Ceton eth6 now handling 6 tuners (1 Viewer)

gpnash

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March 2, 2015
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Hi, I'm back again.
Spectrum cable now (Charter bought a few companies) been running MP1.xx since 2013 or so and am now up to 1.20.
The ceton eth6 tuner support seemed a bit slow on reporting back errors so I thought I'd ask.

Every new map from Spectrum has a error in it. Usually it's on El-Rey and it's just a matter of adjusting it's service id so fixing it has become old hat.
However in working with this I've noticed that before get the popup that tells me there's a problem with tuning the channel there is a several minute (up to about 10 or 15) delay.
Checking the status on the Ceton I see that MP is trying to tune each of the 6 tuners in turn to find the channel.
I understand that, with 6 different boards this might be what you'd want to do; but is it what you want to do here?

Channels are selected by picking a tuner on the ceton and doing a channel scan to get the channel list.
Directions say to then copy that channel group to each of the other 5 tuners.
Given that if the first tuner fails on anything other than a "I'm busy doing something else condition"; all of the other tuners are going to fail as well.
When a pmt or other configuration failure occurs it takes from 90-120 seconds to timeout (if the time out is set shorter getting the program list becomes problematical) so when tuning a channel that is misconfigured it tries this 6 times total (so 8 to 12 minutes) before reporting the missing video, missing audio or no pmt error.
Allowing an option to skip the other ceton eth6 tuners would cut that wait down to 1-2 minutes. You'd only want to skip on a non-expected error, finding an available tuner could take 10 minutes if all the other tuners were busy and that's something we'll have to live with. of course, you'd only want to skip tuners that were on the same ceton device.

I know you guys don't have access to all of the hardware all of the time and that issues like this, while important, are not that important. Heck it's working just a bit slow.
With Spectrum cable at least I've only found two stations so far that can't be accessed do to encryption/copy once restrictions BBC HD (BBC SD is ok) and Animal planet which makes the ceton eth6 a good network multituner solution and MP has been a wonderful entertainment tool. Now if I could only get used to dd/mm instead of the US norm MM/DD....
 

CyberSimian

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  • June 10, 2013
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    Allowing an option to skip the other ceton eth6 tuners would cut that wait down to 1-2 minutes.
    I have no experience of the Ceton tuner unit, or of US TV, but I think that the setting that you want is the one indicated in red in the following screen shot:

    tuners_to_try.jpg

    As you can see, I have the value set to "0" which means "try all tuners". I use this value because I have two different tuner cards in my HTPC, and they have different sensitivity (the TBS tuners are more sensitive than the Pinnacle tuners). If I had only one type of tuner card, I would use the value "1", or perhaps "2".

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    CyberSimian

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    Will that work for normal tuning as well or only for recordings?
    It applies to all TV access (recording TV, and watching live TV). Certainly, in the cases where I have actually noticed this, it was when I was trying to watch a channel that was not broadcasting, and TV Server tried all 8 of my tuners before giving up! :D

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    gpnash

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    March 2, 2015
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    I went crawling thru the settings and found it again in timeshifting so I've changed the number from 0 to 2 in both places.
    I'm figuring 2 is safer than 1 when I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

    Thanks a lot I'll post back when I figure out what we've just done...
     

    CyberSimian

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    I went crawling thru the settings and found it again in timeshifting so I've changed the number from 0 to 2 in both places.
    Hmm, I had not noticed that before. :(
    Thanks for mentioning it (and apologies for giving incorrect advice in my previous post).

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    gpnash

    Portal Pro
    March 2, 2015
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    No worries, no worries at all.
    brought me to 120 seconds during a failure down from 720 seconds :)
    If I find any negatives I'll post back. So far so good.

    Thanks again :)
     

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