Question 1

I currently have the InfiniTV4 card. I have COX cable in San Diego and I have a couple of questions about this card.

1. Can I replace my existing Card with this WITHOUT involving the cable Co in any way?  I want to avoid involving them AT ALL COST!

2. Can I GET RID of the Tuning Adapter which is also a royal PITA?

Thanks

Accepted Answer

John,

With my recent purchase of the InfiniTV 6, I too was seeking to upgrade an InfiniTV 4 that I had had great luck with for 18 months prior...  To your questions:

1. Unfortunately no - cable co intervention is required because each Ceton card has a unique host id, and the cable co will need to know this new id in order to properly pair the cable card.  If its any consolation, in my case this switch was handled easily with a 10 minute phone call, where my initial InfiniTV 4 installation required a truck roll, so it wasn't nearly as painful...

2. PITA indeed! I feel your pain, but no. If your local system uses SDV and your old card required a tuning adapter, the new card will as well. The good news is that any TA with firmware up to date will handle up to 6 tuners, so you'll only still require ONE TA...

All in all this is an easy upgrade and (despite these caveats) is well worth the time and $$, especially if you use this card to drive one or more Extenders as well as DVR capabilities...

Question 2

Does this card act like a tuner card for Windows 7 and 8.1 Microsoft Media Center when the cable company cable card is added?

Accepted Answer

It does but with some limitations which may be somewhat affected by who your cable provider is and what cable cards they use.  First issue is whether you use Windows 7 Media Center or Windows 8.0/8.1 (I could not use 8.1 because my ASUS Z87-Pro motherboard was not 8.1 compliant for sound out on HDMI).  I am presently only functional on about 2/3rds of my cable channels which I believe is a Cox cable problem and several of the functional channels have very high rate flicker/refresh rate issue (jumps between 30 fpm to 60) on channels such USA network.  Ceton is aware of the problem and say they are working to fix it but I haven't seen anything yet.  Also, Ceton only supports WMC so you are stuck with that and WMC is not that great with regards to how it handles the cataloging of the recorded shows and especially ripped seasons of shows (no descriptions of the content/shows other than the season & episode number and no search function) which makes it very hard to find where you left off if you are trying to watch the shows in order.  PLEX does a far better job of this but CETON does not support it so you are stuck with WMC as your user interface to the tuner card.  That being said, it does record multiple shows simultaneously without any problems plus I haven't really found a suitable alternative...yet.

Question 3

Do the extenders have to be hard wired to the main computer?  What about WiFi, is it possible to connect everything together without physically wiring everything together?

Accepted Answer

They can connect wireless, but I found the interaction is sluggish & depending on the distance or interference (ie. cordless phone)  I have problems streaming HD content.  I have one extender down a floor and approx. 30 feet away from my wireless N router & will be looking at wiring it into the network.  I use an xbox 1 wireless and 1 wired.

Question 4

Does product come with an M-Card(cablecard) ?

Accepted Answer

No, the cable card is supplied by your cable company which you will pay a monthly fee for, maybe around $2?
The cable company uses the unique contents on the card to associate your tuner with your account so the cable company  system knows what you have subscribed to as such what cable channels you are eligible to receive.

Question 5

Does it work with Directv?

Accepted Answer

That you'll have to ask them. This requires a cable card rental from your cable provider. I would assume that it won’t work with Direct since I don’t think that they offer a cable card rental. You'll need a continuous strong signal from a cable provider or Fiber optics work the best such as Verizon Fios. Make sure that you have an up to date motherboard and processor or this may not work well for you. This is what I use to record and watch TV in my living room. I have 12TB of space. If you set this up build it with a military spec motherboard such as the Asus Sabertooth and AMD video card with HDMI out for video and audio then run it to a stereo receiver. I recommend to use a processor such as the AMD FX series that runs above 3.4 GHz. I also recommend having two sets of drives. The first to run your OS but make sure to use an SSD or a PCIE SSD such as OCZ. I prefer the OCZ PCI SSD Drives for the OS. Also, Have a second set of drives as large as you want for all of your recordings. You can even use a USB 3.0 external drive. Make sure that you have more than 16 GB of ram. It took me a few years to get the right formula of parts and this is what finally works the best for me.

Question 6

Can I use this card to Stream Live TV through my home network using multiple PCs as the extenders?

