Ceton tuner failing daily

[mike015pgh]

I had an issue where my ceton usb 4 would work but then would not work. I would get the recording conflicts for ~500 shows.
I ended up getting it going but thought I should share what the trip.

If I rebooted it would work for a while, one day-ish. unplugging the tuner did the same thing. I thought my power supply was failing, happened before. so I replaced it. sadly the issue remained. I found that there was a driver issue with the device, it would show in the device manager as having an issue. This is where I took a detour, had I looked into it more I would have seen that it had an error code 43 in the properties of the tuner, which I just had to uninstall the drivers and reinstall. been solid since, (a few days at this point, but great none the less)
Instead I started treating the symptom. I found that if I disabled the device and reenabled it, everything worked , for a while. at least it let me keep the thing going until I got annoyed enough to fix it properly.
I found some batch commands that allowed me to automate the enabling and disabling of the hardware in device manager and then add to task scheduler to make sure it was working at key times in the day.

part 1 run as elevated batch
probable source, had for too long to remember https://gist.github.com/Maximus5/a7fb0a11b3c33e5d96b0

my batch from this

@echo off
:: BatchGotAdmin
:-------------------------------------
REM  --> Check for permissions
>nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system"

REM --> If error flag set, we do not have admin.
if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' (
    echo Requesting administrative privileges...
    goto UACPrompt
) else ( goto gotAdmin )

:UACPrompt
    echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
    echo UAC.ShellExecute "%~s0", "", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"

    "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"

    exit /B

:gotAdmin
    if exist "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" ( del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" )
    pushd "%CD%"
    CD /D "%~dp0"

"c:\Dis Re enable Tuner.bat"

This gets an elevated prompt, (I have UAC disabled by the way)
and the last line calls a second batch file

PART 2
file named and located "c:\Dis Re enable Tuner.bat" change to what works for you. does the following steps
1 disable the tuner
2 stop the openDCT service
3 allow a few seconds for the previous steps to complete
4 enable the tuner
5 allow a few seconds...
6 start openDCT service

but to get this going you will need to get the DEVCON command downloaded for your particular setup, once installed I searched and found the file in program files / window kits....
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...devtest/devcon

file named and located "c:\Dis Re enable Tuner.bat" change to what works for you.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64\devcon" disable "@USB\VID_2432&PID_0AA2\5&10FDD118&0&3*"
net stop opendct
timeout 10

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64\devcon" enable "@USB\VID_2432&PID_0AA2\5&10FDD118&0&3*"
timeout 4
net start opendct
timeout 5

you will need to change the device instance path for your device
image attached

hope this helps
Mike

[KryptoNyte]

I realize that you have a USB version, but it's interesting to see this thread. About once every 1 to 4 weeks I have to reboot my SageTV server due to the Ceton 6 pcie card going flaky and stops responding. When I do so, I've found that I have to do a complete power down and let the machine completely discharge (turning off the power supply) and then start it up 'cold' so to speak. If I don't start the machine up cold, the Ceton won't come back to life.

I have an fan in the machine blowing outside air directly on that pcie card and that does keep it cool, but for some reason, it just craps out sometimes - never really tried to track it down. I've been waiting to see if Silicondust actually makes good on their 6-tuner Prime network thingy and I'll likely replace the Ceton with that.

[AlphaCrew]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I realize that you have a USB version, but it's interesting to see this thread. About once every 1 to 4 weeks I have to reboot my SageTV server due to the Ceton 6 pcie card going flaky and stops responding. When I do so, I've found that I have to do a complete power down and let the machine completely discharge (turning off the power supply) and then start it up 'cold' so to speak. If I don't start the machine up cold, the Ceton won't come back to life.

I have an fan in the machine blowing outside air directly on that pcie card and that does keep it cool, but for some reason, it just craps out sometimes - never really tried to track it down. I've been waiting to see if Silicondust actually makes good on their 6-tuner Prime network thingy and I'll likely replace the Ceton with that.

I'll be shocked if we ever see the Prime 6

[thomaszoo]

I had a Ceton card until last fall when it suddenly died. It was always dicey when I did a system restart as to whether the card would be working after the restart (unless I did the complete cold boot by turning it off and discharging the power supply). I bought a used Prime and it has been 100% solid. I really hope the Prime 6 is released (this year). It would be enough to let me get rid of my OTA tuners.

[sic0048]

Sorry to hear you all have issues. I have the 6 tuner ETH version (network connection) and it's been rock solid for years. Occasionally I have to restart the openDTC service, but never the ceton tuner.

[Guyverix]

Originally Posted by thomaszoo

I had a Ceton card until last fall when it suddenly died. It was always dicey when I did a system restart as to whether the card would be working after the restart (unless I did the complete cold boot by turning it off and discharging the power supply). I bought a used Prime and it has been 100% solid. I really hope the Prime 6 is released (this year). It would be enough to let me get rid of my OTA tuners.

I have found at least one of the reasons for the flakeyness on these cards. They loose the pairing on the cablecard and generate a new id value. It will not tune channels until the pairing is successful. I end up re-pairing it on Comcast site when that happens and all is well. It only happens about half the time, but when it does it is rather confusing to isolate what happened.

Certainly something to check out when yours goes crazy.

[egeller]

There are a number of things of which I wish I were not knowledgeable. The Ceton USB is one of them. I used to run one of them as part of my Windows setup, before I moved to Unraid.

Long story-short, I got on Ebay and bought a Ceton 6-ETH to replace it.

What is the OP's operating system? If it's Windows 10, there's a problem that may be hobbling a solution.

The USB tuner does not have drivers that were ever "officially" supported on Windows 10. When I did a rebuild I hit this issue like a brick wall and had to give up. I had the USB tuner working when I upgraded Windows from 7 to 10, but when I tried a clean build of 10, I could not get drivers to work. your mileage may vary.

Hope some of this helps.

[dlj9999]

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to thank Guyyerix for the pairing suggestion. Came home from work and found both of my Cetons(4 and 6) could not get a signal. Called Comcast to re-pair them and everything is working again.