Over the weekend, every time I tried to set a recording, VMC would crash.  I think I have it narrowed down to a corrupt recordings.xml.

Unfortunatly, during my troubleshooting I managed to make it so I get no video and audio from any of my 4 ATI DCT with cable card tuners.  During this original troubleshooting, I uninstalled the tuners in device manager and reinstalled.  I suspect this step caused my current no video issue.

After I fixed the recordings.xml problem, I reran 'set up TV signal'.  At the end of the the setup, it fails during 'upgrading security components'. It then says I will be unable to vire premium and high def content. In reality, I also can not view basic analog either. In the tuner diagnostic screen, each tuner shows a black screen with no audio; however, it shows my normal signal strength.  Live TV and recordings give an error that there is no TV signal.

I've disabled windows firewall, uninstalled my antivirus, and can ping the tuner IPs.  Comcast says the cablecards are still paired and they can talk to them. I suspect this is a DRM issue, although my previous recordings all work.  I have tried reseting DRM as described in http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=891664

Does anyone have any ideas?  This mdeia center runs all our TVs and my family is about to revolt after three days of no TV.

One more thing....a week ago I was messing around webguide. I never got it working (I'm running Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 with TV pack) and uninstalled.  I haven't made anyother changes untill all the problems started happening.

I feel your pain. We need to get you up and running prior to the revolt!

First thing, Webguide will not work with TV Pack. If you set a restore point prior to the webguide install return to that.

Second, was your system working correctly with TV pack?

Third, have you or any other family members installed any new software or firmware?

TV pack was working perfectly before this happened.  Everything was working great when we left for vacation on the 15th.  Th trouble started sometime before we got back on the 20th.  During that time, no one touched the computer and windows update installed a couple defintions for defender. 

I did try a system restore from before webguide, but it failed.  I'm not sure if webguide has anything to do with it.  Live TV worked fine after webguide.  One thing I am wondering about is if webguide changed something related to networking that prevents the 'upgrading security components' from connecting to what ever it has to connect to.   I did uninstall everything webguide related and turned off windows firewall.

I did uninstalled and reinstall playready.  The only affect this seemed to have was before I reinstalled it, the upgrading security components failed immediatly instead of timing out after 10 minutes.

Any ideas?   I'm about ready to do a nuke and rebuild, but I have over a terabyte of recorded shows I dont want to lose.

Unfortunately the nuke and rebuild will definitely kill all shows from the cable cards. I guess it depends on how long the family will put up with no TV. Personally I would go for the nuke and rebuild just to get the family off my back. Otherwise you could end up chasing this thing for a week, and even then end up at the same result.

> "upgrading security components" times out or fails.

This is a long shot...but look at your systems clock Date, Time and Year. If that's out of whack upgrading the security components will crap out every time.

try re-installing the PlayReady and run setup again.  this may help.

The time and date appear to be correct. 

I'm reinstalled playready, but it still fails at upgrading security.....

I find it odd that it even tried to upgrade security components.  I've rerun setup several times in the past for various reasons and I dont remember it trying to upgrade components after the first time. 

Does anyone know how DRM and 'security components' works on TV pack with cablecards?  IS it just using windows media player for license and DRM management?  Does removing and reinstalling playready delete nessessary certs?  Also, if DRM is screwed on my computer why do all my previously recorded shows work fine?

Okay, I thought your recorded TV was also dysfunctional. It may be due to your ATI OCUR tuner firmware. One of my units updated to a new firmware some time ago while the other did not and it wreaked havoc on live TV. 

I'm running 1.17.1 on all 4.  I have been running that version for sometime.  Yesterday i did try flashing them to 1.17.1 again.  It didnt seem to help.

Just now, I tried rolling back to 1.16, but am unable to find that version on ATI's site. 

Look at your tuners in Network and click on each one, one at a time and then click on card to check the cable card aps. If you have SA cards you should see a CA ap and you can open then and it should show if you have received authorization from the cable company. All the re-installing may have lost the pairing or they may have lost authorization which would cause this as well.

The other problem could be a cable feed problem, so double check the coax to another device to make sure that there is a signal on it.

 

I know there is not a feed problem because I can take the cards out and get all the analog channels.

I will check on the authorization shortly....although I called comcast yesterday and they told me they could 'see' my cards and they believed each was still paired.