HDHomerun Prime Owners Thread - Page 7

I just read this post and so I checked my settings on my dlink dir-601 and found out that I did not have multicast enabled but I have not been having anyproblems with my set up. Should I enable it and see if anything changes?

Thanks. I can live with the 29/59 issue (for a while), but it is annoying.

I thought switching to a HDHR Prime would not only let me save a few bucks on my cable bill, but hopefully work better than the Moto DVR which was always missing recordings or some other nonsense.

Although I gained recording space, I basically exchanged issues with different issues.

I have to levae my system running 24/7 due to the freezing after waking from hibernation issue, or else the whole night of recordings gets missed.

Btw, I'm wondering if there is confusion here between sleeping and hibernating? Sleeping I believe just puts the machine in a lower power mode, while hibernating practacaly turns the machine off.

Waking from sleep takes no time at all, while waking from hibernating takes 3-5 seconds, at least on my machine. From Microsoft:

Hibernation is a power-saving state designed primarily for laptops. While sleep puts your work and settings in memory and draws a small amount of power, hibernation puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power.

However...
When I click START/SLEEP, I think my PC hibernates, not sleeps!
It powers down, the power light blinks, the fans and hard drives stop spinning.

Btw, my resume from sleep/hibernation issue started after I installed a PCIx video card (Radeon) for it's HDMI output. I'm using two monitors, a PC monitor connected to the on-board video, and an HDTV connected to the HDMI card. I tried disabling the on-board video but that didn't help. My issue must be in the driver for the HDMI card but I need HDMI.

Well we just went through this with my system here and Fieryphoenix suggested that maybe my power options in the bios were set to worst case as far as power draw when sleeping. Mine has S1, S3, and auto. I remember having a PC a while ago that would shut down or at least slow way down all the fans when it was sleeping, this one always left all the fans going full bore when asleep. Surfing it draws about 230 watts, sleeping it was 150 which is not much savings when everyone else says theirs pull 5 watts or less sleeping.
I reset the bios to auto and waited and when it went to sleep in a hour all the fans and everything shut completely off, it is now only drawing 1 watt when snoozing and wakes up within a few seconds now right where I left off.
I did have it lock up the keyboard and mouse, that are Bluetooth wireless, so I set the USB ports to stay awake and made sure the fans weren't in some weird power saving mode that also seems to cause BSOD and other issues.
I also set the bios to wake up on LAN, PS2, and PCI and so far it wakes up fine and quick and seems stable.
Now it draws less then many of the other users have reported too so I'm also leaving it on 24/7 for now as 1 watt wont break the bank here. You might want to look at your manual and bios settings and experiment till you find the stable point like I did with some help from here. You also might want to find a forum for your board and video card and see if anyone has had similar issues and possible fixes for them as doing that for many issues here has found fixes I never would have figured out.

Yes, I read your posts as you were working through it.

I will look at my BIOS, but as I said, untill I added a second video card, my system hibernated fine. I have to suspect my issue has something to do with that change.

Also, like I mentioned in my last post, people seem to be confused about the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate".

It sounds to me like previously your machine was sleeping, and now it's hibernating. Sleeping does not turn the system off, so your fans continued to run.

Every time I actually set it to hibernate it never works right and usually does a BSOD when it's supposed to restart so I have it set to sleep only.
Before I changed the bios setting the fans did stay running, now they shut off. I just looked again and hibernate is off, BUT Hybrid sleep is enabled so maybe that's the difference though I hadn't seen that setting before.
I came home today and the system had crashed sometime earlier anyways but it had restarted on it'd own and was sleeping when I walked in. Wondered why I had to enter my password but I'll let it run a while and see how often it does this but it ran a few days just fine so far.

leebo - no, actually, the S3 sleep is not hibernate. Greatly simplified, it leaves just the memory (and NIC, when WOL is active) on. Nothing is written to hard drive and it resumes extremely quickly... far faster than hibernate. On modern systems power consumption is darn near exactly on par with hibernate, so for almost every application, Sleep is now a better choice than hibernate these days.
On my system, the high wattage drawn in sleep is due to my quite old PC Power and Cooling 510 Turbo SLI power supply, which I think draws ungodly amounts of power on the 5V standby subsystem even when there are no attached devices drawing power.

Well, what I wrote above came from Microsoft's web site. It did mention hybrid sleep, but I didn't mention that because I thought it might confuse things.

Google hybrid sleep and look for a hit from Microsoft's web site. What's written there jives with the power draw Dartman experienced.

Today I went into my BIOS and completely dis-abled the on-board video. After booting, in device mgr., now only one display card shows up. Tonight I'm going to once again put it to sleep/hibernate (whatever) and cross my fingers.

SD reccommends it for all D-Link routers but I think it stems mostly out of the 655 which reacts badly to the Prime unless multicasting is enabled. WMC will not tune more than one channel without it enabled. From my experience the 655 is a bit of a control freak and wants to control all content on a network. Great from a security standpoint but it can be a bit annoying at times by slowing things down. It should not hurt to enable it and is easy to reverse it could prevent problems during high traffic.

