hmmurdock, just curious about some of the details of your install. You mentioned "This was on a new install of WHS", so I am guessing you installed the cabs and patched files on an already installed and running whs, or did you slipsteam them into the install iso? If installed cabs to a running whs, what did you use, dism, pkgmgr? And, had you installed windows updates prior to setting up tuner, playready, dca and live tv? I've messed with my setting and files so much now I'm gonna scrap it and start again fresh. Just want to nail down the install steps. Thank for all the help.
I used a mostly* pristine ISO of WHS SP1 for my install. During install I had to add drivers for my NIC (I went ahead and added all of the laptop device drivers during that process) and after install was complete I installed the 2 Media Center cabs (created by T-S's install instructions) with DISM. After that I changed ownership and permissions for the 4 files in the ehome folder that needed to be replaced by the patched files, then copied the patched files. At that point I tested to make sure that WMC would at least launch properly and it did. After that I installed tuner drivers, PlayReady64, DCA64 and ran the DCA bypass. Went back into WMC and ran Live TV setup and followed the instructions to activate CableCard and setup TV. After the Wizard completed I could tune all of my subscribed channels. No other updates were installed outside of what WMC added during Live TV setup. *WHS ISO was unmodified except for one INI file that allowed for installing WHS on a single small drive.
There's an optional step that I didn't mention yet. You can change the recording path from the default one X:\Recorded TV to the one used by WHS to share the recordings X:\server folders\Recorded TV changing the path here HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording (then restart the WMC services or the whole WHS) You can do the same thing with a simbolic link or you can change the path of the shared folder, but i think the first solution is more "elegant"
mkedda if you are still following this,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Wow, what a crazy pain in the rump! Finally got my HDHomerun tuner recognized,,, WOOO HOOO!! After picking WMC apart and reinstalling pieces parts and then everything, even pushing patches in, I started looking at the tuner install. Even though the VIEW program would run fine I finally realized that the HDHR install on whs was not complete. Comparing to my win7 system showed that the hdhomerun_service.exe was not installed as a file or as the service but everything else was there. Copied the file, installed it as the service as it should be and boom it worked!!! Still don't know why everything but that file installs. Now I'm going delve into the mysterious world of extenders. Need to get my xbox360s connected now. Almost there. hmmurdock, you have any luck with your extender setup yet?
So, I've hit an impass. I am having an activation conflict/issue. I can't run WMC and WHS dashboard at the same time. It appears to be a conflict between the WHS dashboard and the WMC OCUR activation. Both run before the setup and activation of live TV. Once Live TV is setup and the OCUR activation happens when I try to open the WHS dashboard I get a "Cannot retrieve the activation status. Please try again later." pop-up message. If I remove the OCUR activation via slmgr.vbs then the dashboard opens with no problem. Reapplying the OCUR activation results in the same disfunction. I am using an OEM SLP license on WHS and a retail license on OCUR; Licensing Data--> Software licensing service version: 6.1.7601.17514 Name: Windows Server(R), ServerHomePremium edition Description: Windows Operating System - Windows Server(R), OEM_SLP channel ... License Status: Licensed ... Name: Windows(R) 7, OCUR add-on for Ultimate,HomePremium,Enterprise,Professional,ServerHomePremium,Embedded Description: Windows Operating System - Windows(R) 7, RETAIL channel ... License Status: Licensed ... I have no clue how to bypass this issue. I have not tested but from what I have read where other people have recieved this error in different circumstances is that pretty much none of the WHS features work in this situation; no backups, etc. It kind of defeats the purpose then. So, I would love to hear from anyone with ideas about correcting this or ideas about hacking/patching this. I have not found any solutions by searching thus far and I have spent more then a fare amount of time combing the net. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the tools to breakdown the code if a patch is the fix. Any insight or assistance would be greatly appreciated!!!!!
Likely you forgot the SPP service disabled. The dashboard looks for it to check its activation. I wrote it earlier
i am running with patched ehome files and slipstreamed wmc. The only mention of spp disable that I recall was in the post about trying the product policy editor and unpatched files which i didn't think would apply to my current setup. I just now disabled the spp service and tried the dashboard and received the same activation error.
