Problems with NAT and Xbox 360

I talked about this in another post but here is some new information. I have two friends both with Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. They can join other people's hosted games (Halo 3 for example) and play. But if one of them starts a match and the other tries to join, they cannot. They have also reported problems with hearing each other's voices.

The first person's router went bad and he got another one. I had to go over and fix this problem again. To fix it I updated the router to the latest firmware version for it. This can be downloaded from the Linksys website. Updating the firmware did not fix the problem. His Xbox 360's IP is manually set (in this case i did 192.168.1.105. I enabled DMZ on the router and set it to be that address. That fixed the problem. Then a week later he said he was having the problem again, and the xbox network test was reporting his NAT as Moderate. So I disabled the DMZ and set the port forwarding on the router to forward ports 3047 and 88 to his xbox's address (192.168.1.105). It still did not work and the network test still reported Moderate NAT. I preferred using the IP forwarding rather than DMZ, because DMZ seems like overkill. Anyway, I power cycled the router (unplugged, waited a minute, and then plugged in). Now the Xbox 360 reported open NAT and he was able to join to a match hosted by his friend. I hope this helps someone!

Replaytv automatically reboots after complete boot

I have been using Replaytv (5000 series) for years now. I have encountered many problems. Today I had a problem and want to record the solution. The replaytv kept rebooting after doing a full bootup. It would boot and you could see a brielf glimpse of a show (live tv) and then it would automatically reboot. I ended up booting it without the network cable, and the coax cable, and then it would not automatically reboot. As soon as I plugged in the coax cable, it would reboot. It turned out the hard drive was full. Once we cleared some shows off (we freed up 10 hours) it quit rebooting when the coax was plugged in. The unit is now working correctly. If you have this problem, try booting it without the coax cable and clear up some space, then plug in the coax. Booting it without the coax was the only way we could keep it up long enough to clear up some space.

Microsoft Hotfix KB933049

Microsoft Hotfix KB933049

This hotfix resolves an issue between mpeg2 and antivirus software on Vista. It may fix freezing errors associated with Media Extenders and Transcode 360.

The file was available through the transcode.co.uk site but the site is down. I have access to the hotfix for Vista x86 (32-bit) only. Click here to download.

Transcode.co.uk site down

The transcode.co.uk site is down, and has been down for over a week now. I was able to locate a copy of transcode 360 1.6.3 for Vista 32-bit here:
http://www.transcode360.be/Transcode360Vista1.6.3.zip

Error 1606 during uninstall

On a Vista system while performing an uninstall of Symantec Endpoint Protection 11, the uninstall would not complete because of an Error 1606. Could not access network location \\myservername\public\pictures. The location it reports could be different in other cases. I believe in my case it is because I set my systems path to pictures to be on a home server where I kept pictures (but since change the path on that server). So the path was not accessible. Based on a Microsoft KB document that described a similar situation I tried something and it worked. I did a search on the registry for the missing path. Start>Run>regedit and then Edit>Find and I entered the missing path. In my case \\myservername\public\pictures. In each case when the path was found I changed it to %public%\pictures. Keep in mind this is Vista. On XP you might want to use %AllUsersProfile%\path to whatever. This document may explain it better. In the end by replacing the invalid path referenced in the registry with the valid path, the uninstall was able to complete.

Keep in mind to be careful editing the registry and have a look at the documents linked to above for more thorough information. The bottom line is replacing the incorrect path with a correct path seems to fix the problem.

Webguide - Covers look different

I am currently asking on the webguide forum why I see this...some covers are stretched, some are not.

Interesting read on different encoding options (for Xbox 360) and why this guy likes VLC best

These are from the happybeggar.com website - Item 1 and Item 2