Ceton to discontinue network tuner ability in Windows 8?

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morgwon

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 25, 2004
Messages
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Received this email earlier today

InfiniTV & Windows 8
General release of Windows 8 is tomorrow, October 26th, and we’re sure many of you are as excited to upgrade as we are. However, we do not recommend that InfiniTV customers upgrade to Windows 8 quite yet.

We expected that the Media Center feature would be included in the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 8 when it was made available to Microsoft partners in August but it was not. In fact, it was just released this morning, so we are only now able to start our final testing.

While our current Windows 7 driver does work relatively well with the current version of Windows 8, it has not been fully tested and is not supported for use with Windows 8. Testing of the InfiniTV driver for Windows 8 is progressing well and should be released to Beta shortly. Please stay tuned for more details.

Upgrade Considerations

If you plan to upgrade to Windows 8 once the InfiniTV driver is available, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Copy-Protected Content: Please be aware that copy-protected content is tied to the specific installation of Windows that made the recordings. To preserve copy-protected recordings you must upgrade directly from Windows 7 and not perform a clean installation of Windows 8. If you backup copy-protected recordings from Windows 7 and transfer them to a clean installation of Windows 8, your copy-protected recordings will no longer be viewable. That is the way copy-protected content is handled by Windows regardless of what brand of CableCARD tuner you used to make the recordings.

Network Tuner Support: The InfiniTV network tuner bridging feature will not be available in Windows 8. If you use network tuners you should not upgrade.

Thanks,
-The Ceton Team
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I wonder if this is just a temporary issue.
 
I don't see an issue. Your title is misleading.

Ceton is just saying they haven't tested their drivers with a full blown version of Windows 8 because Microsoft only just now made truly full blown versions of Windows 8 available. By full blown, I mean with Windows Media Center available. So they are recommending you don't upgrade until they have.
 
jpm100 said:
I don't see an issue. Your title is misleading.

Ceton is just saying they haven't tested their drivers with a full blown version of Windows 8 because Microsoft only just now made truly full blown versions of Windows 8 available. By full blown, I mean with Windows Media Center available. So they are recommending you don't upgrade until they have.
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read to the end of the quote
 
The question is - is this Ceton's decision, or is this a limitation of Windows 8?
 
Just upgrade to Win8 from Win7 instead of doing a clean Win8 install. You'd want to do that to keep Win7 WMC anyways unless you wish to buy Win8 Pro and buy the WMC feature pack (after the free promo ends).

I'm sure Ceton is in communications with Microsoft to get things back on track. After all, they did say "However, we do not recommend that InfiniTV customers upgrade to Windows 8 quite yet" which means Win8 will be supported eventually.
 
"The InfiniTV network tuner bridging feature will not be available in Windows 8."

This is just terrible... I really hope this is not just a choice by Ceton because of their new extender. This will cause me to stop using Ceton products.
 
Not knowing anything more than what is written, the sentence does suggest that it will not be supported in the future.
 
Yeah I saw this yesterday too, and I was really looking forward to being able to move the tuner out of my desktop and back to my server 2012 box... I know win8/ws2012 have a lot of underlying network changes so maybe it's not possible any more.
 
Azhar said:
I'm sure Ceton is in communications with Microsoft to get things back on track. After all, they did say "However, we do not recommend that InfiniTV customers upgrade to Windows 8 quite yet" which means Win8 will be supported eventually.
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And I'm sure MS is giving them the finger. The Centon Echo doesn't work with Win8 MC either.
 
dan87 said:
And I'm sure MS is giving them the finger. The Centon Echo doesn't work with Win8 MC either.
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Where did you read that the Echo doesn't work with Win8? It wouldn't suprise me at this point considering the product is still in Beta - but I'm sure Win8 will be supported by GA.
 
dan87 said:
And I'm sure MS is giving them the finger. The Centon Echo doesn't work with Win8 MC either.
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yeah this could be a showstopper for me. Interested to know where this information is coming from.
 
His butt. MS didn't release Win8 MC to partners prior to yesterday so they couldn't do any Win8 MC testing until yesterday. Win8 support should be available before launch (and if not presumably via an update very shortly thereafter).
 
This sounds like an issue with Win 8. The only reason we had this feature in the first place was cause MS made hooks for it in MC and then let devs develop it. That, and, MS didn't release 8MC for testing like this until the other day.
 
Ceton has had nothing but amazing support since the InfiniTV was released, I doubt this is because they wanted to limit the feature in Win8. More likely, MS changed some of the networking protocols.
 
Once I get my free Win8 MCE code today, I'm testing this out, regardless of what they say. As for the network tuners issue, I never really use it anyways. I perfer to be able to record as many shows as I like, as opposed to having to divvy up my tuners across computers and then worry about it later. I'm hoping that using extenders and then linking up to an xbox with smartglass will give me the ability I want.
 
I have the InfiniTV 4 USB and 4 computers in a LAN.
All computers are running Windows 8 and they are all able to watch TV without a problem with the Media Center Add-on.
Yes it is true that the Network tuner is not present, but all you need to do is manually bridge your NIC and the Ceton USB NIC and the other computers will find it fine.
There was an earlier post about .NET 3.5 needing to be installed in Win 8, but that was only in the preview.
The RTM of Windows 8 comes with 3.5 installed as well....
 
BabyPinkSWE said:
I have the InfiniTV 4 USB and 4 computers in a LAN.
All computers are running Windows 8 and they are all able to watch TV without a problem with the Media Center Add-on.
Yes it is true that the Network tuner is not present, but all you need to do is manually bridge your NIC and the Ceton USB NIC and the other computers will find it fine.
There was an earlier post about .NET 3.5 needing to be installed in Win 8, but that was only in the preview.
The RTM of Windows 8 comes with 3.5 installed as well....
Click to expand...

