ESXi Based Windows 7 Extenders TV Issue

[crzyone01]

Windows 7 Extender No video on live or recorded TV

Hello,

This might be a bit long so I apologize in advance but could really use some help. I have been running my main Windows 7 Media Center mahcine on ESXi for a while now and have gone through 3 hardware configuraiton changes(an old AMD athlon board, then to an Intel i5, and now on new server). I have never run into any issues in the past using this setup but on my new hardware I am having an issue.

Current Setup:
Dell Poweredge 2950 2x Quad Core Xeon 5320
ESXi 5
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
HD HomeRun for TV tuners

I setup the HD Homerun drivers/software without an issue and can verify that the TV functionality does work on the Win7 Virtual Machine by opening the HD Homerun live preview. I then run through the setup for WMC live tv and it does not give me any errors. The issue is when I try to use an extender (Xbox 360, fully updated) to watch live or recorded TV. The extender will open up the TV guide, go to the live tv menu, the popup for the channel, dolby digital logo, etc. will come up but the entire screen is black. It acts like the tv is playing but the screen remains black. I can switch channels and it is the same for every channel. The really odd part is that I can turn closed captioning on and it will show up but still not actual image of the show. I have tried everything I can think of and nothing makes any sense, please help!

I know that the TV does work as I can console into the VM and the TV is viewable there.

 

[crzyone01]

SOLVED! (workaround found, not actually fixed) The issue was with ESXI 5. I installed ESXi 4.1 and rebuilt a new Win7 VM and all of the functionality on the extenders returned to normal.

 

[pjaromin]

Working for me with patched ESXi 5

I experienced the exact same issue running on my ESXi 5.0 host (PE 1900, Dual Quad Core 5335) - blank screen on the Xbox 360 extender. I was using the ESX host for a number of other reasons and thought it might be cool to eliminate a media center PC as well. After reading this post I decided it wasn't worth it and moved on to other things.

This weekend, however, I tried installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on the system and discovered that it wouldn't work without patching ESXi to patch2. I installed all of the latest patches. I also noticed that there was no audio device, and found a method of manually adding an HD Audio driver to the vmx file. I also updated the VMware tools.

After this, I decided to try hooking up the vm to an XBox again -- and it worked! I got video and audio. Because I made all of these changes at once, I can't say which is needed, but they're all easy, free, and probably a good idea anyway.

That said, I'm left with one problem that I've actually seen before with one of my physical systems: when I skip, rew, or ffwd through recorded TV, it always takes a very long time --maybe 5-10 seconds before responding to the 30-second jump. The CPU and network graphs on the VM aren't spiking and I don't have a clue what it's using to do the seek of the file (remote over UNC path to WHS server).

Anyone have any idea why HD live tv (HD Homerun) and recorded wtv files would play smoothly, but jumps/rew/ffwd would experience delays?

 

[crzyone01]

Thanks for the reply. Do you have the extenders connected to Windows 7 or the Windows 8 CP VM? If it is the Windows 7 box can you let me know what the steps were in getting it to work exactly?

I want to upgrade to ESXi 5 for Windows 8 and Server 8 but this issue was the only thing stopping me.

 

[pjaromin]

The extenders connect to Win 7...haven't tried Win8 CP, not even sure it's possible and after playing with Win8 for 15 mins or so decided it truly lived "down" to the negative press and powered down the vm.

As for getting Win8 to install and Win7 to work with extenders, as I said I can't say for certain which specific step/steps are absolutely required, but here's everything I did:

First, I upgraded my ESXi 5 build with "patch 2" here and the subsequent update from 3/15 on the vmware support site. See this link for details/instructions:
VMware Communities: Windows 8 Consumer Preview runs fine on...

Next, I installed the "HD Audio" device, which requires manually editing the vmx file as outlined here: Virtual HD Audio Hardware in vSphere 5 « Virtualization.BlogNotions - Thoughts from Industry Experts

Finally, I updated the VMWare Tools. The updater in Windows 7 system tray wouldn't work right away -- said I needed to edit the vmx file and provided the line to add, which I did. Just click on the VMWare tools in the tray, choose update, and follow the instructions if it complains like mine did.

At this point I was able to watch HD & SD recorded and live tv (HD Homerun Prime CC) without a problem...EXCEPT for the aforementioned issue with skip/ffwd/rew which I'm still looking for answers on.

Good luck and hope this helps!

 

[crzyone01]

Thanks, I'll try getting it setup this week. I'll probably try and do the steps one at a time to check out which one is the solution. After I get it up and running I'll look into the FFwd issue with the recorded tv.