Ok I guess I am not affected by it then because I can have all three tuners on my prime going on 2 tv's and no problems at all. I enabled it anyway to see if it cuts down on the buffering when I am watching mkv blu-ray rips on my xbox extender.

Well, about a minute after waking it this morning I got a blue screen. so apparently my issue is hard ware related, but not a conflict between the on-board video and the HDMI card (on-board video is completely disabled in the BIOS).

Can anyone recommend an inexpensive HDMI card I can buy to replace the ATI 4350 I have installed?

Preferably an Nvidia so I can: 1. Avoid ATI driver issues, and 2. Try the 29/59"fix" paople have been talking about for Nvidia cards.

I know at least 2 of my tuners were working too but just went in and enabled multicasting on my 651 D-Link. Only reason I got it is I now needed WiFi as I got myself a cheap tablet and I figured the 4 gigabyte wired ports was a extra bonus for later when I got something that could use it.
My newest media player supports gigabit but of course due to bios and driver issues not fixed yet it wont go faster then 4 mbs on network file transfers yet goes full speed anytime you play a shared file...
Does anyone know if they make one that does WiFi and has more then 4 gigabyte ports as well because I'm out of ports and not sure if I can safely reconnect my 8 port 100 VPN router that worked fine with my live even when playing HD ISO's.

I use the Asus version of the GT430 (a DDR2 version in one and the DDR3 in another) do not really see a difference between the two. You should be able to find them for around $60. Be aware that the fan/fins are thicker than the normal card, on my slimline HP this covers the next available slot making it useless. Also when downloading latest firmware you may have to use the latest beta as there is a bug that affects WMC vidio playback in the latest approved driver.

The 430 does not seem to suffer from the 29/59 issue but I find it to work really well with my plasma vs the LCD.

When trying to watch copy protected recordings on another pc what needs to be done? I have my main pc upstairs do the recordings since it has the bigger HD and I use an extender in the bedroom to watch the recordings. I have another networked pc in the living room downstairs so is it possible to copy the recordings on a networked drive and then be able to view them? I have a freenas server I could copy the data to or could I just share the drive where the recordings are being sent to.

Also I kept on getting a error "Channel request timeout..." while viewing the other day. I was still able to view the channel I was currently watching and didn't see any type of lag or stuttering so was just curious what this error meant? I also get 'network issue' when viewing on my xbox 360 but view livetv or recordings hasn't been an issue. Is something in my network causing issues? I have a dlink dir 655 with a couple of netgear GS108 switches.

Can't watch CP'd recordings on another PC, sorry - have to use extenders like your Xbox.

For the network issue, is your Xbox wireless or wired? Wireless causes a lot of probs, but the only issues I've heard with wired are with either heavy HTPC usage or GigE/100mb settings (usually flow control).

Somewhat related, there's a new wireless standard coming out late this year--AC. Presumably that would take care of the wireless issues with Xbox.

Yeah had a feeling that would be the case. Thanks for clarification. Not a big deal just more of a convenience thing. Darn TWC and their copy protection.



Everything is wired on GigE switches. The switches are unmananged and I don't have any heavy HTPC usage when I see the network issue. I do leave my HTPCs on 24/7 and mainly use them to view livetv, recorded shows, or ripped movies from my freenas server.

Make sure flow control is enabled on your HTPC's NIC. Also try setting it down to 100mb just to see if the problem goes away on the Xbox.

Thanks for the info. I'll make sure to set these settings on my NICs.

Sorry to be a bit off topic but will it matter that I have 2 different switches in my network? I have 1 Netgear GS108 feeding to the various rooms in my house then in 2 rooms I am using a Dlink DGS2205. Both of these are unmanaged switches.

No, it shouldn't.

With my HDHRP I'm using a Cisco CableCard from TWC and tuner adapter. I've got an amplifier supplied by TWC at my home's cable hub and all of my cable box linked TVs give me no problems.

On several HD channels (ESPN, Com Central, SpikeTV, TNT, and a few others) I get pixelation and garbled sound. This only occurs in the evening. On the HomeRun GUI panel, the effected channels show decreased signal strength and quality. During the morning hours, these channels have less than 100% signal strength (95-99%) but otherwise look fine. In the evening, some channels dip below 85% and pixelate while others drop to 60% and I get a "no signal" error from WMC.

Of course, when the TWC tech came to the house in the morning, there were no problems! When I explained the symptoms -ie the night time factor, he had no answer. I suggested that perhaps when my neighbors were watching TV, somehow this lowered my signal strength just enough to affect my HDHRP. He said "it doesn't work that way" and that was that.

Any thoughts?

I am betting that your line is split somewhere before it gets to your house. But that also doesn't make perfect sense because I have the same signal strength weather the tv's are on or not. So I don't think that them watching tv would lower your signal? But then again I know that bandwidth is shared with cable internet and speeds can vary depending on how many people are online. So really after I said all that, I have no clue.

