We have seen a significant increase in Decas or STBs dropping off line in the last few weeks.

Yesterday I was at job that had a STB we use only for sonic tap channels that was not responding to IP commands, I connected it to the service monitor installed in the rack to verify IP and restart the network services-

Box starts responding again and the TP in the room is working fine so i figured we are good to go.

I shut off the rack monitor and close up the closet and leave, get a call later that night that the room is not working again.

Today I test the room, no audio

open the rack, turn on the monitor, and verify all the connections are good and then go and retest the room-

All good.


shut down the rack again and then retest just before i go to leave-

no audio-

It appears that the STB is now following a CEC signal from the TV and not sending any analog audio while its connected to a TV in standby.


In this case it was an easy fix, just disconnect the HDMI to the service monitor before i shut of the monitor since we are not using video for that STB.

Anybody else seeing odd behaviors from DirecTV STBs in last few weeks?

This may be related.
[Link: remotecentral.com]

Knowing HDMI as we do, is this odd behavior? It seems perfectly HDMIish.
Was there an update since it was first installed and working?
Did you try turning off CEC in the TV, or was it not worth the experiment and possible added roll of the truck?

I have roughly 300 STBS being controlled by the Shef protocol-


first time I have ever seen a STB shut down analog audio outputs when a TV turned off.


Was there an update since it was first installed and working?

Its been installed and working for three years, I assume there has  been an update in that time.

Did you try turning off CEC in the TV, or was it not worth the experiment and possible added roll of the truck?

I just disconnected the TV since the STB is only used for music and the only reason it was connected to the TV was to verifiy that it came back on the network after a network drop.