 

[crzyone01]

Well I just installed ESXi 5. Updated it to Update 1 (build 623860). Edited the VMX file to input the HD audio device. And finally updated the VMWare tools. I checked the TV on the extenders each step and am still having the same issue of no video during live TV or recorded TV. Trying a few other things since you were able to get it working I know it should be able to work now...just no clue why not.

 

[pjaromin]

Hmmm... I'm 99.9% certain I didn't do anything else with my rig, but I'll keep thinking about it and post back if I think of anything. The only other difference I can think of is the XBox was hooked up to a physical system for a while before I switched back to the VM, but I it doesn't seem like that could affect anything.

 

[crzyone01]

ONe thing that is common among the systems i have this issue with is an event log error

Product:Windows Operating SystemID:602Source:MCX2FilterVersion:6.0Symbolic Name:MCX2FILTER_EVENT_DRM_FAILEDMessage:Windows Media Center Extender encountered a DRM failure. Error code: %1

Event ID 602

 

[siman007]

Hi I have a similar issue - I followed the instructions above (thanks and once I had configured VMware to switch on 3D for the virtual video card I can confirm it works... I can watch live TV while logged into it via my vSphere console! - but neither a linksys or xBox extender display video or any audio.

What I am seeing in event log is "Windows Media Center Extender encountered a DRM failure" error code is 0x8004b822

Both exhibit the same issue - the extender appears to work fine (links up/shows menus etc) - but it always displays a black image for both recorded and live TV- I can fast forward rewind the TV (and it appears from the network traffic) that its getting the stream but no video/audio appears.
Strangely under the video's section of media centre there is a demo HD video.. this works fine!
Everything is a fresh install and fully licenced.

I'm running ESXi 5 (fully patched) running win 7 prof 64bit with USB pass-through for a DVB SAT (Q box s2)

 

[pjaromin]

The other things I needed to do with this system (though I don't recall at what point), was to bypass the DCA test and get the PlayReady update to complete.

Here are a couple links to look at....perhaps these will help?

Guide Override Digital Cable Advisor in Windows Media Center 7 | Missing Remote

The PlayReady update was Incomplete.You will not be able to watch or - Microsoft Answers

My setup is still working fine, except for the sluggish file seek that makes skip, ffwd, and rewind frustrating to use. I've moved the vm to a dedicated gigabit virtual switch under vmware, but that didn't make any difference.

Good luck!

 

[siman007]

Hi Thanks for the ideas. I tried deleting the DRM and rebuilding it - but I had no luck - though I do not get a DRM failure message anymore I still do not get any audio/video :-(

For fun I setup a Windows 8 CTP VM in ESXI 5 and got it working fine in vsphere 5 with my sat receiver - my linksys extender connected but wouldn't even show Media Center menu's, the XBox extender however connected fine and displayed menus perfectly and was quick, but it had exactly the same issue as windows 7 media center when atempting to play TV - i.e. blank screen and no audio.

So no further forward.

 

[siman007]

Just to sum up (and save anybody else wasting time) I have tried Windows 7 & 8 CTP. All have been 64bit, fresh installs. I have the virtual audio driver installed and can get the video to work fine via vsphere 5 on both. I have tried dropping the firewall, installing codecs, using linksys and xbox extenders. I have added the mkv entry to the registry.
I have a good quality 1Gbit switch between me and the TV set extenders - though I'm sure that is not effecting it as my old windows 7 media center server works fine over it.

I allocated 3 cores/4gb and 128mb memory/switched on 3d on the video card and installed all the patches that were available to both windows and ESXI.

Nothing so far has made a difference.

 

[siman007]

Well amazingly I think I have fixed it!! As with any good evening hacking I'm not 100% sure what I did - I will rebuild a new one just to check (the good thing about using VM's!!). Anyway - I think there were a number of problems
1) DRM - this seemed to go away after I followed a link to removing/replying the DRM keys to windows 7 - I basically deleted the DRM folder in Windows 7 and went to a MS website where it recreated them (see how do you manually reset the drm media rights? - Microsoft Answers)
2) Network performance - the NIC on my dell server (Dell R210 ii) couldn't keep up. Basically it is poorly designed and shares the same IRQ as a couple of other devices - so the performance is very poor. I fixed this by switching to the second on board NIC.
3) I had to untick all the service options for the ethernet card on windows 7 (link layer/IPv6 etc) just left IPv4 and QOS working.
4) Applied a new Client VM tools patch and updated the tools into the Media Center VM - not sure if it helped but I did it anyway

I did do a bunch of other things so its difficult to be sure - but what I would say is that its now working both with my Linksys 2100 and Xbox 360. I will spend a few more days testing it before building a new VM to prove it.

thanks for all your help.. I will let you know how it goes

 

[cram501]

I had this same exact problem with ESXI 5.