On my system the main lines for the TV part under the house is as old as the house, probably mid 80's. Many times when it starts raining in the winter I start loosing signal and my on demand menu of things stops working with the equivalent error code of low signal, usually my regular channels are fine though I do sometimes get some pixelization and things. I have ran better cable rated splitters, a pro Motorola cable drop amp and new quad shielded satellite grade cable and the tuner in my PC stopped dropping signal and channels like it used to. The splitter and drop amp all are bidirectional so PPV/on demand works when everything is right.
I do know when it's having problems if I disconnect some of the extra runs in here the main set and box starts working again, once everything dries up outside I can reconnect all my extra feeds and it's good again.
Eventually I'm going under the house and replacing all the old cable with some of the high quality quad stuff I have and I'm betting that will give me the signal it needs on the bad/wet days as the old stuff was never meant to carry the high band stuff they are using now even though at the time it was pretty good stuff.
They hardly ever admit there is a problem with their system or cables as I don't think they want to roll a truck every time somebody has a problem and many times we've split it so much inside the house with poor quality stuff that's part of the issue too. So make sure all your inside cable and splitters are good, if you have a bunch of extra things running everywhere try unplugging them then see if the main run works better. If that doesn't cut it then maybe you have the old cable problem running into your house and good luck trying to convince them to redo it.

Try using a 1 to 2 splitter, where one run goes to your HDHR, and the other goes to another splitter to your other runs.

He is correct in suggesting that it should not work this way; dB's should remain constant until it splits and is not subject to a draw of power like a motor on an electric line. But you have a good point just not the right theory for him to explore. Variations in signal strength over a 24 cycle could be due to a repeater/amplifier beginning to fail; probably the power supply to that device. It could be a power instability in their source of power for their amp. Attenuation is another potential for signal loss but that tends to be constant unless someone has some high magnetic force that only would be on at a specific time. The only way I can see your idea working is if someone had a switch they would open on your cable line and split the signal when they wanted and turn themselvs off when not in use.

You see the problem because the Prime is rather sensitive. Your neighbors may not see it unless they have a number of splitters. You could ask around to see if some are having a problem. If you have any neighbors who are good friends and use the same cable provider (and you know they are on the same main line) you could ask to test your theory in their home. If you see the same thing then you are justified that the providers system is having a problem and rule out your own home.

Another thing to look at is exactly when it occurs (daylight - that is sunset and sunrise or peak power times - which may be the same thing depending on where you live).

Could it also be temperature related?

I live in San Diego, so no!

This issue happens like clockwork: at around 2pm the signal strength and quality begins to drop off on the same set of HD channels. By about 3pm, they are unwatchable. This continues until at least midnight (way past my bedtime!) and is back to normal by 6:30am.

I moved the HDHR Prime to my media closet and it is getting its cable feed directly from the amplifier (which gets its feed from the street) without any apparent impact.

Arrrrgh! I've got a cable guy coming out next week in the evening so I hope we can troubleshoot this better.

Probably a good idea to note which channels are affected or which are not depending on which list is smaller. It may point to a specific amp or transceiver in the system. My best guess would say where it is converted from fiber to cable the transceiver for that set of channels is having a problem.
Given the area you live and the timing of the issue I doubt it is a power draw down as it does not seem to let up before midnight unless there is some kind of industry in your area that starts up around 2 pm and ends before daybreak. So that leaves some kind of EMF as another cause.

I ran into an issue yesterday on a couple of my htpcs. I was watching tv in my upstairs room that was using tuner1 while my wife was watching tv in the bedroom using the 360 which is an extender to the htpc upstairs (tuner2). My friend was watching tv on another htpc in the living room on tuner3. When I was trying to change channels I was getting errors saying "Channel not available at this time" and I could only view the current channel I was on. I had to stop viewing livetv then start again to be able to switch channels. Also during this time the video on the living room htpc went black and could only hear the audio. Not sure if WMC7 went wacky or what.

Anyone else experience something like this? The only one that was working fine throughout this time was on the 360. I was not scheduling any recordings at this time so there was no other priority to grab a tuner.

So what's SD's rationale behind designing a 3 tuner device and a 2x3 (6) tuner device?

Windows supports 4 tuners by default. Tuning adapters now support 6 tuners. M-Cards support 6 tuners.

I'd expect to see a 4 tuner device and a 6 tuner device that uses 1 CableCARD and 1 Tuning Adpater.

Because of the ongoing firmware issues that cause reboots and memory leaks with the Ceton InfniTV 4 PCIe card, I'm looking to go with an HDHomeRun Prime device. The only issue is I need at least 4 tuners but I don't want to have to mess with 2 CableCARDs, 2 Tuning Adapters and 2 network interfaces required by the 2x3 HDHomeRun Prime.

The SD 2x3 Tuner concept just seems convoluted to me. It may be this is the way they went with the design of their boards originally but it really makes no sense as to why they went this route.