Accepted Answer

The simple answer is yes,that is what i have done. I have 4 extender and 3 roku connect to the wmc pc
The long answer you will have to have a hard network wire, wifi just is not fast enough to stream live hd with out video drop outs. 
 I have plex installed with wmc and it streams records show to the roku over wifi.

Network equipment i used
1 Fois wireless n
3 Zytel 500 power line network adapters
2 cat5 network wires

Bruce

Question 7

Will this fit in a low profile case?

Accepted Answer

It will.  It comes with a low-profile bracket; however, in my experience I would not recommend this unless you can find a good way to cool it.  These tuners run very hot.  I tried the InfiniTV 4 in an HP Slimline PC, and I could not keep the tuner card cool enough.  There's just not very much room for air to flow in such a small case, and I started having a lot of issues with this card.  Once I moved it to a desktop PC with a full-sized case, all the problems went away because it had better air flow and decreased the temperature of the tuner card.  Ceton provides a diagnostic software tool that will tell you the temperature of the card.  It was always running hotter than recommended in the Slimline PC.

Question 8

Will this fit in a low profile case?

Accepted Answer

I'm not sure, if you can put a video card in your case then this should fit But I would recommend the external Six Tuner Unit. In my dealings with Time Warner cable I have problems with a parameter on their cable card know as ( EMM's Processed ). This number needs to be above 40 in order to watch any live TV let along record anything. Even at 200 my EMM numbers were dropping to 0. At 0 you can not tune in any channels at all. Cable recommend the external unit to have less problems because these numbers can regenerate while the computer is in the sleep mode. I purchased an external unit and replaced my PCIe tuner. I do have less issues with my EMM number dropping of.

Question 9

Finally was able to test this last night, and as I feared, the picture on both the HTPC and the media extender was randomly extremely pixelated or cut out completely intermittently to the point where it was unacceptable and unwatchable for anything important.  The sound would cut out at the same time matching the picture issues.  Anyone else have this issue and fix it?  Is it the card?  Is it the computer (first generation i7 processor, 12 gb RAM, 55gb SSD)?  Is it the internet provider (Comcast)?  Maybe just unfortunate timing and my internet was struggling that night?  I did a download test and I was getting 35Mbps which I would assume is more than good enough...Please help!

Accepted Answer

I have not experienced any such problems. While I experience a very infrequent pixelation issue (maybe once a day for a couple of seconds), on the whole, the card performs very well for me.

The computer should not be contributing to the problem... sounds like it has more than enough horsepower (the card seems to use very little CPU resources).

One problem that I do recall having was associated with a "splitter" that installed on my cable connection. I bought a supposedly high-quality splitter to split the cable signal from my wall jack between both my cable modem and the Ceton card. It was an interesting problem because, normally, everything worked OK. However, whenever any other computer on my home network accessed the internet (for web browsing or downloading), the Ceton went bonkers with massive pixilation and distortion. When the browsing/downloading stopped, everything returned to normal.

This was bizarre and unexpected because the other computers were not connected in any (physical) way to the cable outlet that I was using for the cable modem/Ceton connection... but they were using a wireless router that was connected to the cable modem . Somehow, the interference was being translated from other network connections, through the router and cable modem, into the Ceton card. I could not figure it out... any time that there was any internet activity, the Ceton went into total pixaltion.

I had Comcast send a technician to check on my cable drop signal integrity and, as the technician was trouble-shooting the problem, he saw my splitter and suggested that we remove it. As soon as he removed it, the problem disappeared. Next, he replaced my splitter with a Comcast splitter and everything still worked perfectly!

So, in summary, I had a cable-related problem that was associated with a low-quality splitter that manifested itself as pixelation whenever any internet activity was taking place. Very weird - and fixed by replacing my splitter.

Question 10

How sensitive is the dongle?  Does it disconnect easy? Does the receptacle on the dongle bend easy making it hard to plug back in?  Are these dongles available from there website as an accessory?

Accepted Answer

If you are referring to the mini-cable connector. Seems to work just fine without any of the issues mentioned.

Two important things to note! 
If your service is through Cox Cable, you will need the SATA1520 cable adapter box to receive High-Definition Channels. Also, make sure that you do NOT have any signal amplifiers connected at any point in your system as this could cause the sync (Cox provisioning signal ) not to be recognized, which results in the  higher channels to display, "No Service Available At This Time." Just FYI!

Other than these points (which most techs don't know), this is a great tuner and provides an amazing picture and recordings.

Questions & Answers