Then isn't what I guessed If there is a license conflict I'm afraid that isn't that easy to overcome the problem w/o patching the dashboard or whatever file checks for the activation. Anyway would be interesting to see what happens deactivating the server and activating the just the OCUR Another way far from being called a solution could be a script that stops the SPP service swaps the token.dat made before and after the activation depending on what you need to use, obviusly that would prevent a scheduled recording and a backup if scheduled in the same timeframe.
FYI, I did try deactivating the OS. It reverted back to its trial license. With OCUR licenced it gave the same behaviour with WMC working but with the dashboard activation error. I do not really like the modified run scripting as you mentioned it defeats the purpose of unattended backups and recordings which is what my end goal is. I'd much rather figure out how to patch the dashboard activiation check if anyone can assist with that.
For the record i did the same yesterday and although everything went apparently fine (even windows update grabbed the related updates), Hyper V was unable to boot any machine. Then I realized that the Server 2008r2 packages have a build number 9600.16384 while the two stock packages present on WHS-2011 are from 9601.17535. So I managed to get the HV packages with that build number from Multipoint Server 2011, removed the old ones, installed the new, and everything went fine. The 2011 HV packages should be also present on SBS 2011 Premium, but the latter is a way bigger download 5 GB v.s. 3GB. Then WindowsUpdate gets the update mean't to fully support win8/Server2012 based clients.
You can try the following things Start checking if isn't just ehome that doesn't start or are the mcservices that doesn't start/show So check if ehRecvr and ehSched are shown in the services and if they can be started Try also to launch once the media center recovery task from the scheduled task applet. try also to launch the ehome as administrator Check the logs for any clue (from eventwvr.msc and inside the folder /program data/microsoft/eHome). Finally you can also check for any problem with Procmon.exe, filtering the results from ehome and ehrecvr) I guess that after 39 downloads there isn't nothing wrong on the attached files or in the procedure itself.
Updated instructions for server 2012 R2. (Simpler procedure). Added quick instructions for Server 2016
Hi Guys, Found this thread and decided to have a bit of a play with WHS and MC, but hit a bit of a problem. MC is working fine when WHS is in 30 trial mode, but the second it activates or I extend the trial (testing only), MC loses the live TV function. I've tested this both on physical and virtual machines but I haven't had any joy getting the TV option to show up in MC after activation. Anybody got any ideas, because if I can get this working, I'm planning to roll it on to my live server with it's legit OEM key, but if it keeps failing after activation, I'd rather not waste the key. Cheers, Sten
What kind of LiveTV are you talking about? The normal service or the American Cable Card based one? Did you try to activate it with daz loader? Does it make any difference? For the record I'm in Europe, I'm using the live tv service on an activated WHS-2011 since many months and I didn't face a single problem.
Cheers T-S, I'm in the UK, so it's a normal DVB-T tuner. I've got it working now, but I can't fully understand why it's suddenly satarted working. I tried the Daz loader for both the trial extension and activation, but both options seem to be making a change in the reg somewhere that breaks MC and Live TV. I pulled off the reg files before and after activation for comparison, but I can't see any changes in the MC regs that would be breaking it. I just did a fresh install, put my legit serial number in, used the Daz Loader's KMS activation, and everything's working well, including the TV section of MC Seems weird that SLIC loading failed, but KMS worked a treat. All I can think of is that the SLIC installation altered a reg making MC act as if it's in a terminal server session and not allow TV tuner access.
Throw away that 11Mbps wificard! Jokes aside #1 who said that the video over rdp must be at 4K?. A 800x600 or 1024x768 window is more than enough to have silky and good quality video, on higher resolutions the smoothness degrades proportionally to the resolution used, but remains "watchable" even in HD. #2 Likely you're not familiar with WMC, but its live TV section can't be even administered via RDP. The world is plenty of people who use VNC or even Teamviewer to do that. #3 Given the RDP unlock was something waited for 12 years, I think the the video quality is the lesser problem.