I can report positively on this - I just put 8 and the infiniTV installer on my PC - had to go download .net 3.5. (This is full retail Win8 Pro)

So what you're saying is you bridged the NICs, and your other PCs can see it just fine? How did you manage the configuration in WMC?
 
BabyPinkSWE said:
I have the InfiniTV 4 USB and 4 computers in a LAN.
All computers are running Windows 8 and they are all able to watch TV without a problem with the Media Center Add-on.
Yes it is true that the Network tuner is not present, but all you need to do is manually bridge your NIC and the Ceton USB NIC and the other computers will find it fine.
There was an earlier post about .NET 3.5 needing to be installed in Win 8, but that was only in the preview.
The RTM of Windows 8 comes with 3.5 installed as well....
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When I run through the tuner setup on the non host pc, (the host is 7). I still get Tuner Not Found on the guest pc that is windows 8. .Net 3.5 was required to be installed (vanilla win8 rtm install), using beta drivers. No luck.

What did you do to get the tuner to show in Media Center after initial setup?
Edit; after playing around with multiple resets. Somehow it just started to work. So with effort it seems possible. And I imagine the manually bridging would work also. Just requires configureing windows and the ceton ip on the webpage manually, there was an old guide for ceton network tuners that you could follow to do it.
 
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My advice to anyone running ceton or anyother similar device, if it's currently working and you don't need to change something, leave it alone. I'm sticking to win 7 as long as I have my htpc for the sake of stability.
 
sonicboom said:
My advice to anyone running ceton or anyother similar device, if it's currently working and you don't need to change something, leave it alone. I'm sticking to win 7 as long as I have my htpc for the sake of stability.
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I run my ceton in a vmware esx server :), snapshoting works wonders.

But anywho. After some resets, I got it working in win8 also. The network bridging would likly work but would require manual setup. No reason for me to test that out. Im happy I can watch TV on my tablet again.

Edit; After diagnosing the situation, ive determined that the problems lay with the network tuner setup wizard on the guest pc. On a fresh install of ceton on the guest, traditionally if you just go to Live TV Setup it has told me No Tuner Found. Which I considered normal becuase I hadn't assigned one yet. To resolve this, I go to Ceton > Network Tuners > Reset to Factory Settings (no reboot actually needed?). Once this completes I then go to Live TV Setup and it detects all 4 tuners, but instead of something being assigned nothing is assigned. So I go through the live tv setup manually, choose my signal type etc. But when it comes to the tuner part, I manually configure that and choose the tuner(s) of 4 I want to use. After this it works every time. I just followed the same procedure on all the other computers whether they be 8 or 7. If you try to assign a tuner using the network wizard the tuner configuration gets reset and it doesn't work. So in sort, don't use the network tuners wizard excet for the host (7) pc. If its guest, reset tuner using network tuners in wmc, then configure manually skipping the wizard. Fun times.
 
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Klownicle said:
When I run through the tuner setup on the non host pc, (the host is 7). I still get Tuner Not Found on the guest pc that is windows 8. .Net 3.5 was required to be installed (vanilla win8 rtm install), using beta drivers. No luck.

What did you do to get the tuner to show in Media Center after initial setup?
Edit; after playing around with multiple resets. Somehow it just started to work. So with effort it seems possible. And I imagine the manually bridging would work also. Just requires configuring windows and the Ceton ip on the webpage manually, there was an old guide for Ceton network tuners that you could follow to do it.
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What i did do on the Win 8 machines where WMC couldn't detect the card was just to play around with the Ceton driver and configuration.
Funny thing is that if the Ceton setup is complete in WMC (1`st part) and the 2nd part in WMC doesn't find a tuner its just a matter of changing the registry manually to use the Ceton tuner in WMC, its all there at that point.

But I did discover a downside, maybe its just on my end, but if one Win 8 is watching TV in WMC and another Win 8 starts WMC and tunes to a channel then the follow happens:
Signal goes out on both computers and WMC complains that either A) low signal B) Subscription required.
The only "fix" is to restart the USB tuner and limit the TV watching to one at a time.

I did reach out to Ceton and got the reply that Network Tuner will NOT be supported in Win 8 by Ceton, it's not on the road map because is not going to happen.
They even recommended that I change to a different tuner vendor then wait for them to release a solution.
The only suggestion they had is to put the 4 tuner USB device on a Win 7 host and the Win 8 should work fine. (but that's unofficial)
 
I see absolutly no reason why ceton is not supporting windows 8 after doing what I did. You can bridge connections in windows 8, heck I did it myself. Just select both connections and bridge them. Configure the IP's manually and volia. Follow my above guide for connecting to the tuners on a guest windows 8 pc. I've had no problems with this setup at all, all 4 pcs can watch different channels. This was at least for the PCI-e edition, no idea if this is a USB related problem.
 
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I installed windows 8 last weekend on my htpc with Ceton infinitv. I gotta say that I like more because the tuners are available almost instantly when I load up media center. Just wish metro apps were more remote friendly.
 
I downloaded the Beta for Win 8. Media Center cannot locate the tuner. I opened a ticket with Ceton and followed their suggestions. Still not located. While awaiting for additon info from Ceton, does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts?
 
Klownicle said:
I run my ceton in a vmware esx server :), snapshoting works wonders.
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Did you have issues bridging in esxi? Whenever I do it the bridge loses internet, and then nothing works, no tuners found in WMC, none in the diag tool etc. I have to reset everything to get it to come back.
 
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