My issue revolved around the default ethernet driver (E1000). I could uncheck the "link-layer topology" properties for the network card and it would work with some performance issues.

Switching to the VMXNET virtual Ethernet driver (comes with ESXI 5) solved all my problems. Note: You won't have a driver until you install vmware tools.

 

[siman007]

Update on the update
1) cram501 is correct "link-layer topology" kills media centre and I am also now using VMXNET3
2) I have now had to switched to using Windows 8 CTP (i.e. pre launch version) – see below for the reason. But this amazingly works fine I am now running Windows 8 CTP with 4 TBS QBOX 2 S2 HD USB sat feeds via an xbox extender and it works fine. Its responsive, with no lip sync, rewind problems.
3) I have built a number of windows 7/8 VM’s now and have had no repeat of the DRM issues.


My situation was much worse due to me using a Dell 210 ii rack server -
(http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/poweredge-r210-ii-technical-guide.pdf) , hopefully the following might help others. I bought the server as it appeared to fit my needs (small rack server, good range of options etc). BUT be warned

a) The cheap RAID card that seems the obviouse choice when configuring the box on the Dell website is the PERC H200, this (I discovered after the fact) has a known configuration issue, which when used for RAID kills the performance. So I now run without any RAID.
b) The first NIC on the Dell 210 is crippled by sharing the same IRQ as the USB and other peripherals. So I am using the second only for media centre the first is restricted to admin functions.
c) I was using USB 2 virtual drivers to pass the 4 USB satellite cards through to my Windows 7 VM. However USB 2 seems to be crippled as I started to suffer huge amounts of signal breakup. The performance of USB 2 was so bad for me that it was simple unusable.

An option that exists in ESXi is to pass the hardware directly to a VM. However I couldn’t pass the Dell USB hardware directly to the VM as there is no Windows 7 workstation driver for this USB 3 chipset (vSphere warns you about this when you try to configure the Windows 7 VM with a xHCI USB port)

Dell do Windows server 2008 drivers but it appears not a Windows 7 workstation version. My solution (in fact the only solution I could find that would allow me to use ESXI 5.0) was to switch to Windows 8 (which as I write I only have the customer technology preview version – this happily has Media Centre built in). ESXi 5.0 does support the USB 3 drivers for Windows 8 CTP. In fact I have not had to pass the hardware directly the to the VM as it appears that the combination of Windows 8 CTP and update 1 to ESXi is good enough to deliver the performance I need for the 4 USB Sat cards – (these by the way are USB 2 devices, and I am running them through a good quality 10 way powered USB 2 hub and into a single USB port on the server).

d) I still had to turn off the "link-layer topology" setting in Windows 8.

e) Windows 8 doesn’t appear to work with my old Linksys 2100 media centre extender boxes but it works fine with my xBox 360 slim.

f) I think there is a fault with the TBS QBOX S2 drivers – it appears that both Windows 7 and 8 drop them (fail to see them) after 36-48hrs – so I now auto reboot the Windows 8 VM every night via a scheduled task.

Hope this helps

 

[siman007]

Quick update - I have built a new VM using the latest version of Windows 8 release preview (still had to do all the things mentioned above) but it seems to be working fine - I have only connected it my XBOX but media center is working, record/playback/pause as well as guide download are all working. I have however mapped the USB ports direct through to the Windows 8 VM (I was suffering some breakup before I did this). I'm currently only using some old Nova-T DVB USB tuners. Added Iplayer to the extras and it appears to work as well. Cracking

Note VMware doesn't support VMXNET3 network with this version of Windows 8, and I cannot get it to install the tools anyway so I'm running without them. No prob really as I'm only using the extender capability.

 

[siman007]

Last update

The RTM of windows 8 was very stable and has worked pretty well since it was installed.

I have just built a new system with full windows 8, VMNET3 with 4 USB sat cards and all appears to work well.
Little tip that I used was to copy my win8 RTM vmware directory to a new one (to keep all the vmware settings) then create a new virtual disk into which I installed Win8 release. Saved rebuilding all the VMWARE settings (thanks to Alex for that idea).