected or provisioned properly, but I would need data from the ticket to say any more.

@ bgthree...Hate to ask the obvious but is the TA connected to the PC via USB? If not that's the problem. I have RF coming out of the wall to TA and then from TA to Infinitv and it works fine. Some have suggested using a splitter but mine wasn't necessary. Your problem sounds like some other posts on here where the install tech did not connect the TA to the PC with the USB cable. Otherwise, TA may need to be re-provisioned, rebooted or is just bad. Either way it's not letting the other channels get through.

Good suggestion - I actually made that mistake once

I had the TA properly connected to a USB 2.0 port, and it showed up properly in my device manager, but you are right that the TA was the problem. I went to Cox to get a new TA, swapped it in, and now it "pretty much" seems to work. I'm getting almost all my channels now, but am getting a "subscription required" error on a couple channels I pay for. So, I'm about to call Cox to see if they can resolve that. I don't suppose there's any ITV4 or WMC/computer setting that could be causing this error?

OK, so this "subscription required" error is very flukey. If I flip to the channel by changing the channel up or down, the channel comes in perfectly. If I type in the channel number and press enter, I get a "subscription required" error. I guess this is just a minor annoyance. However I don't want to have something set to record, have the tuner automatically switch channels to record, then get no recording.

You might also want to check PlayReady. I have a problem such that everytime the computer updates I have to reinstall/update PlayReady. This too causes subscription error and No TV Signal error for me. So any time I restart my system, the first thing I have to do is go update PlayReady and then all is good. YMMV

Thanks, I will try that. Eventually. But first I have a bigger problem that needs solving:

Previously while trying to get the ITV4 to work, I only had a cheap monitor connected to the HTPC via DVI. Once I got the issue with the tuning adapter fixed so that I was basically receiving all the channels I pay for, I tried plugging my HDTV into the HDMI port on the HTPC. When the TV is connected via HDMI, I get the following error in WMC: "Display driver error. The video playback device does support playback of protected content."

This error occurs on all channels except local networks and a couple other channels like ESPN. As much as I enjoy Judge Judy and local news, it would be nice to be able to watch all the channels on my TV instead of only on my cheapo Acer monitor!

I tried making the TV duplicate the HTPC monitor, as well as making the TV the sole display with the HTPC monitor turned off, but in both cases it still gives me the Display Driver error.

I do not yet have a receiver - my setup is currently HTPC straight to HDTV via HDMI, and currently there is no separate audio out - I'm using HDMI for both video and audio. The TV is a Panasonic Viera TH-58PE75U. The HTPC is built on Intel DH77EB with i3-3225, and I am using the integrated graphics (not using a graphics card).

Any suggestions why I'm getting this error? Any time I get a possibly DRM-related error it makes my blood boil

Edit: all drivers are up to date.
Edited by bgthree - 2/15/13 at 4:27pm

I think I solved the content protection error problem. Ceton tech support confirmed that my TV is HDCP compliant, but mentioned you can't have cloned displays and maintain HDCP. In the Windows display settings, I made sure only the TV was the active display, but this still didn't work. Finally, I physically unplugged the monitor from the HTPC so that the TV was the only one physically connected. Voila! Everything works like magic.

Is your monitor HDCP compliant too?

I've never tried dual monitors can't help you there. I've only used HDTV for display but have on occasion needed to physically disconnect and reconnect the HDMI/DVI cable. That does seem to fix most handshake issues which sounds like your problem. Good luck.

I had a pretty nasty WAF killing error last night with my iTV4 USB.
Monday nights are, historically, the most active for TV recording... 4 tuners going at once.
Last night, for some reason, my iTV4 USB/Win7/MC7 decided I only had one tuner to use... so 3 other programs had the yellow caution sign with the "please stop a recording show to start this recording". Unfortunately, the three programs were nearly over and I had no idea they were not being recorded. I checked, and sure enough only one recording was active.
I checked the Ceton menu in MC7 and saw that all 4 tuners showed up in the diag...
I ran over to the main server and nothing looked out of the ordinary. I put the back of my hand on the iTV4 and it seemed okay and well cooled. I checked for any beta updates and I am on the latest.

After powering down the server and unplugging the iTV4 USB and powering them back up, everything was fine.

This is the first time this has happened in the many months of owning the iTV4, so I'm not too worried about it. Just wondering if anyone else has seen anything similar.

If Windows Media Center detects a failure of a tuner (such as no signal) it will sometimes remove that tuner from the list of active tuners till reboot - it sounds like that's what happened here. You might check your event logs - they may provide more info.

I gave up getting my cable card activated with Comcast after several months and calls. I turned the card in so now I am using the QAM feature to tune in the local channels only. That seems to be working OK. I just need to map the channels with the correct guide information.

Did you ask ceton for assistance with this?

I got a card from Comcast, called the cablecard specific number and had it activated in about 5 mins...

Usually comcast is quite good at pairing cards. There was one incident recently on the prime thread that the person went to his "local" office and they handed out a moto card as that is the only thing they used but it turned out his area was actually an cisco/SA area and had to go to a different office to pick up his card.

As Sammy mentioned, if you are having trouble getting your CableCARD paired, open a support ticket with us and we will reach out to your cable provider

Hi folks, my apologies if this has already been asked and answered, but this is my question. I am trying to do a budget HTPC which is going to mainly stream movies and TV shows that I have on my NAS as well as view TV using one of the channels from my Ceton Infinitv tuner. The ceton is on a Windows 7 machine and I have shared 2 with another Win 7 machine. I would like to know if I can use one of the channels on a machine with Linux as the OS. I can keep the cost down if I don't have to use Win7.

Thanks.

Unfortunately, you can't use Linux with a cablecard tuner. Windows 7 is the only OS that you can use to get around the DRM issues so you can use a cablecard tuner to watch or record TV.

There is nothing preventing linux from being used with a cablecard tuner, ceton even has a linux driver page {edit: I probably should say its unsupported but I really think that is because linux is community supported and they can't possibly support every distro and possible configuration} ... the problem comes in to play when the channels are marked copy once, copy never, or not marked by CCI and has some other protection enabled. If they are on fios, everything but hbo/max should work. If they are on comcast, all but premiums(HBO/MAX/SHO/TMC/STARZ etc) should work... if they are on TWC, it is highly unlikely anything but locals will work... I would also say the same about Cox but they do have some areas that have nearly everything copy freely and other areas with nearly everything copy once.
Edited by signcarver - 2/25/13 at 9:37pm

Unless you're on a system like Comcast or Verizon where pretty much everything is copy free, then it's no problem with MythTV. Can use either InfiniTV or the Prime because there is no DRM to worry about. Myth has native support for both tuners.

Good to know that MythTV now has cablecard support. I agree about Verizon with the exception of PPV and premium channels. Last I heard Comcast was flagging most of their channels as copy once, but this may vary by region.

I just tweeted:

@TWCableHelp why oh why do you set CCI on all cable channels? don't say it the content owners since Verizon doesn't do it!

Feel free to join me in an assault.

xnappo

The only thing that's going to do is get my FiOS channels flagged.

Hahaha sorry!

xnappo

FYI technically they still set the CCI on Copy Freely channels, so you would want to ask them why they set it to CCI 0x02 (or Copy Once)

Included that in my reply. They are of course lying and saying the content owners require it. That is hogwash. Show me the contract.

xnappo

It's possible they are telling the truth. I do not know the intricacies of their contracts. Perhaps they have to pay a higher rate if they don't? However, I think a fair question for them would be why do other providers, like Comcast, not do the same thing if it is required by the content providers?